The Fedora community’s guiding north star for Strategy 2028 is “By the end of 2028, double the number of contributors active every week,” which boils down to thinking about how we attract and support people who are making an effort to improve or grow Fedora, both as a Linux distribution and as a project. Many of the teams involved in Fedora on a day-to-day basis are technologists who focus on writing code and delivering high-quality software to end users. At the same time, there is a community of contributors who focus more on enabling, promoting, and building a better space for all. In how Fedora represents these two bodies, the Mindshare committee and the FESCo (Fedora Engineering Steering Committee) both hold the task of providing guidance to the SIGs/Teams/WGs/loosely organized flocks of contributors who are working to make Fedora better.

When considering how to grow the community, a healthy lens through which to view Fedora is ensuring that both sides of the project are increasing in parallel. Many users are drawn to Fedora’s technology teams because it’s one of the easiest ways to get started. Find a bug, ask for user feedback, submit a pull request, and jump in to make your first contribution. Over time, a contributor may start to get involved with other contributors who are working on similar bugs and form friendships, discussing the technologies, which evolves to friendship/respect among developers. This path is easier to examine, and, considering it purely from a data perspective, we can validate that teams are growing effectively, adding new contributors, and measuring the return of those who contribute by analyzing Git Forge information.

On the other hand, however, Mindshare-focused teams are less code-centric and, as a result, don’t have as much data in the same way we think about software forges. Teams may have issue trackers and document repositories for the work they’re doing. Still, the work may also be behind the scenes in meetings, event preparation, and engagement with the broader community. For example, the moderation team in Fedora Discussion has a challenging task of standing on the front line for our users, supporting the Ask Fedora teams, and ensuring our community stays healthy and engaging. In this case, we could look to count data from the Discourse platform that Fedora Discussion runs on, but we also have to think differently about how we measure what success looks like for that team.

Knowing our guiding star is weekly growth, if we grow in a lopsided fashion, the community may or may not be the same one that many individuals have started in. For example, if we have a heavy growth of contributors working as Advocates or Marketing, but not enough new folks joining to modernize packaging, is the distribution getting better? At the same time, if we’re adding new packages and not providing a space for community members to grow beyond the technology, are we also dropping that side of our community?

In that mind, I genuinely believe that measuring community growth has to examine both the “all-in” Fedora contributors and at a team level. To support that, in some of the data experiments we’ve conducted, I’ve reviewed the number of FAS IDs we see by Topic as a way to simulate the number of people involved based on the type of Fedora activities. Over time, it would be beneficial to attribute FAS IDs to groups or membership and roll up by team to examine the number of active topics by team and where teams are allocating their time.