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.

Post-Goddard.

Voting is now open for the Fedora 14 release name. Naming the next release is yet another way that our community is involved in making the future of Fedora. If you're a member of any group in Fedora (beyond completing the CLA), you can vote on this ballot.

To cast your vote for the F14 name, login at the elections site. May the best name win!

The name game, no. 14.

We now have a wiki page open for suggestions for the Fedora 14 name.

Every release, we provide our community a chance to give name suggestions for the next one. Each consecutive name must be linked to the previous one, but that link must be different from the link that connected the previous releases. So for example, Fedora 12, Constantine, and Fedora 13, Goddard, are linked by being names of rocket scientists. Fedora 13 and Fedora 14 must share a different link.

You need to be able to truthfully complete the sentence, “Goddard is a ______, and so is <my suggestion>.”

There are links we don’t use because they’re too mundane or vague (like “is a place” or “is a word”), so those kinds of links will be discarded. Also, we simply can’t use names of companies or brand names for products, especially not if they’re related to IT, software, computers, or technology.

The wiki page has some helpful guidelines that will help your name suggestion pass muster. After the names are collected, the Board and Legal provide input for a short list, and that list comes before the community for a vote. We’ll announce the winning name around May 11, approximately a week before the release of Fedora 13.

We could use help in winnowing down that wiki list. If you’d like to help run some simple tests to ensure we have a clean ballot for our community, you can either respond on the advisory-board list, or let me know here or by email.

To distract readers while I write a real post.

Election extensions.

As seen here on the fedora-advisory-board list:

Although Mike McGrath and the Infrastructure team don’t expect the server relocation to affect our upcoming elections, we want to make sure the community’s ability to vote is not unnecessarily affected given the timing.

The original voting period was December 8-15, and the infrastructure move is occurring over the weekend of the 12th:

https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2009-December/msg00000.html

https://fedorahosted.org/fedora-infrastructure/ticket/1845

I talked this morning with Mike, John Rose, and Nigel Jones, and here’s the plan we arrived at:

• The voting period will start on December 5 instead of December 8. This ensures that, no matter what unforeseen circumstances occur, there will be a full weekend of uninterrupted voting time available to all community members. All townhalls will be finished by that point, since none are planned for FUDCon at this time.
• Although Mike and the Infrastructure team believe they can keep the elections open throughout the move, in the event of any substantial outage (8 hours or more), we will extend the end of voting by an additional day. For any additional day of outage, we’ll extend the end of voting by another additional day. Again, we aren’t expecting to have to do this, but it’s better for us to have a plan ahead of time. If there is no outage, voting will end on December 15 as originally planned.
• Nigel is preparing a change to the elections app that will allow a logged in user to check the accuracy of a previously recorded vote. This will give an additional measure of confidence in the election system, even in the event of a brief outage. If any user detects a problem, they can report it via IRC, email to the infrastructure list, or a Trac ticket.

We’ll be putting announcements out elsewhere as well — but as Darren noted, there’s nothing wrong with getting your vote in early!

Fedora 11 release name voting

As was just announced on the announcement mailing list*, the voting ballots for the Fedora 11 release name are now open. To vote, you just need to be a member of one non-CLA group in our Fedora Account System. Voting ends at 2359 UTC 2009-01-09, so get your vote in quickly! (There’s nothing wrong with campaigning for a name of your choice either, if you’re so inclined.)

The Fedora release name is sort of a fun Easter egg for the community. Ultimately, it’s simply a way that anyone who participates in Fedora can have a say in what we call the next release. For Fedora 10, that name was “Cambridge,” which incidentally was Red Hat engineering’s internal release name for the Red Hat Linux 10 product that never was. That release ultimately became Fedora Core 1, “Yarrow.”

All the names on the ballot were submitted by the community, run through a series of searches to identify probable trademark conflicts, and then approved by the Fedora Board and Red Hat’s legal department, which did a more thorough search for conflicts and risk identification. The entire submission process was recorded on the wiki, where you can find details on all the suggestions.

Each release name is linked to the previous release name, and that link must be different from the link that came before it. We try to keep the links non-obvious and (arguably) clever wherever possible. In the past, the links have become a little more generic, but given the fairly good slate of names that’s on the ballot this time, I hope that will be less of an issue going forward.

Thanks again to Nigel Jones for coordinating our election process and to everyone who submitted a name for consideration!

* Not on it? join here.

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!