"What is the Fedora Project?"

[Paul W. Frields]

On Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 02:48:48PM -0700, John Poelstra wrote:
> Gregory Zysk said the following on 10/12/2009 06:55 AM Pacific Time:
> > Dear F-a-b,
> >
> > Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Gregory Zysk and I am a new
> > member to the Fedora community who is interested in the strategic
> > management/leadership of Fedora. Please take the time to view my
> wiki here:
> >
> > https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Gmzysk
> 
> Welcome to Fedora!
> 
> > As I am quite new, I am not sure about the prior work that has been done
> > to define the question of "What is the Fedora Project?" but from my
> > personal experiences so far every user and contributor view this
> > question in their own way (i.e People person vs. packager/developer, etc)
> >
> > I believe in order to truly form a strategy for growth and target a
> > specific user segment, we need apply some research internally and
> > externally. If not applied already, as a form of Organizational
> > Development, one can start with measuring the needs and values of a
> > contributor through sampling. We can reciprocate this process for all
> > positions within Fedora and then move to the outside of the organization
> > to sample a group of "external" users. For instance, those who use other
> > open source distros, proprietary OS's and the like (This can be
> > accomplished through surveys or focus groups on-line or off-line at for
> > example Fedora events). Once we gain this data, we can begin to measure
> > these needs and values to that of Fedora's needs and values (at a
> > management/leadership level) to see if they are in alignment. One can
> > also view this as aligned resources for strategic fit.
> 
> Long term I think these could be useful things to do, many of which
> could be done in parallel with our ongoing releases.  Short term we
> find ourselves a month away from releasing the 12th release of
> Fedora with work on the 13th release already starting.  There isn't
> really time to freeze everything to research these things nor a lot
> of people with background or experience doing what you have
> suggested.  Some work has been done by the marketing team so that
> could be a good place to work on these things.

Gregory was at the Marketing meeting today and we gave him some
reading suggestions of interest, including "Producing OSS" and "The
Starfish and the Spider".  There is a lot of information in these two
books that will form a foundation for understanding organziations that
are not typically or strictly hierarchical.

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
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