Fedora Appreciation Day is an idea stemmed from Ubuntu's Ubuntu Community Appreciation Day as mentioned by cprofitt in #fedora-commops. A Fedora Appreciation Day event would be beneficial to plan and organize for our own community to help boost morale and further foster a positive environment for Fedora.
What is it?
Inspired by the Ubuntu Community Appreciation Day, it is of interest to the Fedora Project community to organize a similar day or week of appreciation for the contributors who help volunteer their time to help make Fedora what it is. This can be from a development, infrastructure, marketing, engineering, or any other relevant standpoint.
During this time of appreciation, users and contributors alike would be highly encouraged to select either a single or group of contributors to thank for their efforts in the Project. This appreciation could be given in as simple of a way as a karma cookie in IRC, a short note of thanks delivered on a wiki page, or even a longer form appreciation such as a letter or personal email.
Why do it?
The purpose of planning such an event is driven by the form of communication in an open source project such as Fedora. For many of us, our daily interactions, discussions, and meeting are in a non-lively format such as text via IRC or in other forms of text, such as email and wiki articles. This is effective for accomplishing our goals and getting work done, but in a sense, we lose a human sense of interpersonal interactions and physical cues. Sometimes it can almost seem robotic, with the exception of video conference calls with some members of the community.
So why wait for next year's Flock or FUDcon(s) to roll around in order to regain some of that humanity? There are ways that we as a project can still reach out to each other and make an impact without just giving high-fives at conferences. In a sense, the "system" is already in place with the implementation of the Fedora "cookie" badges from IRC. With a little bit of joint organization and awareness, we could create our own community appreciation day or week to help boost our bonds not just as a FOSS project, but as a community and even in some sense a family.
Or, in other words... community++!
When is it?
A Fedora Appreciation Day (or week) could take place on or around November 6, the anniversary of the Fedora Project.
Organizing
To organize a Fedora Appreciation Day, outreach and awareness are important ahead of time so the community is aware of the event. Especially for something that has not yet happened before, spending extra time on awareness will be important so contributors remember and are aware of the day. Consider the following steps if you are organizing an event.
- Create clear guidelines and ways for participants to express gratitude. Make sure this is somewhere public and open.
- Communicate ahead of time of the event, as far as one month ahead of time.
- Create a "community thank you pad", either as a wiki page or otherwise, that can serve as a public wall of thanks.
- Focus on awareness the week leading up to the event so users and contributors both are aware of the planned event.
- Monitor what's going on for the day of the event and try to make observations about the result and impact of the event (e.g. number of wiki edits on gratitude page, number of karma cookies given on day, etc.).
Participating
If helping organize isn't quite your thing, there should be plenty of ways that you can contribute to this, either as a user or a fellow contributor.
Picking a contributor
If you can single out a specific contributor who has impacted you at any time, either within Fedora, open source, or beyond, take some time to find the person either on IRC or another platform. If they're unavailable in a chat format, find their email. Let them know what you're thankful for and maybe share a common memory or experience you remember. Taking the time to single out someone to give thanks is one of the best ways to make a personal impact.
Noting contributions
If there's a project, application, software, or something in Fedora that you find incredibly useful, find out what person or group of people are responsible for it and take the time to thank them. For an application in Fedora's long list of apps and utilities, you can usually join #fedora-apps on freenode IRC to find the developers. For the silent warriors monitoring Fedora's infrastructure, you can find them in #fedora-admin. For the designers who create the images and art assets you see around the operating system and the project, you can find the designers in #fedora-design. For translations, you can find the Globalization team in #fedora-g11n. The list goes on...
See what resources, tools, or things you're thankful for and find out who is responsible for them to pass along your thanks.
Writing your appreciation
If you'd like to make a general note of appreciation for the Fedoran community at large or make a public shout-out, you can post it on a public wiki page of thanks and gratitude. It is up to the event organizers to determine where this place will be. If you have nobody specific you can think of to thank or not sure who to thank for what, this is the place to do it.
Other notes
Based on the objectives and tasks of the Fedora Community Operations (CommOps) team, this sort of task would likely best be organized by them.