Fedora video bonanza.

The great thing about the Fedora community is that when there’s work to be done, people roll up their sleeves and pitch in. That’s exactly what happened at our most recent Fedora Users and Developers Conference (FUDCon) in Boston a couple weeks ago, where volunteers banded together to provide audio streaming and video recording of some of the proceedings. Matt Domsch, Chris Tyler, and Clint Savage headed up the A/V support for this event and I’m very thankful to them. You can find all the proceedings linked here in the schedule, in the totally free Ogg format. The Linux Foundation has kindly made Flash versions available of some talks as well.

But if you thought that was all the video goodness available these days, think again!

It was a couple years ago, I think, when I first met Colby Hoke, a member of Red Hat’s Creative team who specialized in videography and video production. Colby and I share a deep love of film, although I’m convinced he’d beat the tar out of me when it comes to technical trivia about cinematography or film treatment. Plus, he has a bitchin Creative Commons tattoo. That’s dedication.

Colby has a wonderfully loose and natural shooting style that informs the many videos he’s shot about Fedora over the years. His style helps emphasize the Fedora themes of fraternity and freedom. By getting naturally up close with the people who contribute to Fedora, he shows that Fedora is built by regular people who care deeply about software freedom, and about your rights as a participant in the global information society. And of course the subject matter is often the cool code on which those people are working, code that builds features you’ll see not just in Fedora but in many other Linux distributions, thanks to our upstream-friendly practices.

If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, hop over to our wiki and check out the list of systems and features Fedora contributors at Red Hat work on every day, and from which you and I benefit. So much of what just works in Fedora and Linux is due to the hard work and brilliance of contributors like the ones building the free software on that list. I’m amazed at the progress we’ve made and what’s still ahead for Fedora 11 and beyond, and the features we’re building now are going to be part of the pieces Colby and his teammates are creating right now.

The Creative team calls these videos a “Spotlight On” series, because they help shine a light on the great work being done in Fedora by a group of dedicated, talented engineers. These folks work directly with upstream communities so that the features produced in Fedora don’t just stay in Fedora. That wouldn’t be much of a collaboration, now, would it? Instead, we work with GNOME, KDE, freedesktop.org, the kernel, the information security community, and many others — to lead the way on features and make sure the future of open source is one of sustainability, steady growth, and participation.

If you travel over to this page, you’ll see where Red Hat has kindly built a one-stop shop where you can find all the great Fedora media Colby and the rest of the Creative team have helped us create. But that’s not the only way to check out these video feeds!

There’s also a YouTube channel where you can find “Spotlight On” videos as well as a lot of other exciting media. There’s also a playlist available if you want to drink from the firehose.

You can also see the latest videos by grabbing the RSS feed from Red Hat Magazine. We have plenty more exciting content like this on the way, so stay tuned.