Changing of the seasons

Autumn Colors
Image by Lee Cannon / Licensed under the Creative Commons BY-SA

One of the things I absolutely love about my neighborhood is being able to watch the seasons change.  Here in the Northern Hemisphere, autumn is in full swing.  The days are getting shorter, and the nights are getting colder.  A couple of weeks ago I took my family for a drive to see the leaves changing colors — it’s something we look forward to every fall. For my friends in the Southern Hemisphere, winter is giving way to spring.  Either way, the changes in the seasons remind me that nothing in nature is static, and that changes and cycles are a part of life.

Just as with nature, we have cyclical changes within the Fedora Project as well.  I think it’s both useful and healthy to point out a few of those changes, for a couple of reasons.  First of all, I want to point out that every person in the Fedora community is a potential leader.  Our policies of rotating leadership help ensure that everyone who is so inclined has a chance to lead and serve.  Second, I’d like to personally thank those people who have diligently served the Fedora community, and wish them success as they move on to other endeavors.

As was previously noted, Jesse Keating has been hard at work in Fedora’s release engineering team for the past several years.  He’s done such a spectacular job that his skills are in high demand, and he’ll be stepping back from Fedora for the next year or so to focus on some release engineering tasks inside of Red Hat.  In the meantime, the release engineering baton has been passed on to Dennis Gilmore, who is proven himself in the Fedora community as well.  I look forward to working more closely with Dennis as we get into the Fedora 15 cycle and beyond.

The next change involves the Fedora Program Manager.  This is another Red Hat paid position that helps coordinate the Fedora schedule, acts as the Feature Wrangler, and helps out with coordination of other meetings, such as the blocker bug meetings around the time of releases.  John Poelstra has served very well in that position for the past few years, and I’m happy to announce that community superstar Robyn Bergeron has accepted a job at Red Hat to take on that role.  John Poelstra is leaving some awfully big shoes to fill, but I’m sure Robyn will also do an excellent job in that capacity.

Last but not least, I’ll point out that we’re still actively looking for a highly skilled systems administrator to serve on the Fedora Infrastructure team.  This is an interesting and critical job as well, as it requires not only the technical skills of actively managing the Fedora services and infrastructure, but also requires effective soft skills to deal with the community at large.  If you’re interested in applying for this position, please don’t hesitate to contact either myself or Tom “spot” Callaway, or follow this link.