The Fedora Council met for an in-person FAD for three days from 26-28
March in Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA. Almost the entire Council was able
to attend. Josh Boyer, Brian Exelbierd, Robert Mayr, Matthew Miller, and
Langdon White, were present, and unfortunately, Jan Kuřik and María
Leandro could not make it. We chose Grand Rapids to accommodate one of
the two members with travel challenges and to reduce overall travel
costs for the rest of us.
We set a full agenda^0 and managed to discuss the topics over the three
full days.
We spent the majority of the first and second days considering the
current state of the project. We focused on "What we actually do; What
we do *well*; What we say we do but don't; and What we aspire to."
Using a variety of tools including SWOT analysis (that's
Strengths/Weaknesses/Opportunities/Threads) and Kellogg Logic Models^1,
we carefully considered how the Fedora Project fits into the competitive
landscape and how we can move forward achieving success while living our
values^2. We considered scope, as well: what we should address directly
and what we should enable by empowering others.
A key result of this is a proposed new mission statement for the Fedora
Project, which will be shared, along with some detail on the thought
behind it, in a follow-on post. These thoughts include alignment of our
objectives and our budget to achieve this mission. This should also
bring some clarity to our overall target audience.
The third day was focused on core decisions and processes for our
community:
* We extended our focus on diversity and inclusion in order to increase
our ability to attract a variety of thoughts to power our project. To
that end we are going to empower the Diversity Advisor with some direct
budget allocation to achieve this vision. In Fiscal Year 2017 we
allocated $6,500 for Diversity and Inclusion, however 100% of that money
was really to support an Outreachy^3 intern. While this is a noble cause
which the Council fully supports, we want to allow the Diversity and
Inclusion group to use the budget to further their objective directly.
Therefore, in Fiscal Year 2018 we are allocating $9,000 for Diversity
and Inclusion. The Diversity Working Group^4 under the guidance of the
Diversity Advisor will need to decide how to best use these resources
and whether we should continue to support Outreachy. Additional funds
may be allocated as there is a need and good ideas.
* We gave some initial thoughts to the Code of Conduct^5. The Diversity
Working Group has done a great job surfacing some needs related to this
area and we are thankful for the work they have done. We have realized
that after the Community Working Group shut down a few issues and
challenges had gone unanswered. We, as the Council, will be taking this
issue forward with an emphasis on an open and transparent process
related to the Code of Conduct. We have some paths forward to explore
and look forward to having an open conversation with the community .
* We had some great conversations about the signature events held by the
project. We realized that some of the events haven't necessarily been
accomplishing their goals because they have been overly broad or no
longer aligned with the realities of today. Therefore we are taking the
following actions:
** We want to make sure that Flock is attended by as many
contributors as possible from all around the world. We also
recognize that we have to live within our budget and cannot afford
to fully fund every person who would possibly attend. Therefore we
are initially going to increase the Flock budget from the $75,000 it
had in Fiscal Year 2017 to $85,000 in Fiscal Year 2018. This will
allow for a few more funded attendees from regions that have
traditionally not been well represented. However, we are also going
to work on both the goals of the event and how it is funded overall.
There will be a follow up post and discussion about these changes as
we seek community input. We discussed the possibility of Flock
rotating to APAC and LATAM as well as NA and EMEA, although that may
be realistically limited by travel budget constraints.
** Additionally, we are not going to create a line-item budget for
regional FUDCons. Instead, we are going to allocate budget for great
ideas. We want to make sure the community has the freedom to create
the outreach events we need, not just do the outreach events
dictated by the budget. This doesn’t mean we won’t do regional
events; instead we want to fund regional events that are clearly
going to accomplish great things and be good uses of funds as well.
This may even mean that we continue to support a FUDCon in some
regions, if that turns out to be the great idea. Or, it may be
another idea, like doing smaller but more frequent Fedora Meetups.
* Mindshare is the currency of our project. We aren't in the sales
business; we are in the ideas business. Last year FAmSCo started working
on an outreach committee concept called FOSCo. For various reasons this
didn't happen. We recognize that FOSCo is only one way to achieve the
larger goal of growing our mindshare. This year we have asked Robert
Mayr to focus on this challenge and created the Mindshare
Representative^6 on the Council by changing the title of the seat set
aside for FOSCo. Robert will be leading an open and transparent effort
to help our project align around mindshare goals. To help him succeed we
have allocated a budget of $9,000 so that he can drive forward with
implementation. Additional funds can be allocated as there are needs and
good ideas.
* Ambassadors are a key component of our project and our "feet on the
ground." We realize that the Mindshare position above will involve a
lot of work with the existing Ambassadors group. However, we can't make
our Ambassadors wait for this to be solved. Therefore we allocated a
full Quarter 1 budget for the ambassador regions. We based this
allocation on one-fourth of the total annual spending from last year.
The goal is to allow our Ambassador groups to be funded through the end
of the conversation about our new mission. The new allocations replace
the stop gap budget^7 that was provided earlier. These are hard
allocations that should not be exceeded. The Fiscal Year 2018 Quarter 1
budgets for the regions are: APAC $1,600; LATAM $1,300; EMEA $4,100; NA
$4,250.
These are not budget cuts; they are a way of preserving flexibility. We
want to preserve funding for any changes the ambassadors will want to
make as they align around the new mission. We hope the ambassadors will
give very careful thought before committing to any events after June 1
to ensure they will help us with our mission.
This post is being sent to both the Fedora Community Blog and the
council-discuss mailing list. Please follow up with your comments in the
mailing list thread here, as we don’t want to split the discussion.
0:
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/council-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/thread/UJ5LNBZBGR5UGQF5WZGRWYPVNAZAQKBW/
1: https://pagure.io/FedoraLogicModelTemplate
2: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Foundations
3: http://www.outreachy.org/
4: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Diversity
5: https://getfedora.org/code-of-conduct
6: https://pagure.io/Fedora-Council/tickets/issue/102
7:
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/council-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/thread/YFL4W4HMTK5LFLONEAI4QB53DUTLNKA7/
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