Fedora vision & more specific goals

[Máirín Duffy]

On Tue, 2010-11-16 at 18:54 -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
> 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.

I focused on meeting note-taking as a specific example in order to
provide one. Kick-ass collaboration can mean anything in that space and
I apologize if it seemed like I was dictating the idea was exclusively
centered on meeting minutes taking - it is not, I just wanted to provide
an example to illustrate the goal because I know having concrete
examples to back up a point can help folks follow the thread of thought
more easily.

The reason I chose that example in particular is because I have to do a
*lot* of grunt work to make sure real-time meeting notes are captured
and easily available to the many contributors on my team (the design
team) who *cannot* be at the meeting in real-time and rely heavily on
the post-meeting artifacts to participate. 

> Keep in mind that while you might find some tools to be outdated and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.

I'm trying (and it seems failing in part) to get us talking about ideas
& goals and not specific implementations. It would helpful to discuss
the actual ideas rather than assumed specific implementations of the
idea, although I understand a lot of us here are technologists and we
enjoy jumping to implementation considerations.

There's a lot of things to consider in implementing technology to
achieve these goals. I think we're going to get sidetracked if we worry
about all of those things right now rather than when we start discussing
implementation ideas. A goal should be able to stand on its own merit
without dictacting any implementation or causing any problems lke the
ones you've given as examples (and they are good examples, just a bit
premature right now.) Therefore I would like to suggest that we put that
level of critique on hold for the moment.

>   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. 

That goes without saying.

>  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).

That goes without saying as well, and no, I really believe that specific
idea here is not but I didn't spec my idea out here so there isn't a lot
of material for you to work with to know that. :)

> 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.

Absolutely, that's a great point which is why I think this proposed goal
is a really important one to try to achieve to reach our vision.

~m