One of the crucial duties of the new Council will be the selection of two to four 18-month objectives (and then finding people to own and drive each of them). Although the new body is not yet in place, this is to be a community conversation, so there's no need to wait to start talking about what we want. A few months ago, we had a good discussion about "winning"... what success means for Fedora. This structure is intended to bring that to a more concrete level, so we have some things we can plan around and act on. Please bear with me for a minute while I bust out an ASCII diagram: /============+============+=============++=============+=============\ | | | || | | | Resources | Activities | Outputs || Outcomes | Impact | | | | || | | +------------+------------+-------------++-------------+-------------+ |What we |What we do |The direct ||The specific | Mission and | |have: time, |with our |products of ||change in the| vision; our | |money, code,|resources |our ||world due to | long term | |hardware... | |activities ||those outputs| effect | +============+============+=============++=============+=============+ | Things we can affect directly || Out of our direct control | +============+============+=============++=============+=============+ | <----- planning flows right to left ---------< | +------------+------------+-------------++-------------+-------------+ | >------ effort flows left to right ----------> | \+===================================================================/ Beautiful! This is what's called an organizational logic model. I like it a lot, because it draws a meaningful connection from what we're doing to what we want to achieve — and from what we want to achieve to what we're doing. When we need resources for something, we can show stakeholders (sponsors for funding, volunteers for time, donors for hardware) the clear line to the expected big-picture result. A lot of times, organizations draw up beautiful mission and vision statements, put them on the wall, and then do whatever makes tactical sense based on the feeling in the moment. Fedora may be guilty of that to some degree — I think we tend to focus on our outputs — the Fedora distribution, documentation, websites, etc., and skip the connecting step. (Sidebar: Of course, in a largely volunteer organization like Fedora, we don't just declare goals at the top and expect people to line up at the bottom. The goals have to align with what the community actually wants to do. But, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't — or don't! — have goals, and it's the role of the council to help discern and articulate those, and to inspire more people to join in work on them. Having a framework for this might even be _more_ important than in a "command and control" organization.) Over on the right hand side, we have our long-term impact: the project mission and vision. These are defined on the project wiki at <https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Overview#Our_Mission> and <https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Vision_statement>. Of course, we can revisit these whenever we like, but I think they're basically sound and I don't think we need to overdo the fundamental soul-searching. We do have an existing list of project Objectives, which are further to the left (that is, the more concrete side of the chart) in the model. They're at <https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Objectives>. These are pretty decent, but none have a timeframe attached — they are things we want to do continuously, rather than things we want to accomplish. There's nothing wrong with that, but we also need targets for "_how much_ of _what_ will be achieved by _when_". So, in the logic model framework, when we talk about our 18 month goals, we're talking about Outcomes. Sometimes people break that box down into short-, medium-, and long-term goals, and we could do some of that if we want. For this conversation, the target is medium scale, and I think it's fine to not overburden our own model with too many boxes. (Sidebar: That said, there are few updates to the current objectives which we might consider. For example, the create-a-distro objective could include description of new Fedora.next ideas, and _I_ think that we should focus on building one Fedora community rather than on building communities in general. And I'm not sure that "developing the science and practice of building communities" is something we've been concerned with much lately — maybe that too should be folded into building our _own_ community; or alternatively, something we need to expand work on. But, anyway, this is really a tangent. Like the mission and vision, I don't think we need to mess with this much.) So, let's zoom in on the top-right corner of the (did I mention, gorgeously-drawn?) ASCII diagram from above and fill in what we have: ====+===================================+============================\ ... | Outcomes | Impact | +-----------------------------------+----------------------------+ ... | 18 Month Goals: | Mission: to lead the | | | advancement of free and | ... | 1. _________________________ | open source software and | | | content as a | ... | 2. _________________________ | collaborative community. | | |. . . . . . . . . . . . . . | ... | 3. _________________________ | Vision: the Fedora Project | | | creates a world where: | |. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .| * free culture is | |Ongoing Objectives: | welcoming and widespread,| | * Creating a Free (as in Freedom) | * collaboration is | | distribution | commonplace, and | | * Building a open source software | * people control their | | community | content and devices. | ====+===================================+============================+ ... | ... | ... | Filling in those blanks is what this is all about. As explained in the Council charter <https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Council>, these will be refreshed on a continuous basis. Typically, we will make Flock the "centerpiece" of this discussion (but always being mindful that final decisions can't be made in a conference limited by time and space). However, with Flock just past, we don't want this to drift in limbo until next year. As I've mentioned previously, I have some ideas in mind for where to start (none of them surprising). I'll post about those in individual threads over the next few days (and, given busyness with getting the F21 beta out the door, weeks). I encourage you to do the same, and comment and help improve everyone's ideas. That way, by the time we have the initial Council in place, we'll have a good collective idea of where to start and can seat a few of the Objective Leads quickly. -- Matthew Miller <mattdm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Fedora Project Leader _______________________________________________ board-discuss mailing list board-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/board-discuss
