Fedora is a big project, and it’s hard to keep up with everything. This series highlights interesting happenings in five different areas every week. It isn’t comprehensive news coverage — just quick summaries with links to each.

Refreshing our Objectives

When we created the Fedora Council to succeed the previous Fedora Board, one of our goals was for the new body to take an active role in leadership and in finding project direction. One concrete way we do this is through Fedora Objectives. We choose two to four of these on a roughly 12-18 month timeframe, with full Council consensus and broader community discussion. We also appoint Objective Leads as auxiliary Council members, with binding votes on concerns relevant to their particular area.

Currently, the two active Objectives are the University Involvement Initiative, and Fedora Modularization, Requirements Phase — and both are basically at the end of their timeframe. At our Council meeting on Monday, March 14th, we’ll discuss how these went and what could have been better. We’ll also start exploring what to do next — we may re-select the university involvement plan for the 2016-2017 academic year, and we have a proposal for a next phase of Fedora Modularization.

What else would you like to see us focus on across the project in the next year and a half? Who do you think would be a good leader for that effort?

Wayland and Fedora 24

Wayland is the next-generation graphics stack for Linux, designed to be the successor to X11. Fedora is one of the leaders in development and adoption of this technology — but the goal is to bring it to you with minimal disruption. The plan is to have one whole release where we feel like it’s fully working as an option before we make it the default. The Fedora Workstation Working Group has decided to target Fedora 24 as the “fully working!” release, with the goal of making it the default this November for Fedora 25. Fedora (and Wayland) developer Matthias Clasen has a blog post about this, and about why it’s important — Why Wayland, Anyway?

When Fedora Workstation 24 comes out, the GNOME Wayland session will be an alternate option on the login screen. We’d really love it if you would choose it, and tell us any problems you experience (or, ideally, that it works wonderfully). Get your Flock talk in! Flock is Fedora’s big contributor-focused conference, alternating between North America and Europe. This year, it will be in Krakow, Poland, from August 2–5. (See more — and register! — at the Flock to Fedora web site.) Josh Boyer, part of the Flock organization team, reminds us that talk submissions are due April 8th. Note that we have some, limited funding to sponsor travel, and priority for that goes to speakers and workshop leaders. We’re particularly looking for sessions which related to existing or proposed Objectives (see above!). Heroes of F23 Beta

Resuming the regular series “Heroes of Fedora”, Fedora contributor Adam Williamson writes about the Heroes of Fedora 23 Beta. In this post, Adam looks at the participants who helped with quality assurance testing during the beta period of Fedora 23. He ranks testers based on their comments on testing updates, number of specific validation tests run, and number of bug reports submitted. These metrics are calculated using specific tools in Fedora’s infrastructure, such as fedmsg, openQA, and Bugzilla. Thank you to all of these QA Heroes, and to everyone else who helped make Fedora 23 such a great release!

Do conferences bring new contributors to Fedora?

A few weeks ago, I mentioned Bee Padalkar’s work on measuring the impact of Fedora’s appearances at conferences like FOSDEM. We spend a lot of effort and budget on conferences, and since we have a limited amount of both time and money, it makes sense to see whether it’s doing what we hope it is. That way, we can decide how to best focus our resources — and if we can demonstrate real value, even request more. Bee has an updated blog post, with numbers and charts. In general, it looks like FOSDEM effort in particular results in increased contribution over time from existing contributors who attend. It brings in new contributors, too, but we could do a lot better at supporting and retaining these new community members. It’ll be interesting to follow this in future FOSDEMs — and to apply this to future events, as well.

Thanks to Justin Flory and the CommOps team for help on this week’s Five Things in Fedora This Week.