Empowering Fedora sub-communities

[Matthew Garrett]

(Breaking this out from the ticket paste)

One of the problems we face with deciding that Fedora is just our 
official products is that it makes it harder to figure out how spins fit 
in. One of the problems with defining Fedora more widely is that it 
makes it difficult to explain what Fedora actually is and guide users to 
appropriate downloads. Perhaps we're thinking about this the wrong way.

.next is an opportunity for Fedora to develop a strong brand image over 
a small set of deliverables - Fedora-the-product, if you will. But 
Fedora-the-community is much larger than those deliverables. Most of the 
discussion we've had has been figuring out how to fit 
Fedora-the-community into Fedora-the-product, and I don't think there's 
any way to do that without compromising the associated benefits.

How about if we decouple Fedora-the-product and Fedora-the-community? 
The obvious model here is Ubuntu, who over time have spawned several 
products driven by independent subcommunities. These products are 
independently managed but use common respoitories and are tied to the 
same overall release schedule, and each has its own strong branding - 
Kubuntu even has its own financial backing.

Rather than saying that Fedora-the-product should represent all of our 
independent subcommunities, we could allow individual subcommunities to 
define their own product definitions, driven by their own branding. For 
example, KDE could define separate desktop (Plasma) and mobile (Plasma 
Active) products without having to worry about them conflicting with any 
other products.

We'd still want some level of overall coordination - for instance, 
deciding what's release blocking would still be a wider discussion, but 
it might be possible for individual subcommunities to re-release based 
on -updates if they can obtain appropriate resources.

The biggest problem I forsee in this situation is the perception that 
all other subcommunities are still to some extent second class citizens 
compared to the three Fedora products. The counterargument is that it 
gives them the opportunity to demonstrate that they're significantly 
better in a way that's currently impossible, and that may be enough to 
get people to change their minds as to future choices.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org