Fwd: Fedora Working Group Writers

[Pete Travis]

Fluke?  Trying again.

-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: 	Fedora Working Group Writers
Date: 	Mon, 12 Jan 2015 22:01:06 -0700
From: 	Pete Travis <me(a)petetravis.com&gt;
Reply-To: 	immanetize(a)fedoraproject.org
To: 	For participants of the Documentation Project
<docs(a)lists.fedoraproject.org&gt;



Hi all,

The Fedora 21 release is a huge accomplishment for us and the Fedora
Project as a whole.  We have a new lineup of deliverables[0], a new
organizational structure[1], and a new leadership body[2].   Some of the
changes have been hard to miss, and some have had subtle impacts; all of
them promise continuing change for Fedora's users and contributors.

To keep up, we should rethink the work that we do, and the service we
provide to the user and developer community.  Okay, I'll address the
obvious caveat before getting into it:  We're all volunteers, probably
already putting in the time we have available, working on things of
unquestionable value.  We've done a fair job of improving our welcome
for newcomers.  That said, a lot of our work is structured for
yesterday's grab-bag Fedora, not today's product-ized (flavorized?
editioned?) Fedora.  We should be looking at what we can do to better
represent the Workstation, Server, or Cloud images being offered to the
users, and better support the majority of developers whose work isn't in
those default package sets.

I would like to hear everyone's thoughts on where the fedora.next path
should lead the Docs Project - especially those of you that are
subscribed but haven't been active lately.  Your perspective might
provide some valuable contrast.

My idea so far is a simple one.  We have three deliverable-oriented
working groups, and there should be a bridge between these groups and
Docs.  We should provide that bridge by volunteering to actively
communicate with and monitor the working groups.  They might be fine
with just a simple list in the Release Notes, or they might enjoy having
a fully developed guide to their work, or want more than we can actually
fulfill, or they don't know what they want yet.  We can't know without a
solid channel for ideas to flow though.

These are dynamic and active groups, and keeping up with them will be a
considerable time investment.  For some perspective, here's where you
should watch for, and participate in, the action:

 - #fedora-devel, #fedora-cloud, #fedora-server, #fedora-workstation,
others on freenode[3]
 - related channels, like #cockpit or #fedora-desktop on irc.gnome.org[4]
 - Lots of Fedora mailing lists.  devel@, desktop@, infra@, releng@,
server@[5]
 - Trac instances for each working group, infra, releng, and FESco[6]
 - "watching" wiki pages maintained by each group.
 - "watchcommits" and "watchbugzilla" on pivotal packages in pkgdb[7]
 - upstream mailing lists and commit flows
 - ... then write it down somewhere :)

It's really a lot to go through.  Hopefully, there are some folks
already in tune, or people looking for a good way to contribute, that
can jump in, at least one per working group.  If not, let's talk about
dividing some of this up to make it work.  Docs will produce much better
results if we're organized about how we discover the material.

[0] https://getfedora.org
[1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora.next
[2] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Council
[3] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicating_and_getting_help
[4] https://wiki.gnome.org/Community/GettingInTouch/IRC
[5] https://lists.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo
[6] https://fedorahosted.org/web/
[7] https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb

-- 
-- Pete Travis
 - Fedora Docs Project Leader
 - 'randomuser' on freenode
 - immanetize(a)fedoraproject.org