Fedora vision & more specific goals

[Josh Boyer]

2010/11/16 Máirín Duffy <duffy at fedoraproject.org>:
> - 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... :)

You focused a lot on running a meeting, or otherwise doing real-time
style communication (gobby, irc, etc.)  That is all well and good, but
it has nothing to do with mailing lists, nor does it provide a
suitable replacement for the one thing mailing lists are actually
decent at, which is non-immediate response.  Not everyone is sitting
at their browser all day doing Fedora collaboration.

Keep in mind that while you might find some tools to be outdated and
non-slick, they do actually work well.  Also, those same tools and
services are used by a vast majority of other projects, so people are
going to have to run those tools anyway.  Email clients, chat clients,
editors, etc.

Don't take this as nay-saying on your idea.  Rather, take it as a
reminder that when you're off building this collaboration framework
you do so in a manner that is complementary and useful to users and
collaborators.  Designing something that is totally whiz-bang but
replaces a workflow with an entirely different set of tools only works
in corner cases (which I think your meeting participation/logging
example is one of).

IMHO, the more real-time attention someone has to spend on Fedora, the
higher the bar is raised for participation.  That might be good at
attracting a certain class of participant, but it's certainly going to
exclude a lot of the volunteer/part-time participants as well.

josh