Elections are open.

During the next week, Fedora contributors will vote for open seats on both the Fedora Project Board and the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo). The polls are now open for both elections through the Fedora Election System. (Remember to login or you won't see the voting link for an election.) The elections will close on Wednesday, 2010-05-26 at UTC 23:59.

If you aren't familiar with how the system works, check out the Fedora Elections Guide. I also encourage Fedora community members to review the logs from our Town Hall meetings, where the candidates talked openly about their goals and viewpoints. Get informed, and then vote appropriately.

I thanked our election volunteers previously, but I also wanted to say a quick thanks to Mike McGrath and Mark Chappell on the Fedora Infrastructure team, who both ensured that the elections were set up properly and ready for business. Mark is actually working on application upgrades and better usability,which I hope we'll be able to use in the next regular election cycle. It's great to see a contributor jumping in to make a difference and improve the systems we use regularly.

Enough of my yakkin', whaddya say? Let's boogie. Go vote!

Quick links: (Board election)  (FESCo election)

The name game, no. 14.

The Fedora 14 name has been announced, and it's Laughlin.

Later this week our other election processes will be moving ahead as well. Paul Mellors and Larry Cafiero will post answers to the candidate questionnaire, and following that, John Rose will help kick off our series of live, IRC town hall meetings where our candidates will answer community questions. The coming elections of people to the Board and FESCo are probably more important than a release code name, so I want to thank our community in advance for their involvement, and especially our volunteers like Paul, John, and Larry for their assistance.

Upcoming dates.

On Saturday, April 24, we open nominations for the next round of elections for Fedora. Seats on both the Board and the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) will be open.

FESCo is delegated responsibility for dealing with, among other things, the technical issues of production of the Fedora operating system. FESCo is an excellent place to contribute if you have a knack for technical issues that arise from building Fedora and providing its content to millions of users every day. FESCo’s mission and other useful information are found here on the wiki.

The Board is a group that is much like a board of directors for a company, dealing with big-picture issues such as vision and growth of the project as a whole. The Board’s mission and other useful information are found on its wiki page.

Elections help the Fedora community maintain a strong voice throughout the leadership of the Fedora Project. Like all elections, they work best when they are not seen as a popularity or name recognition contest but rather as a way of finding nominees who the community feels are well equipped to lead in the areas that each group covers. I hope interested community members will not only consider nominating, but also use their votes in a considered manner.

I want to extend sincere and deep gratitude to John Rose and Larry Cafiero for volunteering to work on the elections this cycle, dealing with the IRC town halls and nominee questionnaires. Thanks guys!

Also, expect news very shortly about the opening of name suggestions for the next release, Fedora 14!

Finding the next failure.

I caught up on the last couple days of the Planet, and found two particularly interesting posts, one by Kevin Fenzi and the other by John Poelstra. The former contains a years-old (but still 100% accurate) presentation on protecting an open source project from threats from within. The latter contains a rallying call against stagnation, and reminds us of the silent 5th ‘F’ in our project values — fail faster.

To improve Fedora, as a project we need to be willing to embrace some level of change. We can do this with the confidence that we don’t need to write change in stone just to make it happen. Looking back through the history of Fedora, we’ve been through some level of change continuously since the beginning of the Project. Sometimes the changes we’ve made have been to discontinue processes that don’t work. Excess governance comes to mind, for example, or having all our media and swag rely on someone in Red Hat. In other cases we’ve struck out to find new ways to collaborate, like expanding our roster of premier Fedora events, or setting up unique communications channels like Fedora Talk.

Whenever we’ve made these changes, we’ve tried to ensure we were identifying and solving specific issues by doing so — in other words, changing not for the sake of change, but to improve the Fedora Project and our software. The particular issue we’re faced with currently is how to resolve many different ideas about what Fedora users should expect from our stable releases. Recent discussions show that there are several competing ideas in play, and when disagreements exist, fortunately we have leadership bodies to help resolve them. This isn’t the first or last time that the Fedora community has found that we hold a variety of views yet need to find a unifying direction.

I brought up Kevin’s and John’s blog posts earlier because even though the content was created years apart — a Google video from 2006, and contemporary thoughts on embracing change — they both are completely applicable to Fedora as part of our shared philosophy. A prominent point made early on in the video Kevin posted is that attention and focus are valuable and scarce resources in any open source project. The presenters are largely pointing back to works like Karl Fogel’s excellent book Producing Open Source Software, which Red Hat’s Community Architecture and I continue to regularly recommend to people we advise.

To succeed, the presenters assert, a project must achieve a shared understanding of its mission and scope. Our mission includes producing a distribution that serves as both an effective R&D lab, and as a vehicle for attracting interest in and contribution to free software. Being unafraid of changing our approach improves our ability to reach these goals. Moreover, doing so is just as much a part of our founding precepts of community as openness and transparency. As John points out, this isn’t a problem with a binary solution for all time. (Many problems worth solving have that in common.) We have opportunities to improve continually, and as a project we need to be more aggressive about taking them. The prospect of failure is much less frightening than the prospect of stagnation.

The Fedora Project Board and I have been interested in leading this change for some time. In October set out a broad definition of a user base that would help guide decisions and choices about how to continue to improve the Fedora distribution — the sum total of software that we promote as part of the Fedora Project. The set of issues around how, when, and to what extent we provide updates is just one aspect of these improvements.

We went through many open discussions to get to that point so we could build a reference and a basis for helping to guide appropriate change in the Fedora Project. The Board and I want to make it easier for FESCo to make coherent decisions around distribution policies such as updates. Sharing an understanding of the wide user base we’re trying to serve helps us better identify situations that are problems for that broad group. Then we’ll find ways to solve them, iterating through successes and failures and learning from them if necessary — as we’ve done in Fedora from day one.

To distract readers while I write a real post.

Board results.

The Fedora Board election results and the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee election results have been posted. Thank you to all those who voted, and to all those who ran for election. I’d like to welcome Dennis Gilmore and Tom ‘spot’ Callaway back to the Board, and also a special welcome to “Marvelous” Mike McGrath as our new member.

The results of the Fedora 12 release name election will be announced on Saturday as part of my keynote at FUDCon Berlin 2009.

The tallies are in.

Election results for the Fedora Project Board, the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee, and the Fedora Ambassadors Steering Committee are all announced this morning.

Bill Nottingham and Matt Domsch have been elected to the two open seats on the Board. Josh Boyer, Dan Horák, Jarod Wilson, and Jon Stanley have been elected to the open seats on FESCo. Max Spevack, Joerg Simon, Francesco Ugolini, Thomas Canniot, Rodrigo Padula, David Nalley, and Susmit Shannigrahi have been elected to the open seats on FAMSCo. In particular, I think it’s wonderful that all the major regions of the world are represented in the election results for FAMSCo.

Congratulations to all those elected, and thank you to all those who ran and voted. Special thanks also to Matt Domsch for his assistance in organizing the town hall candidate meetings, and Nigel Jones for setting up and running the election process.

Our elections coordinator Nigel Jones has set up the balloting for the Fedora Board, FESCo, and FAMSCo. On every ballot are fantastic individuals who are willing to give extra time and energy to Fedora to try to improve the project for their fellow contributors. Good luck to everyone on the ballots, and thanks for your willingness to help!

Voting is open until 2359 UTC 2008-12-20. Go cast your votes today!