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.

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.

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.

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!

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:

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!