Insight for post-GA

Thu Apr 29 23:45:39 UTC 2010

On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 07:04:53AM +0545, Drak wrote:
>      On Thu, Apr 22, 2010 at 04:15:23PM -0400, David Nalley wrote:
>      > On Thu, Apr 22, 2010 at 3:00 PM, Paul W. Frields
>      <[1]stickster at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>      One very important consideration going forward is, how many
>      *self-service* resources exist for people to learn and grow skills on
>      the platform?
> 
>    All, I'm the project lead of Zikula and I have been following
>    this thread with interest because for many months I have silently
>    worried about these topics and that the development and launch of
>    Insight has, from my point of view, taken much longer than it
>    really needs, especially because, in reality, Insight doesn't
>    even demand anything particularly demanding from a Zikula
>    platform perspective that might require more in-depth
>    customization.  Of course, I am acutely aware of the problems we
>    all face in open-source, in that it's all effectively a hobby and
>    people have to earn the bread and butter so individual time is
>    limited.  I can also understand all of your concerns about
>    'leaning on the Zikula people too much' etc, but this has given
>    me exactly the right opportunity to speak.

Thanks for writing this reply Drak -- it's very much appreciated and
people are happy to see your response here!

>    Firstly, I am passionate about Zikula and I am lucky that I am able to
>    work full time on the Zikula project without distractions from a 'have to
>    do real job'.  From my own perspective, Fedora's adoption of Zikula is a
>    very positive thing for our project - one that is worth nurturing and
>    caring for.  

I'm really happy to hear you say this.  Our weekly meeting was very
much oriented around how we need to grow a community of people in our
Infrastructure/Websites team that care about not only Zikula but also
expertise in PHP.  Because there's a big field of applications out
there beyond Zikula that, if we can't take advantage of them, could
cause us strategic difficulties as a project.

>    Secondly, the Zikula project already has an active policy to care
>    for things directly related to and that benefit Zikula.  Not only
>    do we care for the development of the Zikula core, but we indeed
>    develop and care for a number of modules too, actively as a
>    policy.   After the next Zikula dot release, we will also move
>    much more actively into documentation and training to raise
>    awareness.  I tell you all this because I want to so how active
>    the Zikula project is with related projects.  The pagemaster
>    module that is being used for Insight is also being officially
>    developed by the Zikula Foundation.  From my perspective, it
>    would make perfect sense for some of our people to join the
>    Fedora project on a more official basis with the objectives of,
>    a) bringing Insight to fruition, b) to be available
>    for maintenance, and c) training some of you in the ways of
>    Zikula over time.  In doing this, you also do not have to feel
>    you are taking advantage of us because we would be real Fedora
>    volunteers passionate and interested in helping the Fedora
>    project.  I believe this will help Fedora in the long term and
>    strategically for us, it is a good investment of our time and
>    resources.  I hope I have not said anything wrong or offended
>    anyone - I am just trying to find a practical solution with
>    mutual benefit.  Regards, Drak Project leader for Zikula.

So to move forward with this, here's what I'd like to answer with your
help:

* When should we set up our Insight meetings so that we can guarantee
  attendance from you and other Zikula members starting in the next
  week or two?

* In what ways can we attract not only Zikula but PHP expertise to
  complement our current group of Python experts in the Infrastructure
  and Websites teams?

We have ideas for milestones we'd like to set.  You'll see them in our
meeting minutes:

  * AGREED: We should take Drak up on his offer, set up our weekly
    Insight meeting at a time where he can participate, and then work
    toward a June 15th milestone. At that point, anyone should be able
    to type in "fedoraproject.org/insight" into a web browser and see
    the latest FWN issue and get to any archives we have available at
    that point.  (stickster, 18:39:35)
  * AGREED: 30 days following we have a way to (1) promote a Planet
    story to a separate Insight feed without having to copy/paste or
    retype it, and (2) both this content stream and the FWN can be
    visible/RSS at once  (stickster, 18:51:14)

(from http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-mktg/2010-04-29/fedora_insight.2010-04-29-18.05.txt)

This is really just a subset of the concepts for Insight seen here:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Insight#Content_workflow

I'm interested in hearing your thoughts about the meeting, my
questions above, and these goals.  And thank you very much for your
involvement and support!

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
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