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!

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

Rex Dieter Elected Representative: Langdon White

Langdon White Engineering Representative: Josh Boyer

Josh Boyer Outreach Representative: Christoph Wickert

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).

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 here.

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, Garrett 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”).

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 a job for our 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. 🙂