5tFTWFedora is a big project, and it’s hard to follow it all. This series highlights interesting happenings in five different areas every week. It isn’t comprehensive news coverage — just quick summaries with links to each. Here are the five things for July 22nd, 2014:

FESCo Election

The special election for FESCo (the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee) has concluded. New FESCo members are Josh Boyer, Kalev Lember, and Tomas Hozza. Since these seats are filling various vacancies, they aren’t for the normal two-release term. Since Josh lead the results, he will fill the spot which goes through next spring’s Fedora 22 release, and the others through this fall’s F21. Congratulations and welcome to Josh, Kalev, and Tomas; and thanks to outgoing members Bill Nottingham, Toshio Kurotami, and Peter Jones for all of your hard work on FESCo.

Fedora 21 Schedule Adjustment

This is nominally a Tuesday update, but since I’m late anyway, I’m going to slip in some important Wednesday news. In today’s FESCo meeting, we decided to push back the Fedora 21 by three weeks. The revised schedule is now online, with the alpha release on August 26th, beta on September 30th, and the “gold” release on November 4th.

Why so long? Is everything horribly broken? No — it’s just that we’re running into Flock, our big annual development and planning conference. Some issues putting together the test candidates mean that we do need to slip by at least a week, and given that, we didn’t want to be putting together the alpha release right on top of the conference. This way, our packaging, quality assurance, and release engineering people can participate fully in Flock rather than spending most of the time worrying about their release responsibilities.

Flock Behind the Scenes

And speaking of Flock, Fedora contributor Jiří Eischmann has put together a nice series of blog posts about what’s going on behind the scenes to put Flock together. Great reading for all of you who are planning on attending, and I think actually pretty interesting for everyone.

AppStream: An Easy Open Source Contribution

On her blog, Máirín Duffy writes about a low-barrier opportunity to contribute to free and open source software by participating in a volunteer drive for AppStream metadata. AppStream is simply a format for providing screenshots, icons, and user-friendly descriptions of software, and it’s used by software installation apps in Fedora such as GNOME Software and Apper.

Contributing AppStream data doesn’t take any special technical knowledge — just a willingness to write about your favorite open source software, or to research and learn about new software.

Right now, only about a quarter of applications in Fedora ship this metadata, and we’d like to get that to almost 100% by the Fedora 21 release.

Participants will be awarded a special Fedora badge and will also be featured in a future article on Fedora Magazine!

Introduce yourself in the Join Fedora SIG

I’ve written about the Join Fedora SIG again, but this is a good time to mention it again. This special interest group works to make Fedora friendly to new contributors, and to help those contributors — possibly including you! — get up to speed. SIG member Ankur Sinha (a.k.a. FranciscoD) recently launched a thread for self-introductions — if you’ve been interested in helping but aren’t sure how, here’s a great place to say hello. And if you already are a Fedora contributor, there are a lot of new folks who could use some  assistance.

So, sign up for the mailing list, or drop by #fedora-join on Freenode IRC for a friendly chat (with no complicated signup or obligation!)


 

Thanks to Máirín Duffy for contributing to the AppStream portion of this 5tFTW update!