What the Community Ops Team did (2015–2020)

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:

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:

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:

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:

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: