[commops] working on f23 final release announcement

Wed Oct 14 23:21:05 UTC 2015

On Wed, Oct 14, 2015 at 2:39 PM, Paul W. Frields <stickster at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 14, 2015 at 01:13:36PM -0400, Remy DeCausemaker wrote:
>> --
>> Remy DeCausemaker
>> <decause at redhat.com>
>> Fedora Community Lead & Council Member
>> http://whatcanidoforfedora.org
>> 308C A504 0B47 1503 C9D9  E670 E633 A79B 0BB0 F6D9
>>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> > From: "Matthew Miller" <mattdm at fedoraproject.org>
>> > To: "Fedora + Community + Operations = Fedora CommOps" <commops at lists.fedoraproject.org>
>> > Cc: "Fedora Marketing team" <marketing at lists.fedoraproject.org>
>> > Sent: Wednesday, October 14, 2015 12:33:11 PM
>> > Subject: Re: [commops] working on f23 final release announcement
>> >
>> > On Tue, Oct 13, 2015 at 05:22:47PM -0400, Remy DeCausemaker wrote:
>> > > I'm new here, so bear with me, but Fedora has been really been making
>> > > the "Friends" foundation a focus of the latest release, by improving
>> > > our infrastructure and community. I realize this is not necessarily
>> > > the distro itself, but there are a few activities that come to mind:
>> > >
>> > >  - We deployed Bodhi2 (5 years in the making, huge performance increases,
>> > >  fine-grained karma, and more...)
>> > >  - D&I - Advisor search ongoing, and we've approved funding to hire two
>> > >  Outreachy interns, helping with Hubs/dev portal & Community Operations
>> > >  (CommOps)
>> > >  - Fedora Hubs has already had a successful intern (mrichards) pave the way
>> > >  for future interns and contributors.
>> > >  - Fedora-bootstrap is our latest project wide CSS and website theme,
>> > >  providing cohesion to our web properties.
>> > >  - Fedmenu is a glimpse into the widgetized future that comes with
>> > >  embeddable widgets via Fedora Hubs
>> > >  - http://whatcanidoforfedora.org is like the Fedora Sorting Hat :)
>> > >  - Fedora Magazine has hit milestone readership and publications (actual
>> > >  numbers TBD)
>> > >  - Others that I am not thinking of at the moment
>> > >
>> > > I know this list above includes things that we have shipped along
>> > > with things we have not yet shipped, but we've made mentionable
>> > > progress on a number of fronts. I dunno if these 'Community'
>> > > improvements are part of a release announcement or not, but they are
>> > > def worth mentioning somewhere (particularly the strides that have
>> > > been made in front-end, and in Rel-eng.)
>> >
>> > Nice angle — I really like this. I had suggested (or, maybe I glommed
>> > onto someone else's suggestion beacause I like the idea — I forget —
>> > anyway, it was suggested) that Fedora development might benefit from a
>> > "tick-tock" cycle, with one release focusing on process improvements,
>> > and the next release focusing on OS features. People weren't, overall,
>> > comfortable with putting Fedora into that model, I think mostly because
>> > feature changes sometimes come faster than that, but also irregularly.
>> > In any case, though I think this is clearly a "tick" release, with more
>> > process and infrastructure improvements than big change within the
>> > actual distribution.
>> >
>> > On a similar note, at FUDCon Lawrence a few years ago, Tim Burke
>> > suggested a "red/yellow/green" model for labeling how much scary change
>> > a release contains. (As an alternative to having major/minor releases.)
>> > I'm not a big fan of that, because I think we're mostly at the point
>> > where even our scary releases are actually very solid and are "green"
>> > in the absolute sense. But from that point of view, this is a "green"
>> > release too. With our current marketing / press  model, which relies on
>> > splashy changes to generate talking points, this ironically means the
>> > releases we'd like _most_ to get into the hands of users get less
>> > attention.
>> >
>> > So anyway, that's a long way of saying that, yeah, I like the general
>> > idea. I'm not sure a list of technical infrastructure improvements will
>> > play any better with the press than a list of software version bumps,
>> > though. Open to ideas. :)
>>
>> I'm also open to ideas. I think that getting a solid list of
>> improvements and performance enhancements from Fedora-infra about
>> Bodhi2 would a great section to include in the notes. It's kinda
>> meta, but still such an epic set of improvements from a 5 year
>> undertaking.
>>
>> I'll reach out to the Infra team and try to get some
>> stats/metrics/facts/bullet points.
>>
>> Same for some bullet points on the Fedora-boostrap redesign
>> too. We're making a common look/feel, and it is helping to provide
>> some cohesion in our web properties.
>>
>> I'll also reach out to the Magazine folks, and see if I can get some
>> quick bulletpoints/stats for readers/articles published.
>
> I don't think we want to conflate the audience that wants to know how
> much better the sausage tastes, with the people that care about
> improvements to the sausage making equipment.

+1 to this. Release announcements are already long-ish as it is. I
think there's a nice line to walk between having personality and not
being boring, informative without losing the reader,

That said -- I think there's definitely room for a mail / blog post to
the wider community celebrating the continuous improvements to the
sausage factory with each release. (Where, definitely room == people
would read it and it would be appreciated, not necessarily room in
someone's life to make it happen :D)

And something like that -- assuming it was published just before or at
the same time as the release announcement -- would be a fine short
addition to a release announcement, IMO. "Want to see how the sausage
is made?" [1] ... "then read this link to take a peek inside the
factory, and how you too can become an official oompa loompa," or
something to that effect, in the contributing section.

Note that the "how the sausage is made" joke has already been used in
this context a bit :)
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/F17_Alpha_release_announcement

-Robyn

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