Abstract: Many outstanding software projects get created, but have problems gathering adoption and building vibrant communities, which are critical to taking them to the next level. Don't let your next great idea become another dead project hidden amongst thousands of others on sourceforge. Ideas develop best when exposed to wider audiences and allowed to evolve in unforseen directions.

A great opportunity for building communities around OSS software is getting involved with the Fedora Project. The Fedora Project is a 100% open source, cutting edge Linux distribution, sponsored by Red Hat, that provides an easy entry point to expose projects and ideas to a wider audience.

In this session, attendees will learn how to get involved with the Fedora Project and make their upstream software applications distributable to millions of Fedora users and to help them gather contributors. Topics covered will include how to get started with the account system, useful mailing lists, RPM packaging, resources provided by Fedora Hosted Projects, the build system, release cycles, project advertising, building software for Enterprise Linux, and where to go for other resources.

Short Bio: Michael DeHaan, a 2001 NCSU Computer Science alumnus and Senior Software Engineer at Red Hat, is the author of Cobbler (http://fedorahosted.org/cobbler) and one of the co-creators of Func (http://fedorahosted.org/func), among other projects. His technical interests include systems management applications, dynamic languages (particularly Python), software architecture, and Open Source community development.