An introduction of the new cheerleader...

[Cristian Gafton]

On Sun, 25 Jan 2004, seth vidal wrote:

> > 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? 

(Apologies for the late reply. The weather had a different opinion about
my plans to return back home from a weekend travel)

Now, onto the strategic direction, I think that is covered pretty well in 
the objectives page we have on the site currently. While the verbiage 
might be a tad verbose, there are two main thrusts of strategy here as 
far as Red Hat is concerned:

- enabling Red Hat to engage the developer community more directly and
provide an integrated and (hopefully) popular platform that would bring
various included projects to their maturity faster; support this by 
providing required resources and logistical support;

- create a test/proving ground for new technologies that allows Red Hat
more flexibility in terms of how quickly can we adapt those technologies
and integrate them into a distribution. Many of the internal developers
here at Red Hat view this as a return to our origins. For those who
remember the old days of early Red Hat Linux releases, you know that
oftentimes we did not shy away from introducing new/incompatible changes
from one release to another. Today people pay for support, stability,
maintainability, compatibility and other *ility features - and to provide
that we have to be more conservative about what we can include and when.  
It is not better or worse, it's just different, and the need for something 
like Fedora follows quite naturally.

> 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

You are absolutely right there. I will make a concentrated effort to keep 
folks informed of what is going on. Personally I'd like to thank you for 
the fedora people aggregator - I hope soon I'll be included on it as 
well. 

For what is worth, I do believe in very active communication channels. This 
is why I do have a secondary agenda of figuring out how to bring your 
aggregator on to the fedora site to increase its visibility. It is 
extremely useful stuff. The same goes for the great work done by the guys 
running the fedoranews.org site. The fact that we have not enabled yet 
contributions like this on the official Fedora site looks to me as a 
failure on our part.

Your comments about the social change are dead on. I am aware of what 
should/needs to be done and I am attempting to address all that as soon as 
humanely possible.

Cristian
--
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Cristian Gafton     --     gafton at redhat.com      --     Red Hat, Inc.
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  "There are two kinds of people who never amount to much: those who 
   cannot do what they are told, and those who can do nothing else."
        --Cyrus Curtis