Fedora mission statement

[Paul W. Frields]

Contributors and other community members have been asking for more
clarification of Fedora's objectives and mission.  The Fedora Board,
as a community governance body, agreed to take on this topic, as shown
in several of our previous meetings' minutes.  We've decided to tackle
this problem in several phases.

The first phase involves making a general mission statement that
clearly declares the Fedora Project's reason for existence -- what we
are trying to achieve.  This is not the statement that can or should
answer every single question about how the Project works, or how we
prioritize different types of initiatives.  Those statements will
follow, but they should all support this overall mission:

"To lead the advancement of free and open source software and content
as a collaborative community."

The three elements of this mission are clear:

* The Fedora Project always tries to lead, not follow.

* The Fedora Project consistently seeks to create, improve, and spread
  free/libre code and content.

* The Fedora Project succeeds through shared action on the part of
  many people throughout our community.

In preparation for the next phase, we've built out a Foundations page
on the wiki to help describe the Fedora core values -- Freedom,
Friends, Features, and First.  These Foundations help ensure that as
we pursue specific objectives, we do so in a way that's in line with
our community's beliefs and shared values.  For instance, if one were
to formulate the objective of "wait for Distro X to solve problem Y,"
one would quickly find this objective to be out of sync with at least
our Features and First values.

Next the Board will be embarking on defining a set of broad
objectives, envisioning how we can achieve the mission.  This is at
least in part a responsibility of the project leader, so I'll take a
strong interest in helping the Board build out those objectives in a
way that helps our whole community understand their underlying
rationale.

A number of these objectives may already be documented, and I don't
expect there will be any major surprises in this content.  My hope is
that we'll be providing information that helps people understand the
basis for our processes, but still encourages contributors to try new
avenues as well.  We don't want to shut ourselves off from new and
different ideas, as long as they support the mission and values our
community shares.

Thanks for reading, and viva Fedora!

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
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  http://redhat.com/   -  -  -  -   http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/
  irc.freenode.net: stickster @ #fedora-docs, #fedora-devel, #fredlug
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