[Fedora-marketing-list] Re: Big decisions loom for Fedora

[Rahul Sundaram]

chasd wrote:
> 
>> From: Rahul Sundaram <sundaram at fedoraproject.org>
> 
>>> Slap down a digital voice recorder next to the phone speaker and post an
>>> OGG later.
>>
>> See
>> https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-advisory-board/2006-November/msg00206.html 
>>
> 
> Is the IRC "transcript" available anywhere ?
> Not that I am interested, but that is an advantage of a digital audio 
> file of conference call procedings, it can be referenced at any time, 
> sort of a historical record. IRC does open up the live conversation to 
> those that aren't on the conference call. Unless that IRC session is 
> saved and posted, it can't be referenced as time passes. An IRC log is 
> possibly more easily skimmed through than an audio file, but does not 
> contain the "body language" of inflection, etc.

In the usual place. 
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Board/Meetings/2006-11-20. A news item and 
comments on the same at http://lwn.net/Articles/210377

[snipped a good amount of insights]

> 
> As well as the transparency of the organization is progressing ( work 
> still to be done, eh ? ), the transparency into certain engineering 
> decisions could improve. Similar to how XGL was dropped on the world, 
> sometimes I see an entry in the rawhide report on f-d-l and think " 
> How'd they decide that ? ".

The infrastructure and organizational changes currently being discussed 
has the potential to solve this problem. Till then if you find yourself 
wondering why a particular change was made just ask.

  If you so choose, now you can follow the
> decision process of organizational issues, because the Fedora 
> organization is now almost completely outside the RH fence line. The 
> decision process on engineering issues is not that transparent, and I 
> expect the merging of Core "into" Extras will help that.

I think so. Any work that continues to be done internally is going to 
miss out some amount of details when published to the community. Forcing 
ourselves to work in a external system guarantees that a minimum level 
of transparency is always there and someone not near the Red Hat water 
coolers know about these stuff.


> 
> An example could be the decision to stick with Firefox 1.5 in FC6. It 
> got mentioned in several reviews, particularly in comparison with 
> Ubuntu. If you followed f-d-l you would have read the Firefox 
> maintainer's understandable position. If reviewers would have seen this 
> quote:
> 
>> Let me state it plainly for everyone: There is nothing
>> extremely compelling about Firefox 2.0.  Firefox 3.0 on the other hand
>> will be very compelling for both features, linux support, and embedding
>> support.  I am seriously considering pushing 3.0 into FC6 and even FC5,
>> and have been making noises for a while about that being the next 
>> upgrade.
> 
> then I think the 1.5 vs. 2.0 issue would have not been a negative, 
> possibly with a positive spin. Bonus points for considering 2.0 not 
> "new" enough. It would have also added to the consistency of the 
> "upstream, upstream" mantra Fedora is/should be known for.

I wrote up a wiki page on this at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Firefox2 
and linked to it from the common bugs page which was send to the 
announce list. I find it hard to see how we could propogate these kind 
of information further.

> 
> Another related issue is if I am new to Fedora and I want to know " 
> Where is Fedora heading ? " , how do I get that info ?
> What list do I subscribe to ?
> What URLs/sites should I monitor ? What blogs ?
> That isn't particularly clear, until after you've sampled a bit of every 
> channel and discarded the ones you feel don't apply. The hardy soul that 
> does that is uncommon. Fedora Weekly News does bring together some of 
> the different channels in one place.

Apart from FWN, Fedora Advisory board and announce lists as well as 
Fedora people at http://fedoraproject.org/people are good places to 
follow discussions. Most of the major discussions happen in one of these .

> 
> I think some of the mismatch between reality and the perception of the 
> Fedora project is rooted in the channels used to expose the activities 
> of the Fedora project. If you subscribe to and follow a decent subset of 
> the mail lists, I think you come away with a good idea of where Fedora 
> is and where it is going. You can't cruise in, surf a few forums and 
> poke at the list archives and come away with the same impression.
> 
> It isn't a Fedora-specific problem. For my company, I also need to keep 
> on top of proprietary software vendors such as Adobe, Apple, and 
> Microsoft. You can't get a clear picture of those organizations in a 
> couple days of cruising their web sites either. I don't think I'll ever 
> get as good a picture of those organizations compared to Fedora, but if 
> I spend time reading blogs and mail lists from those companies, I get a 
> much clearer picture.
> 
> OK, this turned out much longer than it should have been, sorry.

We are working on consolidating mailing lists where it helps.

Rahul