Future Release Naming

People interested

• Pam Chestek
• Toshio Kuratomi
• Jaroslav Reznik
• Stephen Smoogen
• Máirín Duffy
• Emily Dirsh (emichan)
• Ruth Suehle

• (?) John Rose, Maria Leandro (These people have participated heavily in the discussions but haven't explicitly said they want to meet)

What do we get from the current process

• A theme for the release wallpaper, website, other artwork
• A "less cold" way to refer to the release
• A process that involves new contributors to Fedora
• The release name is treated somewhat as an internal code name but it has become more a public part of the Fedora release due to: 1) tying it to the theming process and 2) the press sometimes referring to it by the release name.
• Pre-vetting of names before being passed to Legal (saves us valuable lawyer time and money)
• Opportunities for unique marketing

What do people want from a revised process

• A theme for the distribution that spans releases
• A naming scheme that makes it more obvious when a release happened (not necessarily date-wise... maybe sequence is a better description)
• A process that gets new contributors excited that they have joined Fedora
• A "less cold" way to refer to the release
• Something that's still fun
• A process that is able to adapt to changes over time (EG if naming theme A gets played out there is a method to move to B).

Proposals

• Mizmo has a proposal (Suggestions_for_Fedora_Codename_Theme) to use a single theme for the rest of the Fedora releases.
  • Once an overall theme is chosen, individual names for each release are selected via the same process as today, we simply replace the "is-a" relationship with the theme.
  • For example, if the theme is "Coffee & Tea Drinks," then the community is invited to make proposals on different coffee or tea drink names they think would be a good fit for the next release, and we hold a vote to see which one is the favorite for the next release.

• Remove the is-a relationship. We just brainstorm every release for the best names we can and then vote on them.

• Decouple release naming from theming. Keep the release naming pretty much the same as it is now but move more towards being an internal code name. Theming can be wholly independent now.
  • Downside to this is that we go from bad inspiration to absolutely no inspiration for the artwork.