What is success for Fedora?

[Matthew Miller]

On Tue, Jul 01, 2014 at 11:43:34AM -0600, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
> Well the question to ask the board is are they looking for measurable goals
> or 'reach for the stars' goals.

We need both, and, crucially, we need them to be interconnected. We have a
very high-level goal in our mission "to lead the advancement of free and
open source software and content as a collaborative community."

"Creating a Linux distribution" is noticeably missing from this mission, and
we certainly could spend some time revisiting that if there's enough
interest, but I'm content to read "to lead" as "create a Linux distribution
which leads". If we're fine with that collectively, cool, but we certainly
can go back to that level if people think it would be productive.

We also have some existing objectives defined by an earlier board -- see
<https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Objectives>. To save link-clicking, they
are: creating a Free (as in Freedom) distribution, building open source
software communities, and developing the science and practice of building
communities.

These objectives seem fine, although I don't think we're doing anything to
really work on the third, and the second is questionable. And I can see how
they're connected to the mission in the abstract, but I think there's a link
missing. If we produce any of those three things, how do we know -- and how
do we show, to ourselves or anyone else -- that we are achieving our
starry-eyed vision?

I think we can keep these objectives in the back of our mind, but we need to
figure out the *measurable impact* we want to have. So, the first question
is: what _specific_ changes do we want to occur in the world? Then, we can
look at what we need to be focusing on in order to create that change.

Or maybe we don't want to change the _world_. Maybe we want to change some
smaller subset of it. That's okay too, but it'd be nice to be clear on it.


(I do have some ideas for answers to these questions, but I'll put those in
a different subthread.)


-- 
Matthew Miller
<mattdm at fedoraproject.org>
Fedora Project Leader