Objective Review: Fedora maintains a strong network of thriving local communities around the world

[mattdm (Matthew Miller)]

We’re working on Fedora Strategy 2028 — our next five-year plan. We are now reviewing those Objectives and their associated Impact. Read this guide for details on the current planning phase.

This Objective is part of the Theme “Fedora is for everyone”, and the Focus Area Reaching the World. For general discussion of this focus area, please see the topic Fedora Strategy 2028: Focus area review (Reaching the World) - Fedora Discussion.

Objective and Impact

Objective: Fedora maintains a strong network of thriving local communities around the world.
Impact: As a distributed project, we are more diverse and resilient.

According to a probably-apocryphal story, a famous bank robber was once asked why he robbed banks, and he replied: “Because that’s where the money is.” We should work to make Fedora stronger around the world because that’s where the people are. Or, to put it another way: not only does this lead to our strategic guiding star, but it connects directly to the project Vision.

Before Covid, we started a project to revamp the Fedora Ambassadors’ program. That initiative continued despite the pandemic, and we have some good groundwork (see the Ambassador documentation, but there hasn’t been much space to put that into action. As travel and in-person events resume, we’ll need strong Ambassadors teams to spread our messaging, talk about the project, bring new people in.

But, we’ll need more than event-focused Ambassadors. To be a truly global project as we aspire to be, we need people everywhere working across the project — and working on things that are interesting and beneficial to their local communities. We should have translation sprints, local meetups, and fun Fedora social activities, and more. That’s getting into specifics (which is the next planning phase!), but I want to make sure that what we have at this level captures the intended broad scope.

Our goal now

For this Objective and related Impact, validate that:

1. If the Impact is achieved, it’s reasonable to expect an increase in active Fedora contributors.
2. Success in the Objective logically results in the intended Impact.
3. That link is reasonably sufficient — that is, it represents everything needed to have the Impact.
4. While there might be other ways to have similar Impact, the chosen Objective is the right one for Fedora right now.
5. The wording is precise and clear. The Objective is concrete, and the Impact is (at least a little bit) inspirational. Together, they fit into this Focus Area.

Bonus. If you can improve the longer explanatory paragraphs at the top of this post, that’s helpful too!

As outlined in the roadmap, this post will close in one month.

[jflory7 (Justin Wheeler)]

This objective in our 5-year strategy is one of the most important to me personally.

@mattdm

As travel and in-person events resume, we’ll need strong Ambassadors teams to spread our messaging, talk about the project, bring new people in.

I suggest this is already happening. New folks are reaching out to me asking how they can work with Fedora to do local events in their community. To hand-pick some folks, @irdiis from Albania and @jorgeortegap & @vsrecio from the Dominican Republic recently reached out to me and we are exploring how they can get onboarded to the community and represent Fedora as Ambassadors.

@mattdm

If the Impact is achieved, it’s reasonable to expect an increase in active Fedora contributors.

I think this is obvious. Although figuring out the implementation is definitely relevant here. What exactly is a strong network of thriving local communities? Are we working with individuals within their own niches, e.g. a single person in a hackerspace or local Linux community? Or we working with organizations and their leaders, who might run a variety of events including but not limited to Linux?

I want to think through what a local community means here, so we can focus the implementation details down and we can get somewhere meaningful at the end.

To this end, I am also working with @sumantrom on reviewing where the Ambassador revamp left off and how we can continue this work in 2023, especially as in-person events come back but also how to think around the virtual or advocacy end of things. We are doing a desk review at the moment, but I suspect this will become a Fedora Council community initiative sometime around the Fedora Linux 38 release.