5tFTW: Fedora 21 release on track, new leadership and thanks to the old; counting users; more... (2014-12-02)

Matthew Miller mattdm at fedoraproject.org
Wed Dec 3 01:24:52 UTC 2014


Reposted from <http://fedoramagazine.org/5tftw-2014-12-02/>.


Fedora is a big project, and it’s hard to keep up with everything that
goes on. This series highlights interesting happenings in five
different areas every week. It isn’t comprehensive news coverage — just
quick summaries with links to each. Here are the five things for
December 2nd, 2014:


Fedora 21 on track for Dec. 9!
------------------------------

Things are looking good for our scheduled December 9th release. We’re
in the process of validating release candidates, and everything seems
in great shape. (And it's not too late to join in: see the announcement
on the test list if you're interested in helping.) Assuming no
unexpected showstoppers, we’ll approve this as official at the Thursday
“Go / No-Go” meeting, and then it’ll be off to the mirror network for
release next Tuesday morning!

  * https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test-announce/2014-December/000962.html


Presenting the New Fedora Council
---------------------------------

With the conclusion of the first round of elections, the new Fedora
Council is in place! If you’ve missed it (perhaps you’re just coming by
to see what’s up with the new Fedora 21 release and this happened while
you weren’t watching), read up on it on the Fedora Council wiki
page.

Five of the six full-vote members are in place:

-   **Elected Representative:**        Rex Dieter
-   **Elected Representative:**        Langdon White
-   **Engineering Representative:**    Josh Boyer
-   **Outreach Representative:**       Christoph Wickert
-   **Fedora Project Leader:**         Matthew Miller

The sixth seat is the **Fedora Community Action and Impact
Coordinator**, which will be a full-time position hired and funded by
Red Hat’s Open Source and Standards group. (More on this job opening
here:  

  * http://fedoramagazine.org/fedora-community-action-and-impact-job-opening-red-hat-osas/

The council also includes a number of *auxiliary seats*. As the Council
charter explains:

> They are intended to have significant positive impact on the project
> as a whole, but in order to minimize the overall influence of
> appointed positions vs. those selected by the community, their votes
> in the consensus process are expected to be related to the scope of
> the respective role.

One of these is the **Fedora Program Manager** — Jaroslav Resnik.
Another is the **Diversity Advisor**, a position for which we will be
appointing a search committee shortly. And finally, the Council will
select **Objective Leads** — more on that on my previous Fedora
Magazine post about project objectives.

  * https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Council
  * http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:OSAS
  * http://fedoramagazine.org/lets-talk-about-fedora-project-objectives/


Thanks to the Outgoing Board
----------------------------

I want to offer a huge personal and also official thank you to all
previous members of the Fedora Project Board, whose care and dedication
have been instrumental in guiding Fedora to where we are today.

And I particularly want to thank the most recent board members —
Christoph Wickert, Garret Holmstrom, John Rose, Matthew Garrett, Eric
Chrstensen, Josh Boyer, Haïkel Guémar, and Neville Cross — and all
other project contributors who provided ideas, feedback, wisdom, and
significant effort in constructing the new governance model.


Fedora EMEA Gets Ready for F21
------------------------------

Jiří Eischmann has a blog post about getting the physical manifestation
of the Fedora release ready for the Europe / Middle East / Africa
region.

> I’ve been using Fedora 21 on my home computer since alpha, so it’s
> really nothing new for me, but I’m really excited about the release.
> In my opinion, it will be the most significant release since Fedora 7
> when Core and Extras got merged. It’s also been the most stable
> release of Fedora I’ve used.
>
> While Fedora QA guys are working on the final polishing as that F21
> can meet the final criteria, ambassadors are getting ready for the
> release. [...]

In addition to background notes about stickers, Jiří includes a preview
of the awesome F21 DVD sleeves designed by Alexander Smirnov (a.k.a.
“inkscaper”).

  * https://eischmann.wordpress.com/2014/11/27/getting-ready-for-fedora-21/


How many users does Fedora have?
--------------------------------

Alec Leamas started an interesting discussion on the Fedora Devel list,
asking, “How many users does Fedora have?“. The answer is… we don’t
really know. This is notoriously hard to count, and Fedora has always
opted for more privacy-preserving options, something many in our
contributor community care very strongly about. Stephen Smoogen is
working on coming up with some graphs based on mirror traffic, but
that’s only part of the picture, and an imperfect one.

Finding useful metrics for progress towards project goals and then
iteratively acting to improve them is a powerful tool for making sure
that our effort goes towards what we want to do [*] in the most
effective way. Ben Cotton started a sub-thread about _asking the right
questions_, which reminded me of ticket #1 for the Fedora Council
(copied over from previous work by the Board). Let’s keep this
discussion going. (And, one more plug here… helping get these metrics
right is part of the job responsibilities of the future Community
Action and Impact position.)

* This topic is probably better for the Fedora Council Discuss
  mailing list, (renamed from board-discuss and, before that,
  advisory-board), since it’s not strictly about Fedora development,
  but, eh, not everyone is aware of that list. Next time! :)

  * https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2014-December/204804.html
  * https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2014-December/204873.html
  * https://fedorahosted.org/council/ticket/1
  * https://lists.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/council-discuss
  * http://fedoramagazine.org/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif


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


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