Insight milestone and next steps

[Paul W. Frields]

A lot of people have been asking, both among the Marketing team and
elsewhere, about how to move forward with Insight.  Unfortunately,
we've missed the June 15th milestone that was to serve as our trigger
for reconsidering our game plan:

http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/logistics/2010-April/000519.html

Our plan is divided roughly into development, then staging, then
production -- the way most infrastructure projects happen in Fedora.
However, we still have pieces of the codebase that are changing during
what is supposed to be our staging period.  We've had an instance up
for development for some time without our participants building the
skills needed to understand and administer the instance.  Without
active participation from Fedora community members, this system can't
be sustained regardless of platform.

Participants in Fedora are frustrated because our tools and skills are
not moving us forward at the rate needed to sustain this project.
There are other parts of Fedora considering separate content needs on
different platforms, like mailing list wrappers using Drupal.  We need
to take a more holistic view that includes those project-wide
challenges as well, where we collaborate with the Fedora people
working on them, not just our own team from Marketing.  And we need to
consider whether we have enough docs, tutorials, examples, and other
resources to help us contribute effectively to Insight.

In Fedora we talk about "fail faster" as a worthy goal -- to
understand when we're doing the wrong thing, stop doing that, and then
move on to something more productive.  Our problem right now is that
we are not recognizing that failure and regrouping.  And moreover, we
don't have a clear system owner for the future, which is why I'm
writing this email.  Given the unique and specific workflow in Fedora,
it's worthwhile for us to look at some alternatives, and compare and
contrast them with what we're doing now.

Based on the above, I'm hereby proposing that we temporarily halt
staging and development on the Zikula instance so we can address some
of these concerns.


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