Fedora Community

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On Wed, Jul 6, 2011 at 15:53, Luke Macken <lmacken at redhat.com> wrote:
> Excerpts from Stephen John Smoogen's message of Tue Jul 05 17:44:46 -0400 2011:
>> No not http://fedoracommunity.org but
>> https://admin.fedoraproject.org/community/ It has been in beta for 2
>> years now. What do we need to do to finish it (maybe make it
>> start.fedoraproject.org?) or put it aside for other things to do?
>
> This app was never really intended to ever be "finished". It was meant
> to be a platform for building widgets to visualize Fedora data. However,
> I do think it's definitely still 'beta' quality, and the original
> authors (J5, Mo, and I), have not had the cycles to continue to improve
> it. We accomplished our initial goals, and then got pulled into
> different directions (one of which was working on the core of the
> platform, Moksha).
>
> Personally, I still use fedoracommunity on a regular basis, and find it
> to be extremely useful in many ways. Right now we do not have any idea
> as to how many people are using it. I think we should do some log

Did the following quick statistics using awk:

Currently we are seeing 380->420 unique ip addresses per month who are
not bots or not referrals from other sites. Most go to /community/ but
~100 of them made queries beyond standard page data (images,
javascript, and /community/). While it doesn't sound a lot.. for a
site that doesn't have a lot of advertising it is an audience.

> analysis, and maybe a survey to see what people like/dislike/want. Also,
> Mo did a usability study at FUDCon many moons ago, and we have yet to
> really sit down and analyze the results.
>
> So, in order to remove the 'beta' from fedoracommunity, I would
> personally like the see the following happen:
>
>    * Polish up the interface, and make it *much* snappier.
>      Right now the interface feels very clunky, and the full page
>      reloads when clicking on certain areas is killing us. There
>      is still a lot of low-hanging fruit in terms of optimization.
>
>    * Re-branding, marketing, and a better URL.
>      "Fedora Community" has become an overloaded term, and has since been
>      associated with the language-specific subcommunity portals. We also
>      don't link to the app from anywhere, and the URL is not the
>      easiest to remember.
>
>    * Documentation.
>      Right now there is no documentation that guides people through
>      building a new app/widget using our infrastructure's APIs.
>      Copying/pasting existing code has made contributing painful.
>
> With regard to the claims that the AGPL makes this app difficult to
> maintain -- I honestly cannot recall a single case where we had to
> hotfix it and jump through the AGPL hoops. If anything, this helped us
> figure out what it takes to develop, deploy, and maintain both
> TurboGears2 and AGPL applications.

We did it twice right after it was deployed. We went one way in how we
were going to do this and had to undo it the next day when Tom got
clarification that pointing to tickets/patches was not acceptable. If
we could move to Apache or just GPL I would be quite happy. My memory
of it was that there was a bunch of stuff having to be done right
then, but it is a memory and probably not a good one.

My main concern has been about having something that was having code
rot because other priorities had taken the programmers away. We have
had to do some soul searching on services we offer and if the code was
not going to get much development time was it something infrastructure
could keep up (eg like blogs, asterisk, etc)

> Spot, J5 and I will be meeting next Thursday to draft a potential
> roadmap going forward.
>
> Personally, I envision the following improvements and additions (as I
> mentioned at the last FUDCon):
>
>    * Mailing list interface (a decent amount of code already written)
>    * Meeting app, to visualize our meetbot output (some code written)
>    * SIG dashboards, with action items, SOPs, packages, people, meetings, etc
>    * Package review app
>    * Improved upstream integration & adoption
>    * Nightly spin analysis
>    * Source-level code/diff viewer for auditing/annotations/linking
>    * Realtime message broker integration into our existing infrastructure
>    * Realtime widgets to visualize these live data streams
>
> luke
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-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.
"The core skill of innovators is error recovery, not failure avoidance."
Randy Nelson, President of Pixar University.
"Let us be kind, one to another, for most of us are fighting a hard
battle." -- Ian MacLaren