Friends, Romans, countrymen.

Here’s a couple recent tidbits of great tidings for the Fedora community:

Jeffrey Tadlock and Fabian Affolter, both Fedora Ambassadors, developed a superb one-sheet showing growth in the Ambassadors program. They’ve also put together a page on the wiki to do future tracking of these metrics. It’s amazing to see how fast the community can react and make things happen. It seems like the conversation about metrics in Ambassador-land had just begun and already we have some actual statistics to show. Superb!

Also, last night on IRC, the Fedora Documentation Project had a great meeting with some folks from the Red Hat Documentation team. They were introducing their new publican package, which is a soup-to-nuts DocBook creation system that has been used in-house for a couple of years. One unique feature of publican is its ability to integrate in the distribution without the need for tinkering with CVS repositories, since it’s simply an RPM package like any other, with a dead-simple create_book command, for instance.

A package has been approved and is in Fedora’s development “Rawhide” repository, and hopefully you’ll see it in Fedora 8’s repositories soon as well. The Docs team is currently running it through some tests to see what will be required to make a transition to using it for our CVS-stored documents. This sort of teamwork is what open source development is all about; thanks to Jeff Fearn and the other Red Hat Documentation team members who made this happen.