What is success for Fedora?

[Haïkel]

2014-07-01 17:16 GMT+02:00 Josh Boyer <jwboyer at fedoraproject.org>:
> Something the Board has talked about recently is defining success for
> Fedora.  The project has often done this directly through our main
> deliverable, which is shipping another Fedora release.  We work hard
> to create, test, and deliver a high quality Linux distribution.  We
> look at feedback and try and correct mistakes or oversights in the
> next release.  These are all fine things, and things that should
> continue as we stride towards Fedora.next, but is that really defining
> success for the project as a whole?  Is Fedora simply a project to
> create a Linux distribution, or is it something larger?
>

>From our mission statement, it's obviously the second option, the
distro is only a mean to reach our goals.
To me, Fedora is a community of somewhat like-minded folks who wants
to push forward FLOSS with both
pragmatism and not compromising our values.
Fedora is not structured around the distro, but our culture and brand
that *we* built.


> Our Four Foundations speak to the bedrock that Fedora is built on and
> provide guidance in decision making for specific instances.  Yet we
> seem to rarely stand back and evaluate how Fedora as a project is
> doing.  Are we achieving some manner of success in promoting those
> Foundations?  Should we be striving for that?  Is it even measurable?
> If so, how?
>

>From an educated guess, I'd say we have some success though limited to
FOSS circles.
I still remember the days when Fedora was regarded as being "just" RHEL beta.
Since we dropped the Core/Extras distinction, we have been able to
improve our image as an innovative and truly community-driven project.

I hate to admit it, but we *failed* in promoting our foundations
mainstream while others -I won't name them- succeeded a little.
This is where we should focus our efforts, and Fedora.Next products
will be spearheading that.

I believe that fp.o is currently a self-sustaining project and we can
keep going for few years without worrying about reaching out more
people.
But accepting that is admitting defeat and compromising with our
foundations, this is not acceptable.


Fedora is successful when:
* it has a vibrant community
* its products (distro, incubated projects, etc.) are widely spread
both in the innard circle and mainstream
* we are visible (events, books, partners, specialized/mainstream medias)

All of these could be measured through metrics, for instance:
* community: through fedmsg, we can check our own pulse *LIVE* (number
of active contributors, periods of activity)
* products: downloads
* listing our appearances in all medias, events

But this is not enough, because we miss a lot of signals:
* what about our downstreams ? I mean RHEL, CentOS, Scientific Linux
I agree with Matthew: we're geared toward early adopters, and through
Fedora.Next, we could widen it to innovators and part of the early
majority.
But there's another way to reach out up to the late majority: more
collaboration with downstreams. Enterprise Linux has Fedora DNA, when
it is successfull, we are *successful*.
The main issue is that we lack something targetting consumer products
(desktops, mobile phones, tablets etc.). Focusing on ARM support, the
workstation product may be our weapons to foster such things.
* local communities: we don't aggregate metrics from them though they
are the ones the nearest to end-users, and we're not proactive enough
to reach them (how could we help you in spreading Fedora ? what are
doing ? what would you like to see ?)
* no consolidated view of all these metrics
* having *unbiased* polls -until now, this has been the main issue
with polls suggested- that we could *rely on* for strategic decisions.

> The Board is starting this thread to have an earnest discussion around
> what people see "success" being for the Fedora project.  Hopefully the
> Board members will chime in with their own thoughts soon, but we want
> to get as many ideas around this as possible.  Hopefully this
> discussion will help the Board, and the community as a whole, gather
> some insight as to where we think Fedora is, where it should be
> heading, and what we should be doing to get it there.
>

I agree with proposals to diversify our sponsoring, encouraging
partnerships in order to bring more stakeholders into the game.
RH has been and is a great and trusted partner to the community, but I
understand that some people are weary about our relationship.
Having more stakeholders is also a sign of good health.

Popular adoption should not be the main metric of success but reaching
out mainstream should *definitively* be one of our principal goals for
the next decade.

My hopes in Fedora.Next and what will come out from this discussion
could be: "Fedora -including its whole ecosystem- is back" (yeah, I'm
stealing that from Reagan)

Regards,
H.

> Thanks.
>
> josh
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