Welcome to the Hatlas!

Wow, it has been a journey! And I’m so excited to finally launch this thing where others can play with it!

If you’re landing on this page as your entrypoint to Hatlas, please see the FAQ and Contributing, and feel free to reach out to me in Matrix or email.

Exhaustion and just a little bit of burnout has set in from pushing myself to get this out, but I’m very excited to see what the community can do when it is empowered by data. I’ve been an Open Data advocate for a long time, and I believe that the insights we can gather from this work will be critical to the long-term success of the Fedora project as a community-driven distro.

Prove me right!

Mission #

So, what is the value of Hatlas and/or an official Fedora Lakehouse? Why have I pushed myself so hard for this?

Open Source is, in my view, nearly synonymous with Personal Freedom, which I value deeply. And while I don’t always agree with Fedora and I’m naturally skeptical of large corporations, the fact is that Red Hat and Fedora have contributed massively to the Linux and Open Source world, and they continue to do so.

I believe it’s in everyone’s best interest that the Fedora community thrives, even for those who never use Fedora. And this project seems to be the best way I can contribute to Fedora’s health. In other words, this seems to be the most direct way I can contribute to the cause of personal freedom.

Our current community health is, in my opinion, not great. And while I have opinions about what could / must be done to improve it, right now we have nothing more than opinions to guide us. We cannot measure today whether we have been successful in recruiting and retaining contributors, let alone why, or which efforts have most improved the situation.

We not only have no compass, we can’t even tell when we’ve arrived.

Strategy 2028 #

It turns out, I’m not the first to see things this way. If you dig deep enough into the Fedora memory banks, you’ll find that the previous Fedora Project Leader (“FPL”) was expressing the same concerns and desires at least as far back as 2018, if not earlier. I haven’t verified this, but I believe that his “Strategy 2028” vision was, in some ways, a statement which directly implied the necessity of this work. “Look at what we can’t accomplish without this data!” (That’s uncharitable of me, and course not the whole story, but I think it’s a piece of it.)

In any case, that’s what I heard – a rallying cry. And I’d rather rally to that cry right now than focus on my growing list of recruiters who ghost me. (Hire me please!)

Future #

I’m hoping to make a big splash with this and get us to the point where enough people have traction on this project for it to sustain itself without me. Of course, I’d love to stay involved, but I have no idea what my personal future holds at the moment and I think the top priority of any open source project should always be longevity.

I’m definitely not in the business of marketing, but I do feel that it’s urgent to spread the message of Hatlas (and whatever it’s successor is named when it moves to Fedora) far and wide to help us build momentum. So please, share the news of this project in your data-loving and freedom-loving communities, and help us get there.

And if you’re interested in this sort of work, you should definitely check out the CHAOSS community where like-minded folks try to help other open-source projects evaluate and improve their health.

For myself, I’ll turn my attention soon from “big splashing” to plucking away at the long list of TODOs as much as time allows, with more Datanommer data as top priority. And I’ll provide (much smaller!) future updates in this space, so drop this site into your favorite RSS reader to stay up to date.

Thank you for having your head in this space!