Fedora Regional Hubs: Enhancing Community Collaboration
Executive Summary
The Fedora Project needed to support globally distributed volunteer contributors who struggled to make connections with each other and collaborate effectively.
I identified that helping contributors find local resources (other contributors, events, groups) would have the highest impact on community building and contributor retention.
Through my research, the team was able to determine that creating filterable, sortable master lists for regional hubs, events, and people would be the most effective solution, making Fedora Hubs the default platform for finding regional information.
The Challenge
The Fedora Project is the free community upstream for RedHat Linux, powered primarily by globally scatters volunteers. These contributors:
Struggled to make and maintain connections with fellow volunteers
Had difficulty finding entry points into the community
Had trouble discovering regional events and resources
The existing tools failed to adequately support these interpersonal connections, especially around planning and creating events to introduce new people to Fedora.
Methodology
Competitive Analysis
Why this method: I needed to understand best practices before designing solutions and establish boundaries for our approach.
I analyzed how other platforms handled online community interactions to identify:
Privacy balance considerations for new member onboarding
Which user actions should be easy or have friction
Potential search capabilities
Event management approaches
Affinity Mapping & Prioritization
Why this method: To organize insights into actionable categories and ensure development resources focused on highest-impact problems.
Working with my mentor, I:
Organized identified problems through affinity mapping
Created a prioritization matrix based on user impact and our ability to address the issue
Identified six major problem categories
For more details, see my Medium article about affinity mapping and brainstorming.
Prioritization of problem categories; impact and number
Snippet of competitive analysis spreadsheet
Contextual Interviews
Why this method: To gain rich qualitative insights into actual user experiences and uncover patterns of problems.
I conducted remote interviews with 7 Fedora members heavily involved in community aspects to understand:
Current event planning and attendance processes
Pain points in finding and connecting with other contributors
New member integration challenges
Regional and cultural considerations
Affinity mapping identified problems in Miro
The Solution
Based on our prioritization, we determined that helping Fedorans find local resources would deliver the highest value. We established an overarching goal of making Fedora Hubs the default platform for finding local Fedora information through:
Filterable, sortable master lists for:
Regional hubs
Events
Fedora contributors
Interface requirements that balanced:
Privacy concerns
Ease of discovery
Search functionality
User control over information sharing
Sample mockup related to location detection, a complex topic
Learnings
Prioritization is crucial: When addressing community needs, focusing on high-impact, high-reach problems yields better results than trying to solve everything at once
Balance technical and social needs: In developer communities, both technical functionality and social connection are essential for community health
Visualization of problems: Using affinity mapping made complex, interconnected issues more tangible and easier to prioritize
Brainstorming session exploring the problem space
Outcomes & Impact
The research process provided clear direction for feature development, allowing the team to:
Focus development resources on features with the highest community impact
Develop a roadmap for future enhancements
I also did interaction design and usability testing to build on this research:
Created low-fidelity mockups for the prioritized features
Presented mockups to developers to assess technical feasibility
Conducted usability testing on the proposed interfaces
This work directly contributed to improving how Fedora contributors discover and connect with each other, enhancing community cohesion and supporting the retention of new contributors.
Affinity map from above