Fedora Program Manager

The Fedora Program Manager (or FPgM) is the Chief Operating Officer of the Fedora Project. They are employed full-time by Red Hat to manage the planning and release processes for Fedora Linux. This includes schedule management, change wrangling, and providing status reports to the community and to Red Hat.

Current Program Manager

bcotton rh neo

Ben Cotton (pronouns: he/him) became the Fedora Program Manager in June 2018. He joined Red Hat after a decade in high performance computing (HPC) administration and marketing. Ben first started contributing to Fedora in 2009 as a member—and later leader—of the Fedora Docs team. He is an Open Organization Ambassador, and was formerly a Correspondent for Opensource.com. He is the author of Program Management for Open Source Projects.

Contact Ben by email (bcotton@fedoraproject.org).

Roles and Responsibilities

Within the Fedora Project, the Program Manager is primarily responsible for release coordination activities.

Changes Process

  • Shepharding Change proposals through the Changes process

  • Tracking the status of Changes during the development/testing cycle

Release Coordination

  • Scheduling Fedora Linux releases

  • Coordinating release readiness (within QA, Release Engineering, FESCo, etc.)

  • Manage the Spins keepalive process

  • Perform mass updates of bugs at branch and end-of-life time

Elections

  • Managing elections for Council, FESCo, and Mindshare

  • Ad-hoc election support for other teams when needed

Council

  • Serve as a member of the Fedora Council

  • Act as Council secretary

Miscellaneous

  • Advise on the processes in the Fedora Project

  • Provide regular status reports to the community

  • Coordinate the Prioritized Bugs process

  • Manage the processes for removing inactive packagers and inactive provenpackagers

History

Previous Fedora Program Managers:

Useful links

Want to help? Learn how to contribute to Fedora Docs ›