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Fedora corner

by Max Spevack

Greetings faithful Fedora readers. And welcome to the first installment of Red Hat Magazine's new regular column about Fedora. In the past, we've had the Fedora Status Report, which was basically a copy and paste of the most useful news items from FedoraNews.org, which is Fedora's official news site run by Thomas Chung, and a site that I encourage you all to read. It's on my RSS feed list.

I'll still be using Fedora News as the basis of this column, but what I'm probably going to do is pick a smaller number of topics and write a little bit more about them.

So let's take a peek at what's been happening in Fedora during the past month or so:

Fedora Summit

We held the Fedora Summit in Westford from November 12th - 15th. In a very productive couple of days, most of the primary contributors to Fedora were present either in person or via conference call, as we planned out the technical goals for the next release of Fedora.

To discuss in detail all of our plans would take another article--and perhaps I'll write that one for Red Hat Magazine sometime soon--but for now I'd encourage folks who are interested in more details to check out the Fedora Project wiki or the Fedora Advisory Board mailing list where we have many of our top-level discussions like this one.

Fedora Ambassador Day

During the weekend of December 1st - 3rd, a group of Fedora Ambassadors got together at the Germany/Switzerland border to put together their recommendations for how Fedora can best make its presence felt in Europe during the first part of 2007.

The detailed recommendations of this event are still being finalized, but as the Fedora Project Leader I wanted to point this event out because it's a great example of what we're always trying to do with the Fedora Project -- put folks in the open source community in a position where they can seize the initiative to make things happen, and then listen to their recommendations and support them in implementation.

For additional information, I point people here.

Metrics

Mainly thanks to the work of Mike McGrath, we have a pretty good handle on Fedora Core 6 statistics, certainly far better than we managed for Fedora Core 5. So far, the activity that we're seeing is good stuff. We're open to exploring other ideas for metrics, or better tracking methods (currently we're using Cactus). So if anyone out there takes a look at our page and thinks "hey, I know how they can do a better job with this", well shoot me off an email because we'd love to hear from you. Or better yet, join us at the Fedora Infrastructure Project.

About the author

Max Spevack is the Fedora Project Leader. He has been with Red Hat since 2004, and currently his favorite television show is The Colbert Report.