The release counter we had for F8 proved to be quite popular, so is natural to have this time another one, maybe with some improvements. With the release scheduled for April 29, about a month from now, I think it is a good time to start planning it.
A first thing would be, IMO, to define when we start counting. I see two possible scenarios: either from a certain number of days in advance (30 days sounds plausible) or from the Release Candidate.
For the graphics, I think we can base them on the Beta banner made by Mo [1], but we can be open for another approaches. I think is easy enough to get all the images pre-rendered in advance by the Art team and not rely on a cron job do produce them daily.
Embedding in the website in another part: for F8 we had something like 01.png ... 15.png and the HTML was changed to include the proper image. I see here a lot of potential for improvement: provide something that people can include on their own pages/websites/blog and spread the waiting game all over the web. We can do that having a single image like f9counter.png updated daily, but this may not be very cache-friendly (people may get an old version from an un-updated cache), a JavaScript widget may be a better solution.
Please reply on the Art list about the graphics and on the Websites list about the implementation.
[1] - http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Artwork/PromoBanners#head-168c7c266a7785106cc2...