Interviews/FPL

Fedora Project Leader: Hello and Goodbye
For the last two years Max Spevack has led the Fedora Project through many changes. Now, he has decided it's time for him to move on to other areas and so a new leader has been found: Paul Frields. Paul, coming into the role from the position of a community contributor, is already well known and has some exciting new ideas resulting from his previous experiences. In this interview we catch up with both Max and Paul as they discuss their experiences of the Fedora Project Leader job, the project's past and its future.

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Interview
Max, what was it like coming into the Fedora Project Leader [FPL] job two years ago?

Max: My path to the FPL job was a bit of a twisting one, and I consider myself very fortunate to have been offered the opportunity to have such a major role within Fedora.

The tale starts when I showed up at Red Hat in August 2004 as a Quality Assurance Engineer for Red Hat Network. My boss was Greg De Konigsberg, right?'''

Max: In conjunction with bringing in Paul as the new FPL, Greg and I did a lot of work on crafting a vision for global expansion of Fedora's community.

Greg, Jack, and I have formed what we call the CommunityArchitecture team. Inside of Red Hat, we are part of the Corporate Marketing department, reporting to the VP of that group and ultimately to the CEO, and our goal is to define and execute Red Hat's global community development strategy.

The best way to achieve that is by spending most of our time in the Fedora community, continuing to be catalysts and helpers to all of the already-existing Fedora projects and Special Interest Groups.

We are going to take FUDCon global this year, with large FUDCons not just in the USA, but also in Europe and APAC. We are going to make a much stronger commitment to South America as well, both with personal travel to the region and with more budget to help with shows like FISL. Anyone who looks at the maps of mirrorlist access or changes to the wiki will also see that Fedora's community in Europe is bursting at the seams with contributors, users, and potential to do great things. We want to establish someone as a full-time leader of the Fedora community in Europe, and it seems pretty likely right now that I will have the opportunity to spend some time in Europe directly building our comunity over there.

'''And perhaps you two could tell us a bit about what it means to be FPL? I'm guessing due to Fedora's community nature it's not a simple job of benevolent dictator?'''

Paul: Absolutely right, Jon, that the FPL's job is not dictatorial; that's what makes Fedora a TRULY community oriented project. Fedora cannot exist without the energy of the community built around it, and my job -- and the job of all Fedora leaders -- is to empower that community, to enable them to innovate using the social and technological tools of open source. The best way for the FPL to help Fedora succeed is to identify strategic opportunities, and then get the obstacles out of the way of the community so they can take them.

The secret of this job is that there isn't one. I don't think the FPL should go off in a back room, single-handedly invent an amazing new vision for Fedora, and then go around convincing everyone to follow it. I think the FPL is supposed to listen to the contributors who are already leading Fedora in new directions, and figure out how to better build community around those efforts. And of course the FPL should always be doing this in the context of maintaining Fedora's commitment to free and open source software, for everyone, now and always.

Max: Be the community's biggest champion. Give all the credit away to the folks who deserve it, but accept the blame for the screw ups. It sounds trite, but if you make those things the foundation of everything else, you're likely to be successful.

And finally, Paul, what are your hopes and plans for Fedora over the next two years?

Paul: Right now I am setting my sights on improving contributor access. While many technical contributors don't have a problem making a transition from end-user to contributor, that's not necessarily true for everyone else. There's a tremendous amount of energy out there to be unleashed in terms of non-technical contributors, like translators, artists, ambassadors, writers, and so on. From my time working in the Documentation project and other parts of Fedora, I've seen first-hand how this gap affects our ability to keep the attention of community talent. We've always talked in Fedora about lowering barriers to entry, but we need to take that principle and put into action more directly.

While I still believe that Fedora has the most robust and vigorous community of people actively contributing to free and open source software, we can do a lot better at attracting new talent. I believe we could have a contributor base maybe an order of magnitude higher than we currently have. These new participants wouldn't only be producing code, but also working on our infrastructure, representing Fedora at events worldwide, producing artwork and documentation, and so on. Individual contributors aren't the only way we can gain energy, either. Michael Tiemann talked at FUDCon about the fact that there are companies all over the world who are chomping at the bit to get involved in open source beyond just buying commercial products.

Max: I completely agree. Finding new contributors and leaders is the most important thing that Fedora can do to grow. Converting our users into active participants is one fantastic way to find those new contributors and leaders, and therefore making the barrier to entry as a contributor as low as possible is key. If we achieve this, it creates a positive feedback loop in which more and more of Fedora's userbase takes an active hand in the creation of the "product".

Paul: I'd like Fedora to take advantage of these opportunities over the next year, and I've already seen that achieving that goal leads back to the same issues. Since I'm only a couple weeks into the job at this point, I'm not going to try to give you an all-encompassing vision yet, but lowering barriers to entry in a real, tangible way will be a major part of my focus for the foreseeable future.