2012 is off to a great start for the Fedora Project. Fedora 16 is enjoying great success with its new innovative cloud and virtualization capabilities. And, another winning FUDCon event was held in Virginia earlier this month, attracting more than 175 attendees.

As we enter another exciting development cycle with Fedora 17, codenamed “Beefy Miracle”, we also have the opportunity to renew the leadership of the Fedora Project as part of our commitment to progression. Our current Fedora Project Leader, Jared Smith, hands his role off this month to a new advocate. We welcome Robyn Bergeron as the new Fedora Project Leader.

Robyn began contributing to the Fedora Project in 2009 and was hired by Red Hat in November 2010 as Fedora release program manager. Among her many other contributions, including managing Fedora 15 and 16 release programs, she served as lead for the community Fedora Marketing team, organizing release marketing for several consecutive releases of Fedora. Also recognized as a Fedora Ambassador, Robyn frequently travels to regional events to speak about Fedora, open marketing, and other subjects stemming directly from her community work.

In addition, she leads the Fedora Cloud Special Interest Group (SIG), which includes contributors from a number of community cloud projects. Examples of the Cloud SIG work includes release-day availability of Fedora releases through Amazon EC2 for worldwide use, as well as building an impressive set of cloud infrastructure tools for use on Fedora.

We thank Jared Smith for his leadership and congratulate Robyn on her new role.