i, quaid

As an open community innovation engine, the Fedora Project continues to grow and change in how it creates/consumes itself for its community audiences. These are the “How is it made?” and “How do we use it?” questions. Over the last 6 months I’ve read and watched discussions and proposals around these topics, such as Tom Callaway’s “Overhauling the Fedora release model” and Matt Miller’s “An Architecture for a More Agile Fedora” (video). Most recently has been the proposal the Fedora Board just approved to have working groups that focus on a different editions of Fedora: Fedora Server, Fedora Workstation, and Fedora Cloud. Very interesting and exciting.

In all that, I began to wonder about the process the community used when going through a previous exercise, the rounds of self-identity that produced, for example, the four foundations “Freedom, Friends, Features, First” messaging, as well as the front-page descriptive -content such as, “Free your desktop with Fedora. Fedora is a fast, stable, and powerful operating system for everyday use built by a worldwide community of friends. It’s completely free to use, study, and share.”

This sort of mission-statement, self-identification vision exercise is not easy stuff. There are many personalities in a community as large as this one is now, and I’m sure it wasn’t any easier or less cantankerous back when that work was done.

Myself, I barely remember the process that was followed – I was a bit busy elsewhere at the time and just trusted the community to do the right thing. Anyone know of a history page or somewhere/way to figure this out? Or knows from first-hand the process and wants to meet me on #fedora-meeting-* to get a log of it all? I’ll turn it in to an article/page for The Open Source Way, at least. Thanks!