Fedora Community Action and Impact Coordinator

The Fedora Community Action and Impact Coordinator (or FCAIC) is a full-time, Red Hat-employed job to lead initiatives to grow the Fedora user and developer communities, and to make Red Hat / Fedora interactions even more transparent and positive. The Fedora community budget comes to us through the Red Hat Open Source and Standards (OSAS) team. This position facilitates decision-making on how to best focus that to meet our community’s goals and objectives. The FCAIC supports the Project Leader with all things "Community" and works directly with the Fedora Leadership to help bring more Heat and Light to the project.

The FCAIC is appointed to the Community Action and Impact seat on the Fedora Council, Fedora’s top-level community leadership and governance body. The Council is responsible for stewardship of the Fedora Project as a whole, and supports the health and growth of the Fedora Community.

Current F-🎂[1]

bex ocean thumb

Brian (bex) Exelbierd joined Red Hat in 2013 and became the Fedora Community Action and Impact Coordinator in October 2016. At Red Hat, Brian has worked as a technical writer, software engineer, content strategist and is now an Open Source community manager in the Open Source and Standards team at Red Hat. Before Red Hat, Brian worked with the University of Delaware as the Director of Graduate and Executive Programs in the Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics and as a Budget Analyst. Brian’s background in software engineering stretches back years before his university work and includes stints at small, medium, large and governmental organizations. “Glue Code” is how many of Brian’s projects could be described. These are projects that fill in the interstitial spaces between large systems and provide continuity and ease of use. Follow him on Twitter @bexelbie or on his blog.

Roles and Responsibilities

Council

  • Work with other Council members to identify the short, medium, and long term goals of the Fedora community and to organize and enable the project to best achieve them

  • Primary Council member with responsibility for the development of the annual Fedora community budget

  • Participate in decision-making about use of trademarks, project structure, community disputes or complaints, and other such issues

Special Initiatives

  • Design and spearhead special initiatives to grow user and contributor bases

Metrics

  • Implement metrics for community engagement, participation, and satisfaction; create and execute projects to improve those metrics; report regularly on progress and adjust approach as needed

Opportunities

  • Identify opportunities to engage new contributors and community members; align project around supporting those opportunities

Liaise between Red Hat and FOSS Community

  • Communicate community needs to Red Hat and participate in regular meetings with internal Red Hat stakeholders; align Red Hat participation in Fedora beyond platform engineering

  • Represent Red Hat’s stake in Fedora community success

  • Improve on-boarding materials and presentation of Fedora to new Red Hat hires; develop standardized materials on Fedora which can be used at Red Hat globally.

Budget

The FCAIC will work with Fedora Council and OSAS to determine annual Fedora Budget

  • Ensure that budget is published and tracked transparently, with a public page indicating how each year’s budget is earmarked and its current state.

  • The budget is published at https://budget.fedoraproject.org

Fedora Event Planning and Participation

Participate in planning and organizing Fedora’s Flagship events each year, including:

  • Flock

  • FUDCons

  • Fedora Activity Days (FADs)

The FCAIC also represents Fedora at other major industry conferences and hackathons such as:

  • AllThingsOpen

  • DevConf

  • FOSDEM

  • PyCon (and Sprints)

  • LibrePlanet

  • Red Hat Summit

  • Software Freedom Legal Conference

Communications

The FCAIC provides and facilitates regular communications to Fedora Magazine, the Fedora Community Blog, and other mass communication channels to talk about community goals/progress and general community boosting.

Previous Fedora Community Action and Impact Coordinators

Remy DeCausemaker

February 2015 – June 2016

1. What’s with the cake? The abbreviation FCAIC sounds like "F-Cake" in American English. If this position is going to have a title that is a mouthful, at least the mouthful can be yummy cake!