SWOT
For further reference check the following: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWOT_analysis
Community Parameters
This document should be faced as an "internal audit" to Fedora Project. Here we are going to perform a self assessment of Fedora Project Strength's. All the elements present should comply with the following:
- The elements presented have to be controlled by Fedora Project;
- The elements have to qualify in one of this categories:
- Men (manpower);
- Means;
- Methods;
- Measurables;
- Machines (from the scope of manufacture, developing, not the hardware requirements etc).
- The elements presented should focus on the following:
- Quality and Management
- Performance / Performance Improvements
- Technology
This guidelines are important because the information present will be processed accordingly following a model to perform our SWOT Analysis. This might become a very important management tool that Marketing has to offer and the benefits for Fedora Project are obvious as such analysis will allow us to have a very important insight about Fedora.
The "Strength's" that we are pointing are key points of Fedora Project that highlight us as a community and our product, the Fedora Linux distribution. This factors might be part of Fedora's positioning or just plain technology that we offer. Everything that is recognized as a Strength for Fedora should be posted here bellow by community members.
Tips
The following can and should be contemplated:
- artists - highlight the role and strong points of Fedora's artwork.
- developers - highlight the role of your work and technology on Fedora.
- documentation - highlight the advancements on this field.
- internationalization - highlight the advancements on this field (volume and value?).
- general - everything that you would advertise to your friends as a strong point on Fedora.
Generally most things will qualify to be on this table. Give some freedom to your imagination.
Strengths
The following table pretends to demonstrate the points of Fedora that we consider as a "Strength". This points can be technology developed in-house or by other organizations (ex: GNOME, KDE) that are present. They can also be social factors, like the foundations, people, etc. Everything that is controllable by the management and Fedora and that represents value for Fedora as a product and as an organization. It is important that not only Marketing people fill this in, but also developers, artists, ambassadors, everyone should highlight the strong points of their contributions to Fedora, the things that make us excel.
| Strength | Submitter | Role | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Documentation | Nelson Marques | Marketing Team | Fedora provides a wide set of Documentation in several formats and languages. |
| Channels of Distribution | Nelson Marques | Marketing Team | Our product is freely distributable through several channels, physical media, direct downloads, P2P networks. Everyone can virtually get easily our product. |
| Spins | Nelson Marques | Marketing Team | Availability of several SPINS oriented to segmented audiences. |
| SELinux | Nelson Marques | Marketing Team | SELinux technology (edit highlight it's relevance, strategical competitive advantage). |
| Relevance | Paul W. Frields | Project Leader | Fedora receives major contributions and sponsorship from Red Hat, the world trusted leader in open source. Fedora features technologies that are often inherited into Red Hat Enterprise Linux and therefore Fedora has an extremely high relevance in the commercial market as well as to enthusiasts and home users. |
Information Processing
I will collect the information on the 30th of April to process for the production of the SWAT Analysis. Any entry after this date might not be contemplated in the final document.
Personal Message
Dear Fedora Contributor,
My name is Nelson and I'm a contributor to the Fedora Marketing Team and I'm currently working on a SWOT Analysis of the Fedora Project. A SWOT Analysis is a strategic planning tool used by many businesses to better understand how they're doing - this explains Fedora using a framework familiar to Marketing students so that we will be able to get more of them to understand and help spread the project.
My technical knowledge regarding FOSS is very limited therefore this is a task I can't perform alone. The main goal of providing a SWOT Analysis to Fedora is to get a real inside view on the Fedora Project, identify its Strengths alongside with its weaknesses, and provide a document that can translate an analysis of our situation to help strategical decisions.
Usually a SWOT Analysis is divided into two parts, this (Strengths) being the first one alongside with the Weaknesses (to be worked on in the near future in a similar way) and the second part is based on the Opportunities and Threats, in other words:
- Strength's and Weaknesses are always factors that are under the control of the project (us);
- Opportunities and Threats are factors that we can't control as an community such as: legislation restrictions, competitors, etc.
I would like to leave a word of gratitude towards everyone who is reading this and participating as I believe this is a very important step for all the community, so that we on Marketing Team can continue providing valuable help to improve Fedora.
This document is not meant to be written in "Marketing-speak" - we are trying to carry this out in a way that is familiar and understandable to all Fedora contributors. I am taking the assumption that engineers can highlight better the pieces of engineering in Fedora, as artists can highlight their contributions and so on to everyone who is involved with Fedora. So if you see a piece of Marketing jargon that most people may not know, please remind us of this so we can explain it.
Thanks for your time, Nelson Marques & Marketing Team.