5tFTW: Fedora Beta, Council & Elections, Strategic Planning, Outreach Committee, and FUDCon Reports (2014-10-31)

[Matthew Miller]

Reposted from <http://fedoramagazine.org/5tftw-2014-10-31/>.

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
October 31st, 2014:


Fedora Beta due Next Week
-------------------------

I’ll keep this item short: Fedora 21 Beta is Go, and will be available
Tuesday, November 4th. Next week, we’ll do an all-beta 5tFTW.

This puts the final release target at December 9th. As always, these
targets are more like guidelines than deadlines, but as we are verging
on the holiday season we are going to make extra effort to avoid
further adjustment.

  * https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel-announce/2014-October/001455.html
  * http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/21/Schedule
  * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GMkuPiIZ2k


Council Update and Elections
----------------------------

The Fedora Council — our new top-level leadership body — includes
two of seats appointed by elected committees and two seats elected by
the Fedora Contributor community at large. The appointed seats covering
Fedora Engineering and Fedora Outreach (more on that below) are now
filled, by Josh Boyer and Christoph Wickert respectively.
(Congratulations and thank you to Josh and Christoph!) Now it’s time to
fill the elected seats — see the schedule announcement for details.

Quick summary: nomination period next week; “campaign” week after that,
and finally a week for community voting after that. The Council will
take over from the Fedora Project Board when this is complete.

  * https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Council
  * https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/announce/2014-October/003236.html
  * http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Board


Fedora Objectives
-----------------

If you haven’t seen it already, I would like everyone who cares about
what Fedora does and where the project is going to take a look at my
recent Fedora Magazine article about Fedora objectives — why, how, and
eventually what.

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, high-level strategy discussions can
feel disconnected and pointless. This is a process by which we can
actually connect them into what we’re doing in a meaningful way, and by
doing so increase the impact of our actions. Take a look, and take part
in upcoming discussions on the public board discuss list.

  * http://fedoramagazine.org/lets-talk-about-fedora-project-objectives/
  * https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/announce/2014-October/003235.html
  * https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/board-discuss


Fedora Outreach Steering Committee?
-----------------------------------

Fedora has long had two high-level elected steering committees, FESCo,
the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee, and FAmSCo, the Fedora
Ambassadors Steering Committee. The meritocratic representative
positions on the Council are appointed by these committees.

This is straightforward for the relatively wide-reaching FESCo, but the
seat appointed by FAmSCo is actually intended to represent a much
broader section of the project than ambassadors alone. This lead to a
discussion about creating a new Outreach steering committee, tying
together and coordinating efforts of Ambassadors, Marketing,
Brand/Design, some aspects of the product Working Groups, Docs, various
support channels — overall, all the parts of the project which are
outward looking rather than focused on building the distro and
infrastructure.

Since FAmSCo has successfully delegated a lot of responsibility to
regional ambassadors committees, and since the new Council will work on
the high level community budget, this new body would make FAmSCo
obsolete — so we’re not just piling on yet more committees, here!

If you’re interested, join the new Fedora Outreach mailing list and
let’s start building this!

  * https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_Engineering_Steering_Committee
  * http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_Ambassadors_Steering_Committee
  * https://lists.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/outreach


Reports from FUDCon Managua
---------------------------

As promised last week, some updates from FUDCon Managua, our
user-and-developer conference held this year in Nicaragua. Check out
reports from:

-   Alejandro Prez (Lots of pictures and people!)
-   William Moreno Reyes (In Spanish *and* English!)
-   Rino Rondan (All in Spanish, although the photographs are
    multilingual)
-   Robert Mayr (Just “day 0″ so far; check back for more updates
    from robyduck!)
-   Kiara Navarro (In Spanish with a lot of details, and again a lot
    of photos — and also, there’s part 2 and part 3)
-   Abdel G. Martínez L. (Particularly, highlights positive impact
    of the event on project contribution — nice!)
-   Daniel Bruno (In English)

Thanks to everyone who made these reports, and thanks to the FUDCon
LATAM organizers, and congratulations to everyone on yet another
successful Fedora Premier Event!

  * https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon:Managua_2014
  * http://msvslinux1.blogspot.com/2014/10/fudcon-managua-2014.html
  * http://otroblogdegnu-linux.blogspot.com/2014/10/fudcon-managua.html
  * http://www.itrestauracion.com.ar/?p=2002
  * http://robyduck.fedoraonline.it/?p=12
  * http://panamahitek.com/fedora-users-developers-conference-managua-nicaragua-bitacora-1/
  * http://panamahitek.com/fudcon-fedora-users-developers-conference-managua-nicaragua-bitacora-2/
  * http://panamahitek.com/fudcon-fedora-users-developers-conference-managua-nicaragua-bitacora-3/
  * http://www.abdelmartinez.com/2014/10/fudcon-managua-final-report.html
  * http://dbruno.org/fudcon-managua/

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