5tFTw: NetworkManager Feature Explosion, Waartaa Video Chat, Fedora Board on Fedora.next Products, Flock Planning, and Writing for the Magazine (2014-06-24)

[Matthew Miller]

Reposted from <http://fedoramagazine.org/5tftw-2014-06-24/>.


Fedora is a big project, and it’s hard to follow it all. This series
highlights interesting happenings in five different areas every week.
It isn’t comprehensive news coverage — just quick summaries with links
to each. Here are the five things for June 24th, 2014:


New NetworkManager Release Full of Features
-------------------------------------------

NetworkManager, familiar to many of us as “that thing that has a
taskbar icon for getting WiFi”, has always aimed to be much more than
that. With the 0.9.10 release (which will hit Fedora’s “Rawhide”
development tree later this week and be include in Fedora 21 this
fall), there’s a whole host of features to support those broader aims,
including server and cloud-focused improvements. Read more on developer
Dan Williams’ blog.

  * http://blogs.gnome.org/dcbw/2014/06/20/well-build-a-dream-house-of-net/


Waartaa gets Video Chat
-----------------------

Waartaa is an open source, web-based chat system — it describes itself
as “IRC as a service”. Since Fedora uses IRC (Internet Relay Chat) as
our chief means of real-time collaboration in Fedora, including for our
various team meetings, this might be something we could use to make our
communications more open and friendly. There is a session about Waartaa
and Fedora at our big Flock conference this fall (August 6-9, in
Prague).

I was interested to learn that there’s a Google Summer of Code project
supporting Fedora contributor Lalit Khattar in improving Waartaa, and
right now he’s working on adding video chat support. This is a long way
from ready, but maybe in the not-too-distant future it will provide us
with a viable alternative to proprietary video chat for high-bandwidth
collaboration.

  * https://www.waartaa.com/
  * https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_use_IRC
  * https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Meeting_channel
  * http://flock2014.sched.org/event/ed91d63174a0b3bdd744491beb9824de
  * http://flocktofedora.org/
  * https://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/homepage/google/gsoc2014
  * https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Dne0
  * http://lalitkhattar.wordpress.com/2014/06/11/p2p-video-chat-gsoc-week-3/


Fedora Project Board Discusses Fedora.next Products
---------------------------------------------------

On Monday, the Fedora Project Board held a public IRC meeting. There
were two main topics: first, guidelines for third-party press releases
(which were approved); and second, general criteria for Fedora Products
— a continuation of a previous meeting on the topic. The criteria we
passed are:

-  Addresses a new, relevant, and broad use case or user base
   that a Fedora Product is not currently serving

-  The use case should be something the Board sees as being a
   long term investment

-  The Product should be coherent with all of Fedora’s foundations

We also talked briefly about the Fedora Plasma Product proposal in
light of these criteria, but did not quite get to a conclusion.
Generally, there is broad Board support for better positioning and
promotion of non-product desktop spins. More discussion will happen on
the public board-discuss mailing list before a future meeting.

View the meeting minutes or, if you like full meeting logs.

  * https://fedorahosted.org/board/ticket/3#comment:3
  * https://fedorahosted.org/board/ticket/4
  * https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_Plasma_Product
  * https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/board-discuss
  * https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/meetingminutes/2014-June/001266.html
  * http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2014-06-23/board.2014-06-23-17.00.log.html


Flock Planning Meetings
-----------------------

Speaking of meetings and of Flock, the Flock planning team is holding
regular IRC meetings (on Tuesdays at 14:00 UTC in `#fedora-meeting` on
Freenode.) This week’s meeting was very short, but last week’s had a
lot of activity. (One interesting tidbit: we’ll reuse the open source
Android / Jolla / BlackBerry mobile app from Red Hat’s DevConf.cz
conference.) Anyway, if you’re interested in helping, stop by next
week.

  * http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2014-06-24/flock_planning.2014-06-24-14.05.html
  * http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2014-06-17/flock_planning.2014-06-17-13.59.html
  * http://www.devconf.cz/
  * https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cz.devconf
  * https://openrepos.net/content/xmlich02/devconfcz
  * http://appworld.blackberry.com/webstore/content/47010890/?countrycode=NL&lang=en



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------------------------------

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-- 
Matthew Miller
<mattdm at fedoraproject.org>
Fedora Project Leader