9:21 a.m.
On 06/01/2011 06:19 AM, Jared K. Smith wrote:
On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 4:25 PM, Paul W.
Frields<stickster(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> So here are some starting questions regarding the calendar idea for
> Insight, solicited on our Phase 2 project plan[2]. PLEASE ADD MORE!
OK, you asked for it...
> * Add more here...
This may be a big project to try to incorporate, but I would love to
see if we can get more accountability to the Fedora development
schedule. We have a wonderful schedule now, but very little
accountability to the schedule, and it's hard for the FPL to stay on
top of every single item to make sure it has been accomplished. My
(big?) proposal is:
* Fedora development
* Have the Fedora development schedule that the Fedora Program
Manager (Robyn Bergeron) updates available as a calendar in Insight.
* For each task in the list, have at least one person responsible
for the item.
* Allow the responsible party to mark that item as "not yet in
progress", "in progress", "completed", or "not going to be
done".
* Allow users to easily see overdue items that have not yet been completed.
Some thoughts:
The schedule already outputs in .ics format, so, assuming that those are
easily importable (and a quick glance at some of the drupal calendar
documentation shows that it can be done), at least *showing* the major
milestones should be easy, and with more thought we could probably make
it so that people can see schedules for either (a) FAS groups they are
part of after login, (b) Schedules they are subscribed to after login,
or (c) anyone can click on any schedule to see it. Either way, that
would be super cool.
The part about tracking progress introduces some trickier stuff.
.ics files contain a way to show progress completed, and so forth. The
problem is that my .ics files, currently, are one-way -- that is to say,
I can push them out to my schedules directory on fedorapeople
(http://rbergero.fedorapeople.org/schedules/f-16/), but at the moment
can't really re-import them if they had updated information on
percentages done, etc. (This gets particularly hairy if I have to
republish the schedules in the event of a slip, which rebuilds .ics
files, and then stuff would get overwritten, etc.)
My other reservations about the tracking are as follows:
* I worry about the overhead of having people needing to go and close /
track things in multiple places. A lot of groups already use trac for
their schedule items, and it just seems like additional process overhead
for those folks, particularly when many of their tasks in trac are
organized by major milestones, etc. and are already easy to check
progress on.
* I also have concerns about "task tracking" starting to diverge a bit
from the major purpose of Insight, which was to publish news and
marketing type stuff. I think that "Finding events where Fedora will
have a presence" is a great idea, along with providing a pretty-calendar
way for that audience to see things like Freeze dates, Alpha/Beta/Final
release dates, etc. I think that having the entire schedule there is
*convenient*, though perhaps not really applicable to the target
audience, but when we start talking about task-tracking and checkboxes
it really starts feeling like maybe it should be another drupal
instance/project/etc. elsewhere altogether (status.fedoraproject.org, or
something like that) -- I hate to essentially air our dirty laundry
about who's not done, or who hasn't clicked a box, to press and so
forth. But I could be wrong. :)
--
Jared Smith
Fedora Project Leader
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