First Thoughts as Fedora Project Leader

I’ve been watching HBO’s tech-startup spoof Silicon Valley. One of the reoccurring background jokes is that every software company, large and small, purports to be making the world a better place — usually as a sort of reflexive afterthought with no real meaning. In Fedora, we’re a little more modest with our claims, but we back them with both sincerity and action. We sometimes debate the relative positioning of our “Freedom, Friends, Features, First” foundations (of course we do — we’re a community-driven open source project, and so everything is always up for discussion), but our collective goal of leading the advancement of the free and open source world together is never in doubt.

I’m proud to have been part of the Fedora community since the early days. I’m grateful to have been given the opportunity to work on Fedora as my full-time job for the past year and a half. And now, I’m excited to be stepping into a new place within the community as Fedora Project Leader. These are incredible times in computing and in free and open source software, and we have incredible things going on in Fedora to match — the next years are full of opportunity and growth for the whole project and community, and I’m thrilled to be in a position to help.

Of course, in keeping with that Friends foundation, I won’t be doing anything alone. Fedora’s true leadership strength comes from its community board, and I’ll be working with the rest of the board and the Fedora community in general to find ways to strengthen and empower that leadership, along with that from other governance groups in Fedora, including FESCo, FAmSCo, and all of our other teams, committees, subprojects, SIGs, and working groups. (Oh my.) I’ve worked with a lot of you in a lot of these areas, but there are other parts of the project and community that I’m not yet so familiar with. My initial focus is going to be on expanding that, and I look forward to growing my circle of Fedora friends and to hear your thoughts and ideas on everything. I’m almost always available (as

) on Freenode IRC, and I’m planning on setting up regular “virtual office hours” (stay tuned).

I like to talk and write a lot, so there will certainly be more as I absorb and integrate all of that. But for now, two last (but not least) things:

First, thanks to outgoing FPL Robyn Bergeron, mostly for being an awesome person and friend overall, but specifically for being an inspiring and wise project leader, connector-of-people and (to use her words of highest praise), doer-of-things. Robyn’s commitment to the community and to advancing Fedora in all ways will make her a formidable addition to what might be the greatest costume-clad crime-fighting force of all time, the League of Former Fedora Project Leaders.

Second, does this mean that Fedora Cloud efforts that I’ve been working on are going to fall apart? No way. We have a strong set of community leaders and developers on the Fedora Cloud Working Group, and Red Hat will shortly be posting a new Fedora Cloud Engineer position as additional investment. And I don’t intend to go away from that area — Cloud success is an important part of Fedora’s future success overall.

Thanks, everyone, and… let’s get on with making the world a better place, in our own very real way.