What is success for Fedora?

[Joe Brockmeier]

On 07/01/2014 10:47 AM, Miloslav Trmač wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
>> Is Fedora simply a project to
>> create a Linux distribution, or is it something larger?
> … or something smaller instead?
> 
> These kinds of questions have a tendency to lead to answers that mostly
> expand the scope of what we should be achieving, making it more general,
> more vague, and more close to impossible to succeed.

Not that I disagree, but do you have an example of an answer to the
question we should avoid?

> I don’t immediately have a specific suggestion, but I did want to open
> the possibility of defining success more narrowly, in terms of fairly
> measurable results, rather than more generally, in terms of fairly
> generally applicable ideas or principles.

In general, I'd say success for Fedora is (in part):

- To remain a healthy community, and continue to replenish itself
(replace contributors who leave) and grow (add new contributors).

- Be relevant to users who support Fedora's mission, attract new users,
and serve to advocate the importance of free/open source software and
content as a collaborative community.

- Produce useful software for the public good (currently, the three
products and software used in the production of those products), and
consistently create, improve, and spread that content.

To break that down into more measurable chunks:

- Increase active contributor base year-over-year by some percentage. We
should be able to measure whether we have more active contributors than
last year, right?

(I'd also like to see a contributor survey, which I understand has been
discussed but not implemented previously...)

- Track usage and adoption of Fedora's three products. Tracking usage is
trickier, but we should be able to find some metrics that we can use to
evaluate whether Fedora usage is going up, down, or remaining level.

- We can generally see how much software/content we're producing as a
result of the other activities, and see whether we're doing well there
or falling down. Slightly more subjective than just measuring the number
of packages we maintain or lines of code - but not impossible.

Best,

jzb
-- 
Joe Brockmeier | Principal Cloud & Storage Analyst
jzb at redhat.com | http://community.redhat.com/
Twitter: @jzb  | http://dissociatedpress.net/

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