An introduction of the new cheerleader...

[seth vidal]

> I think it is important for everybody to realize that although Fedora is
> going at this moment through a change in leadership, there will be no
> change in the strategic direction and goals set by Red Hat and the
> Steering Committee when the project was started. And because that saves me
> from having to come up with a new grandiose plan ;-),

What is the strategic direction? What are the goals? What does red hat
want from fedora as a community? 

This page: http://fedora.redhat.com/about/objectives.html defines the
technical objectives. What are the objectives of interacting with the
community? What is it that red hat wants to do?

If red hat wants people involved in fedora they need to foster an
environment conducive to getting and keeping volunteers. This means
giving people guidelines and guidance. This means encouraging those who
are doing what is thought of as a 'small thing'. The items you outlined
are priorities, and good ones but; there needs to be some social change,
as well. 

Making social changes means that there needs to be more active
leadership of fedora. Not just by the technical lead but also by people
who want to make fedora into something they want to spend their spare
time working on. Leadership in the open source world, from what I've
seen, means talking about and describing what's going on. It means doing
the head-down work but letting people know what you're doing so they can
feel invested and involved in the process. Think of it like an informal
status report to the community

One of the reasons I setup the fedora people blog aggregator
(http://fedora.linux.duke.edu/fedorapeople/) is that I thought it would
help people know what's going on. What people are working on or thinking
about. (The other reason is that I thought it was a cool idea). I think
it'd be useful to have the fedora 'cheerleader' have an rss feed to let
us all know things on a semi-regular basis. Even if the news is 'still
in holding pattern on cvs server, legal is tied up debating contributor
contracts/forms' it'd be enough to let people know what's going on and
to remind them that there ARE things going on.

I was speaking with Luis Villa of the gnome board last night about
planet.gnome.org. He said that he's found a number of people have told
him that they feel more involved in the process and more aware of what's
going on b/c they don't have to be in irc every waking minute or reading
every message of every mailing list; they get the interesting and
important bits from planet.gnome.org. He also said by adding someone to
the rss feed lists of planet.gnome.org when they've contributed to gnome
you're encouraging them to contribute more. They get fame or maybe
notoriety by their blog entries but they get noticed and that's
important.

So that's my suggestion:
 - we need to know the goals for the community not just the goals for
the distro.
 - fedora needs active, communicative leaders - not just the technical
lead.
 - we need an environment that is conducive to getting and keeping
volunteers.

so that was somewhat more than 2cents but it probably has the same
relative value..

-sv