[Insight] Calendar idea

[Robyn Bergeron]

On 06/01/2011 06:19 AM, Jared K. Smith wrote:
> On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 4:25 PM, Paul W. Frields<stickster at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> So here are some starting questions regarding the calendar idea for
>> Insight, solicited on our Phase 2 project plan[2].  PLEASE ADD MORE!
> OK, you asked for it...
>
>>   * Add more here...
> This may be a big project to try to incorporate, but I would love to
> see if we can get more accountability to the Fedora development
> schedule.  We have a wonderful schedule now, but very little
> accountability to the schedule, and it's hard for the FPL to stay on
> top of every single item to make sure it has been accomplished.  My
> (big?) proposal is:
>
> * Fedora development
>     * Have the Fedora development schedule that the Fedora Program
> Manager (Robyn Bergeron) updates available as a calendar in Insight.
>     * For each task in the list, have at least one person responsible
> for the item.
>     * Allow the responsible party to mark that item as "not yet in
> progress", "in progress", "completed", or "not going to be done".
>     * Allow users to easily see overdue items that have not yet been completed.
Some thoughts:

The schedule already outputs in .ics format, so, assuming that those are 
easily importable (and a quick glance at some of the drupal calendar 
documentation shows that it can be done), at least *showing* the major 
milestones should be easy, and with more thought we could probably make 
it so that people can see schedules for either (a) FAS groups they are 
part of after login, (b) Schedules they are subscribed to after login, 
or (c) anyone can click on any schedule to see it. Either way, that 
would be super cool.

The part about tracking progress introduces some trickier stuff.

.ics files contain a way to show progress completed, and so forth.  The 
problem is that my .ics files, currently, are one-way -- that is to say, 
I can push them out to my schedules directory on fedorapeople 
(http://rbergero.fedorapeople.org/schedules/f-16/), but at the moment 
can't really re-import them if they had updated information on 
percentages done, etc.  (This gets particularly hairy if I have to 
republish the schedules in the event of a slip, which rebuilds .ics 
files, and then stuff would get overwritten, etc.)

My other reservations about the tracking are as follows:

* I worry about the overhead of having people needing to go and close / 
track things in multiple places.  A lot of groups already use trac for 
their schedule items, and it just seems like additional process overhead 
for those folks, particularly when many of their tasks in trac are 
organized by major milestones, etc. and are already easy to check 
progress on.

* I also have concerns about "task tracking" starting to diverge a bit 
from the major purpose of Insight, which was to publish news and 
marketing type stuff.  I think that "Finding events where Fedora will 
have a presence" is a great idea, along with providing a pretty-calendar 
way for that audience to see things like Freeze dates, Alpha/Beta/Final 
release dates, etc.  I think that having the entire schedule there is 
*convenient*, though perhaps not really applicable to the target 
audience, but when we start talking about task-tracking and checkboxes 
it really starts feeling like maybe it should be another drupal 
instance/project/etc. elsewhere altogether (status.fedoraproject.org, or 
something like that) -- I hate to essentially air our dirty laundry 
about who's not done, or who hasn't clicked a box, to press and so 
forth.  But I could be wrong. :)

> --
> Jared Smith
> Fedora Project Leader
> _______________________________________________
> logistics mailing list
> logistics at lists.fedoraproject.org
> https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/logistics