Fedora vision & more specific goals

[Máirín Duffy]

Hi,

As you may have noted in the board's last meeting minutes [1], it's time
to start thinking about how we should go about realizing the vision
we've set for Fedora. That vision is [2]:

The Fedora Project creates a world where
    * free culture is welcoming and widespread,
    * collaboration is commonplace, and
    * people control their content and devices.

I think the board should set a few smaller goals that could be pursued
over the next 3-4 releases to help get us closer to that vision, since
it is wide in scope. I'd like to ask all of the board members to each
come up with 4-5 proposals of goals we could pursue, understanding that
they do not have to be perfect, and all ideas can be brain food for
better ideas. :)

To hopefully kick things off and provide a concrete idea of what these
goals might look like, here's a handful I've been considering:

- GOAL #1: Collaboration in the Fedora community is amazingly easy,
effective, and fun - there is very little grunt-work involved.

Let's ditch our 1980's mailing list technology and look at putting
together a slick collaboration framework that integrates with the Fedora
desktop & our web properties, is easy to use, and install. Sharing files
and links to those files with other contributors and storing feedback on
them in one place, planning realtime meetings and storing & publicizing
the ideas & artifacts generated during them, and having productive
time-delayed discussions should be far easier than it is today. Manually
copying meeting bot links to mailing lists and wiki pages for example,
suck - menial work like this should be automated. E.g., I'd like to be
able to run a meeting, have a gobby or etherpad session automagically
created, have the gobby-visible chat be the same as the chat in my IRC
channel, have the gobby document visible & editable with etherpad, have
the meeting minutes (chat log) and the documents worked on with diffs
automatically bundled and uploaded to a central meeting documents store,
with a dent sent out to let folks know the meeting took place, with the
meeting date/time logged on a central calendar from which all teh
meeting artifacts are visible, and perhaps an email of the artifacts
sent out to the relevant mailing lists as well, and a blog post
posted... :)

- GOAL #2: It is extraordinarily easy to join the Fedora community and
quickly find a project to work on.

Random ideas: making it easier to help fix a bug that happens when you
hit it, right from the desktop, maybe some ABRT integration. Making it
far easier to file bugs in the first place, submit screenshots, be
productive at filing the bug without a lot of manual labor involved on
either side. Having a Fedora jobs board where you can apply to take on a
task. Integration with OpenHatch. The Fedora RPG, with desktop
integration. Improved forums for Fedora users to communicate with each
other, maybe integrated into the desktop somehow. 

- GOAL #3: Getting your data out of Fedora and accessing it on other
desktops / devices is convenient & easy.

Only have your smart phone available during an off-site meeting, and
wish you could access those notes you took in Gnote on your laptop back
at home? Have a bookmark to a really funny kitty-in-the-cheezburger-bun
video on your home computer but you didn't save it to delicious? Did you
import the photos from your camera to your laptop but the battery died
and you want to show Grandma a picture of jr. at baseball practice? You
shouldn't have to be super-vigiliant on an application-by-application
level to get access to your data across devices. It would be awesome to
have a single button that syncs your laptop to various (or a single) web
app that makes your files safe, accessible, private if needed. At the
very least, a dump to a shell account. You should be able to plug in an
external USB drive, identify it as your backup drive, and it
automatically will rsync your data over upon plugin after that.

- GOAL #4: (this is a smaller goal than the others but by no means easy)
Amazing free calendaring

Let's take a calendaring server, get it whipped into shape, working with
the fat clients we support in Fedora, make it amazingly easy to install
the server itself on Fedora, enable easy calendar configuration
client-side using it, integrate it into the Fedora environment. Another
phase could involve putting together an awesome web interface for it
that integrates with various Fedora web properties and applications. For
example, if I create a meeting using meeting bot in IRC, meeting bot
will log the meeting on a shared Fedora meetings calendar, and make the
meeting minutes available directly from the calendar interface. 

I hope this gets your creative juices flowing. Let me know where the
pandas have gotten to my brain and/or what ideas you have for goals or
how to better scope these goals.

~m

[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Meeting:Board_meeting_2010-11-15
[2] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Vision_statement