(handprints vectorized from a sketch by Booth Tarkington now in the public domain)

One of the projects the which contains a list of common Marketing tasks a Fedora community member might want to undertake. Anyone can add tips they know about and list common problems and resolutions.

"...it is our hope that others in the community will add common tasks, fix our instructions, and just in general look over what we're doing and help us when we could be doing something in a better way. This is a wiki and in true wiki fashion we encourage anyone interested to go over our processes with a fine tooth comb. It'll make us better and we'll probably learn something in the process." --from the Why Is It Public? section

If this sounds familiar to a few of you, it should! Our SOPs and the accompanying explanation text was directly inspired by the Infrastructure Team's SOPs. Different teams within Fedora have different practices and ways of doing things, and if we see an idea that we like, then we should try to adopt it, and share our patches "back upstream."

Which is exactly what we did. Here's my email to the Infrastructure team a few minutes later:

Since we were directly inspired to create the Marketing SOPs by seeing how much good it's done Infrastructure to have them, I thought I'd share some back - we made a template and a SOP for making SOPs to make the SOP-generation process itself easier on folks who might not want to spend a lot of time on wiki editing.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Creating_a_Marketing_SOP
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Template:Marketing_SOP

They're both marketing-specific at the moment, but could be cloned for Infrastructure in a few minutes.

We took a good idea, added our own spin to it (a SOP on SOPs), and shared it back. Now people can...

  1. learn how to do an open source marketing task
  2. learn how to teach others how to do an open source marketing task
  3. make a resource to show people how to teach others how to do an open source task of any sort

That's the power of upstream, and it applies to far more than just code - when you share something, you improve the ecosystem for everybody else as well. This is one of the things I love most about Fedora: we don't just produce open source code (though that's a huge and crucial part of what we do), we live the open source way. It's turtles all the way down.