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 “We build on the success of Fedora.next” and the Focus Area Editions, Spins, and Interests. For general discussion of this focus area, please see the topic Fedora Strategy 2028: Focus area review (Editions, Spins, and Interests).
Objective and Impact
Objective: More (active) SIGs, fewer images.
Impact: We grow strong special-interest teams and networks into other communities — neuroscientists, roboticists, teachers…
Based on people’s reactions in the initial strategy draft thread, the terse phrasing we used for this Objective isn’t exactly self-explanatory. Maybe we can find a better way to say it in this discussion. I kind of like the short, “punchy” version, though — and maybe that plus some short explanation is enough.
SIGs — Special Interest Groups — have been a part of Fedora since very early on. Successful SIGs become thriving sub-communities of their own, and bring new people who share similar interests into the project. Continuing this and building more infrastructure and support for these teams will clearly grow the active contributor base.
So what’s this about “fewer images”?
Well, as currently set up, we don’t give much guidance. Here’s the current documentation: Fedora Project Wiki: Creating a SIG — something I wrote in 2016 and which hasn’t really been updated or cared for. It basically says:
- Make a wiki page
- Make a mailing list (or don’t), and create a ticketing system if you want
- Maybe a regular IRC meeting? I dunno?
- Good luck!
This minimalist approach was a reaction to a previous process which had turned out to be too heavyweight in practice. But it probably veers too far in that direction: it doesn’t really offer any concrete support or anything to do.
One thing a SIG might do is create a new Spin — a bootable Fedora Linux OS deliverable showcasing software related to their particular area (for example: robotics, neuroscience, graphics & design, audio production, security). When we did the big Fedora.next website redesign, we decided to call these particular variants “Fedora Labs”.[1]
This is a pretty intensive, heavyweight thing to do, and requires resources every Fedora Linux release. And the thing is… they’re not really being used. The software that’s packaged by SIG teams certainly is, but not very many people are consuming it that way. I’d make graphs, but none of the Labs even breaks 0.1%. That isn’t terribly surprising: the computer-lab use case isn’t common anymore, and there’s no other particular reason to install the Lab instead of picking your favorite desktop environment and installing the relevant software on top of that.
But, the people working on the Design Suite and Robotics Lab and CompNeuro are awesome. We should figure out some other way for them to offer useful curated collections of software to users — maybe as groups in software installation tools, maybe something else. We don’t want to break these teams by taking away one of the few things we offer as a focus for SIG energy without anything better to offer.
I hope this makes sense now — what do you think?
Our goal now
For this Objective and related Impact, validate that:
- If the Impact is achieved, it’s reasonable to expect an increase in active Fedora contributors.
- Success in the Objective logically results in the intended Impact.
- That link is reasonably sufficient — that is, it represents everything needed to have the Impact.
- While there might be other ways to have similar Impact, the chosen Objective is the right one for Fedora right now.
- 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.
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That’s because at that time, it was still not uncommon to have physical classrooms full of computers which you might take physical media into and literally boot up the Design Suite in order to teach Inkscape. Previously, these kinds of deliverables were all in a list with the other Spins, which mostly focused on a particular desktop technology — KDE Plasma, Cinnamon, Xfce, etc. That made these relatively popular desktop environments harder to find, so it seemed like splitting them out would make things more clear… but in practice people have been asking confused questions about the terminology ever since, so we’ve officially abandoned it. ↩︎