The Fedora Council met last week in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It’s a lovely city, but rather cold, so we largely stayed within the interconnected network of enclosed bridges known as the Skyway — and in our conference room working. One of our main projects was the draft below. This is a follow-on from our update to the mission statement last year. It represents the way the Fedora Council would like the Project to make that mission a reality — a guiding policy. We’d like wider community feedback on this approach (and the write-up of it), after which we plan to include the final version in the project documentation. (Update: done, here.)

— Matthew Miller, Fedora Project Leader

Fedora’s Mission

“Fedora creates an innovative platform for hardware, clouds, and containers that enables software developers and community members to build tailored solutions for their users.”



We do this within the context of the four foundations: freedom, friends, features, and first.

Context

The Fedora Council identifies the short-, medium-, and long-term goals necessary to keep the Project on the leading edge of technology. The Fedora.next initiative focused the outputs of the project around use cases. In 2017, we updated the mission statement to reflect changes in the computing landscape. Today, it’s too difficult to build new solutions in Fedora.

Our Approach

We will make it easy for the community to build solutions, address specific developer problems, and meet their end users’ specific needs. We will do this by encouraging and helping Objectives which make the necessary changes required to ease the process. This accelerates the transformation of Fedora into a community that enables the construction of solutions.



Internally, Fedora focuses on enabling these solutions to be built. The outputs of Fedora are the Solutions our community members build. Our focus on enablement allows experimentation without prior judgement or gate-keeping.

What does this mean?

Teams such as Design, Documentation, Packagers, Release Engineering, and Quality Assurance provide building blocks and offer services to other community members and Teams. Services and building blocks include: CI infrastructure, community building advice and guidance, event funding, logo services, RPM or other software packages, swag, testing and validation, user support, or UX design.



Anyone may use Building Blocks like software packages and artwork to create a Solution. Solutions include: Fedora Workstation, KDE Plasma, and the Python Classroom Lab. Teams define criteria for services they provide to solution-builders. For example, teams providing press and promotional support may choose to provide additional support to Solutions with larger user bases.



Teams are free to define elements of their Solutions, such as intent, deliverables, and release cadence. Teams can build Solutions from any building block and pick and choose what tools they use. Based on their choices, they get different levels of ability to use the Fedora trademark (i.e. “Fedora Remix” vs “Powered by” vs “Fedora”). Some solutions are the premier showcases that we call Editions; these are used in the gating tests for our releases.