Fedora Community Operations (CommOps)

Community Operations (CommOps) provides tools, resources, and utilities for different sub-projects of Fedora to improve effective communication. The following areas are examples of where CommOps focuses:

Work closely with Fedora Community Action and Impact Coordinator to prioritize key focus areas
Assist Fedora Program Manager with release preparations
Support preparation and execution of Fedora Elections
Work with sub-projects and teams to improve on-boarding methods and practices
Use metrics and data to improve understanding of Fedora community
- Support development of metrics tooling
And more (detailed below)

Where to find CommOps

The CommOps team uses a Discourse forum and IRC channel to communicate.

The Discourse forum is best for asynchronous communication. This means it is best for questions or topics that someone may respond to later. It is better for longer, threaded discussions.

The CommOps IRC channel on the Freenode IRC network is best for synchronous communication. This means it is best for quick feedback, like in a conversation. It is helpful for real-time discussions or getting someone’s attention. Additionally, the CommOps IRC channel is bridged to a Telegram group, if Telegram is more convenient.

Discourse forum: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/c/project/commops
IRC channel: #fedora-commops on Freenode
Telegram group: @fedoracommops on Telegram

First time using IRC? Look into Riot, a free and open source client that connects to various IRC networks. Riot also keeps you connected to IRC even when you’re not connected to the Internet.

Workflow

CommOps uses a ticket-based workflow to keep track of our work. The repository with tickets is found on pagure.io/fedora-commops. Tickets are found under the Issues menu.

Various tags are listed at the top of the Issues page. For good beginner tasks, look at the good first issue tag.

Meetings

CommOps holds a meeting once a week on IRC to check in on tasks and plan ahead. Check the CommOps calendar for the current date and time.

Past meeting minutes are recorded in Meetbot.

Meeting format

The upcoming meeting agenda is found on the Fedora Infinote server. Meetings follow an agenda split into five parts:

Roll call: Waiting for others to arrive, opportunity to introduce yourself and ask general questions
Announcements: Any news or updates to share
Action items from last meeting: Follow-up on #action items from previous meeting
Tickets: Discussion and follow-up on tickets marked for meetings
Open floor: General discussion or comments

What CommOps does

CommOps focuses on a few key areas, both technical and non-technical.

Culture

The Fedora Project builds and ships a Linux distribution, but there is a community behind the technical work and planning. In Fedora, we have the Four Foundations to represent our community culture. The Fedora community represents a set of ethics and values to how we build our distribution. These ethics and values create the culture of the Fedora Project. When working in the community, mindfulness of this culture enriches and supports the different sub-communities inside of Fedora.

CommOps builds community infrastructure of support and acceptance for the Fedora community’s culture. The Friends foundation is there for a reason. The community infrastructure CommOps assists with builds on top of the Friends foundation. People enjoy contributing in a community where they feel valued for who they are and what they bring to the community, not just that they are useful. CommOps supports this through some of our tasks relating to culture.

Examples of things we help with to build and support the culture of the Fedora community:

Elections

There are a few elected bodies in Fedora: the Fedora Council, Mindshare Committee, and FESCo. Every new Fedora release, the community holds elections for these bodies. Each election takes "wrangling" work to pull it together. This includes calling for nominations, conducting interviews with candidates, and raising awareness during the voting window.

CommOps supports the Fedora Program Manager in organizing and executing elections. These responsibilities consist of curating content on the Community Blog, creating interview templates, and outreach to grow awareness.

Examples of things we do to help organize and execute Fedora elections:

Storytelling

Messaging and storytelling bring the Fedora Project "story" to both contributors and user communities. Every year, a couple thousand people work on Fedora. Messaging is a way of sharing our story in multiple formats. We bring the message of what we as a community are doing out to others. Others include our contributors working in other areas of the project and users interested in what the Fedora community produces. When we share our story with each other, we are aware of other work happening in the Fedora community. Communicating the story of Fedora keeps our contributors moving together towards our goals. Good messaging helps our users better understand the goals and objectives of Fedora and how we plan to get there.

CommOps supports messaging by working with other sub-projects and teams to tell their own stories. CommOps provides help to "dig out" the stories and tools to share them widely. This includes tasks like interviews, sharing activities by Fedora contributors, running retrospectives, and more. These tasks keep contributors in sync with what we’re working on. They are direct actions to keep everyone on the same page.

Examples of things we do to support messaging and tell stories:

Metrics

CommOps measures community health and engagement through extensive metrics and data available about Fedora. fedmsg is a messaging bus with data about activity in the Fedora community. The data includes activity like git commits, new blog posts, wiki page edits, software build status, IRC meeting notes, and more. CommOps works with fedmsg to tell stories about our community, but specific types of stories. The stories told with metrics are helpful to understand what we may be doing right or wrong. It gives us a data-driven way to understand our huge community.

CommOps directly supports metrics in Fedora through development time and data-driven storytelling. Some members develop existing software or build new scripts to analyze data. Others use the data to write reports or studies on how the Fedora community works. Ultimately, metrics are a largely technical area that CommOps helps with.

Examples of metrics work and data-driven storytelling we do:

Supporting sub-projects

CommOps assists other sub-projects and teams in following best practices and communicating effectively. We work with other teams to help them on-board new contributors into their teams. This includes creating Fedora Badge requests, reviewing guidelines, and making Fedora services and tools more understandable.

Examples of sub-project support and on-boarding work:

Join CommOps

Read our guide on how to join the CommOps team.

CommOps always welcomes new contributors. Whether you are a newcomer or an old-timer, there are ways to get involved. Join CommOps to:

Build your portfolio in open source community management
Directly see the impact of your contributions over time
Gain a holistic view of the Fedora Project and learn how the pieces fit together
Work directly with Fedora Project leadership
Work with teammates from around the world
Aspire to the greatness of a community superheroine or superhero

Figure 1. Join the CommOps team today

Toolbox

The CommOps toolbox explains tools and services often used by the team. The tools are organized by purpose and use.

Communication tools

These are communication tools to share content and information with others in the Fedora community.

Community Blog (CommBlog) - communityblog.fedoraproject.org: Centralized blog for contributors to publish news, activities, or calls for help to the rest of the project. Useful place for getting an inside scoop on "what’s happening" in Fedora.
ircbot.py: Python script for fedmsg notifications in #fedora-commops. Relays real-time updates and changes relating to CommOps in our IRC channel.

Metrics tools

These tools access and use the Fedora messaging bus, fedmsg. With these tools, you can generate metrics, analyze data, and interact with fedmsg.

annualgrepper: Gather raw fedmsg totals on topics in the last year
cardsite: Live fedmsg tracker inspired by emojitracker
daily-briefing.py: Template that takes lists of URLs, generates summary reports of daily Meetbot links and action items (manual now, can be automated!)
datagrepper: The powerhouse tool to interact with fedmsg. Using HTTP GET requests, query for historical data from fedmsg. Examples include events by username, by package, by message source, and more.
fedmsg: Python package and API that hooks into various Fedora Infrastructure services. Sends messages from each service to a unified message bus in real-time. fedmsg drives and powers all the metrics tools we have.
fedora-stats-tools: Multiple statistics tools, data, and slide decks for fedmsg metrics, Year in Reviews, and Fedora event metrics
feedcloud: Takes an RSS feed or list of RSS feeds and generates fancy word-clouds for them
gsoc-stats: Python tool to generate statistics about Fedora contributors
longtail-analyze.py, longtail-gather.py: Measure the ratio of activity per user to approximate burnout
meetbot-fedmsg-activity.py: Jinja2 template that creates links to Meetbot activities
wordcloudbot: Create pretty wordclouds from IRC meeting logs

Other

Other tools that don’t belong elsewhere fit under here.

OSAS/rh-events: Data for Red Hat conference and talk attendance. Useful for plotting events in our own calendar and keeping track of what’s happening in the open source community.