Many years ago I was sitting in the office of Denise Dumas, then the VP of all things Linux at Red Hat (“RHEL Engineering” at the time), lamenting that so many people want to know what’s on Red Hat’s mind, why can’t we just tell people what we want? “Why can’t we?” she asked, and thus was that “What Red Hat Wants” talk born. The first time was Flock 2015, in Cape Cod. The talk was good (better than the venue!) and has been repeated every year since, yet it has never quite achieved its purpose in my opinion. In the clarity of hindsight, this is because the real underlying need was mutual understanding and interest. A single talk won’t do that. Indeed, even the best presentation is substantially unidirectional. Plus, when speaking for and to so many, the need for brevity battles the need for depth. If a single presentation won’t do the job, even multiple presentations won’t do the job, what would?
We need something more mutual, more engaging. And more open, perhaps with those internal RHEL folks you hear about, but rarely hear from. I can tell a community member why and how RHEL uses Gitlab + Jira, why CentOS Stream solves a real problem, and with equal enthusiasm, tell a RHEL insider why Fedora + Forgejo makes sense- and I'm just one person. The reality Red Hatters can share with authority and passion differs from person to person, what anybody is interested in differs from person to person, too. The magic is in sharing, finding common interests, and pursuing them together. In that spirit, here is an overview of what’s on my mind for “new” work in 2025, roughly aligned with my authority as the overall manager of CLE:
Improvements to help people do the kinds of things they’re doing now, but it’s crufty to do or hard to maintain. That’s things like adopting improved software infrastructure such as Forgejo, that’s hardware infrastructure improvements leading to faster builds & tests, and working as community members to take advantage of these improvements with better processes and workflows
Making new things possible, the likes of which we may not all yet even imagine. That’s finding and supporting a new FPL, expanding community opportunities to take part in more, and doing better at what people want but we haven’t figured out how to sustain.
These all require more sharing, more discussion, more opportunity to collaborate. I’ll be doing some of this personally, some of this with CLE, and sometimes encouraging more members of Red Hat to show up early and often. In this pursuit, I’d like to create some sort of 3-way interlock between leads in the RHEL, Fedora, and CentOS spaces. Meeting up at conferences is great, yet limiting. Having intentional, ongoing communication about works in progress, things not decided, that which may affect one another, or there would be a mutual interest is needed. When I think about it, it’s astonishing we don’t have something so fundamental.
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