Archive:BoardBlog

This is an archive of the Board Blog

Today's Board Meeting
Full meeting minutes: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Meeting:Board_meeting_2010-12-13 Meeting thread on advisory-board-list: http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/advisory-board/2010-December/010127.html

Updates
For more details on any of these, please check out the full meeting minutes.
 * Red Hat offices will be shut down between December 24th and January 2nd, inclusive. The board won't be meeting December 20th or December 27th also because of the holidays.
 * FUDCon North America / Tempe is coming soon - it's happening at the end of January.
 * The Fedora 15 Feature submission deadline is Jan 25; the feature/spins freeze is Feb 08.
 * The Board welcomes Pierros Papadeas as the new FAmSCo Chair and Larry Cafiero as the Budget Wrangler for the Ambassadors within FAmSCo
 * Toshio suggested and proposed a Fedora governance discussion at FUDCon Tempe. The prep for this session will involve outlining our current governance structure.

Board Issues Discussion - Long-Term Goals for Fedora
After the board put together a vision statement for Fedora back in October, Spot suggested that we come up with a small set of long-term goals to pursue over the next few release of Fedora to help achieve that vision. As a refresher, here is that vision statement from October: The Fedora Project creates a world where At the 15 November Board meeting Máirín proposed that each Board member come up with three long-term strategic goals they felt would help us achieve Fedora's vision and to discuss them with community members on the Fedora advisory-board list. A pretty productive thread on that list ensued. There were additional goal suggestions provided by board members at the 29 November board meeting. We had lots of ideas and discussion about what our goals to focus on over the next few releases should be, but no priority amongst them - if we had to pick three from the entire list (which was originally well over 20 goal ideas), which three would it be? Also, some of the submitted goals weren't actually stated as goals, but were more tatical rather than strategic in nature. Máirín and Jared went through the 29 November meeting minutes and the advisory-board list thread to gather an exhaustive list of all goal suggestions. Then, at Spot's suggestion, we went through each goal one-by-one, evaluated whether it was a goal or a tatical example for an existing goal. Where a suggested goal was tatical and there was no existing strategic goal for it to become an example of, we worked to come up with a strategic goal that would fit the suggested tatical goal. The list of goals that came out of that process follows. Please note this is not a list of goals the board is currently suggesting Fedora pursue. It is simply a product of the board's capturing & organizing all goals that have currently been suggested to us. There is no priority ordering in this list:
 * free culture is welcoming and widespread,
 * collaboration is commonplace, and
 * people control their content and devices.

Current Long-Term Goal Suggestions
For more details on any of these goal suggestions it is highly recommended that you review the full meeting minutes.
 * Improve and simplify collaboration in the Fedora Community.
 * Provide infrastructure to help people control their content and devices.
 * Improve and encourage high-quality communication in the Fedora Community.
 * It will be extraordinarily easy to join the Fedora community and quickly find a project to work on.
 * Recruiting new / less-common skillsets into the project (e.g., project managers, designers)
 * "Access from Anywhere" strategy
 * Encourage open standards
 * Improve remote real-time & high-bandwidth collaboration
 * Get more involved with upstream / sidestream FLOSS Communities
 * Improve awareness and utilization of available Fedora community resources
 * Expand global presence of Fedora among users & contributors
 * Improve education & skill sharing in community
 * Sharing responsibilities (mentorship, documentation of tasks / SOPs, sharing skills)
 * Evaluate late-breaking technologies for inclusion/interaction with Fedora
 * Improve the Fedora developer experience

Upcoming Board Meetings
The next Fedora Board meeting will be IRC office hours on Friday, December 17rd, at 2 PM EST (1900 UTC) in #fedora-board-meeting on irc.freenode.net. The next Fedora Board meeting after that will be conducted via phone & Gobby on Monday, January 3rd 2001. The December 20th and December 27th meetings are cancelled due to the holiday season. ]]> 3 2010-12-13 17:30:25 2010-12-13 17:30:25 open open fedora-board-meeting-13-december-2010 publish 0 0 post  0  _edit_lock 1295304128   _edit_last 199   2   http://mairin.wordpress.com/2010/12/16/fedora-board-blog/ 72.233.96.150 2010-12-16 10:47:29 2010-12-16 15:47:29  1 pingback 0 0   3   http://techrights.org/2010/12/17/linux-for-mentor-graphics/ 216.105.40.114 2010-12-17 09:44:27 2010-12-17 14:44:27  1 pingback 0 0   4   http://blogs.fedoraproject.org/wp/board/?p=15 209.132.181.102 2011-01-11 17:58:49 2011-01-11 22:58:49  1 pingback 0 0     http://blogs.fedoraproject.org/wp/board/?p=15 Tue, 11 Jan 2011 22:58:33 +0000    http://blogs.fedoraproject.org/wp/board/?p=15

The back story
If you've been following the Fedora Board, particularly our blog posts (here, formerly posted here before that)and/or the meeting minutes & discussion on advisory-board mailing list, you are probably well-aware that the Fedora Board set a vision for Fedora. As of late, the Board has also been looking to establish a set of long-term goals for Fedora. So let's break this down:

Fedora's Vision statement
From about July 2010 - September 2010, the Fedora Board worked on putting together a vision statement for the project to help guide our strategic planning for the future, project-wide. As a project, we already had figured out: These documents, though, don't really provide a clear path as to WHERE we need to go to be successful at what we do. Knowing where we want to be in the next 5-10 years as a project will help us as Fedora community members to more easily figure out what we can do today to get there. In other words, we can't get to where we want to go if we don't know where that is. :) So here's Fedora's vision statement as developed with the Fedora community and ratified by the Fedora board this past October: The Fedora Project creates a world where Think about that vision statement for a minute or two. Is this a future you would support? Do you want control over your content and devices? Would you like to see collaboration a more commonplace activity? Would you like to see free culture as a welcoming, and far more widespread place?
 * Our objectives, WHAT we do today.
 * Our mission statement, our WHY we exist and why we do the things we do.
 * The four foundations, our HOW we get things done - our core values that guide our actions.
 * Out user base, or target audience, our WHO we work for.
 * free culture is welcoming and widespread,
 * collaboration is commonplace, and*
 * people control their content and devices.

Long-Term Goals for Fedora
Well, certainly for me the vision statement we now have for Fedora is definitely a world I'd like to see become a reality. Just wishing doesn't make it so, unfortunately. So how do we make that world happen, as a project? During the board phone meeting on September 27, Spot suggested that the board members should think about (and solicit feedback from the Fedora community as well) 1-3 short-medium term goals we could set for the next 1-3 Fedora releases. They shouldn't be technically-specific, but they should be things we could do as a project to meet our vision. For example, to encourage free culture becoming welcoming and widespread, we could set a goal to focus on more free artwork in Fedora, and allow the appropriate SIG and teams within Fedora to figure out tactical steps to achieve that goal (e.g., create 100 free wallpapers over the next 3 releases.) Máirín posted a kick-off thread to the advisory-board mailing list, which included some example strawman goals. It was followed up by some open discussion and additional goal suggestions. At the subsequent 29 September 2010 meeting, more discussion and goal ideas were proposed. Finally, during the December 13 Board meeting, the board came up with an exhaustive list of the long-term goals that had been proposed by Fedora community members and Board members, stating them in a common format in terms of achievable goals (Full meeting minutes on these):

Suggested Possible Long-Term Goals for Fedora

 * Improve and simplify collaboration in the Fedora Community.
 * Provide infrastructure to help people control their content and devices.
 * Improve and encourage high-quality communication in the Fedora Community.
 * It will be extraordinarily easy to join the Fedora community and quickly find a project to work on.
 * Recruiting new / less-common skillsets into the project (e.g., project managers, designers)
 * "Access from Anywhere” strategy
 * Encourage open standards
 * Improve remote real-time & high-bandwidth collaboration
 * Get more involved with upstream / sidestream FLOSS Communities
 * Improve awareness and utilization of available Fedora community resources
 * Expand global presence of Fedora among users & contributors
 * Improve education & skill sharing in community
 * Sharing responsibilities (mentorship, documentation of tasks / SOPs, sharing skills)
 * Evaluate late-breaking technologies for inclusion/interaction with Fedora
 * Improve the Fedora developer experience

What's happening now
The Fedora board has contacted both the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) and the Fedora Ambassadors' Steering Committee as elected steering committees to provide commentary, feedback, and additional suggestions on the proposed possible goals above. The board will be looking for these groups to indicate which of these goals the community members they represent might have the most interest in working on / excitement about and which they would like to see achieved, hopefully in a priority order. After getting feedback from these groups, and if it seems logical to proceed with this goal process based on that feedback, the greater Fedora community will be asked for additional feedback to help in narrowing the list of goals down to far less than 15 (although we're not quite sure how many makes sense right now.)

What you can do to help
Look through the proposed goals. Do they make sense? Are they something you'd like to work on? Is there something there your team or group within Fedora would have an interest in making happen? Let us know, here in the comments or on the advisory-board mailing list. (Posted by Máirín Duffy)]]> 15 2011-01-11 17:58:33 2011-01-11 22:58:33 open open setting-goals-for-fedora publish 0 0 post  0  _edit_lock 1294786716   _edit_last 6   7   http://blog.byohosting.com/2011/01/14/fedora-board-proposes-project-goals-ostatic/ 184.107.135.218 2011-01-14 04:23:19 2011-01-14 09:23:19  1 pingback 0 0   6   http://topsy.com/trackback?url=http%3A%2F%2Fblogs.fedoraproject.org%2Fwp%2Fboard%2F%3Fp%3D15&utm_source=pingback&utm_campaign=L2 208.74.66.43 2011-01-11 22:57:35 2011-01-12 03:57:35  1 pingback 0 0   8   http://www.xandot.com/172025/fedora-board-proposes-project-goals/ 174.142.214.45 2011-01-14 04:37:04 2011-01-14 09:37:04  1 pingback 0 0   9   http://www.chinshiro.info/fedora-board-proposes-project-goals.html 97.74.144.151 2011-01-16 10:38:34 2011-01-16 15:38:34  1 pingback 0 0   11  tezcatl@fedoraproject.org http://tzkmx.wordpress.com/ 189.228.29.42 2011-01-19 05:13:59 2011-01-19 10:13:59  1  0 158   12   http://nullr0ute.com/2011/01/fudcon-tempe/ 2001:41d0:2:923e:: 2011-01-22 09:36:52 2011-01-22 14:36:52  1 pingback 0 0     http://blogs.fedoraproject.org/wp/board/?p=14 Wed, 12 Jan 2011 00:58:28 +0000    http://blogs.fedoraproject.org/wp/board/?p=14   The Fedora Board meeting schedule works as follows: Every Monday, the Board meets at 2 PM Eastern time (1900 UTC). Meetings will alternate between public IRC and phone with meeting summaries of discussion that can be made public.

Yesterday's Board Meeting
Full meeting minutes: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Meeting:Board_meeting_2011-01-10 Meeting thread on advisory-board-list: http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/advisory-board/2011-January/010290.html

Updates
For more details on any of these, please check out the full meeting minutes. With Máirín on vacation at the last Board Meetings, we, the Board, dropped the ball on posting to the blog. We've now decided that the secretary for the Board Meeting should post the summary of the meeting here so that should hopefully make them appear more regularly. For those who are relying on these postings to know that a new Board meeting has occurred, there were three meetings that were not blogged: the conference call from 2011-01-03, the IRC meeting (largely about goals) on 2011-01-07, and the IRC Q&A on 2010-12-17. The Board is coming up with an agenda for what to talk about while at FUDCon and face to face3 (as well as in close proximity to numerous other Fedora Contributors). If you have ideas of what topics would benefit from discussion then, feel free to bring them up on advisory-board@lists.fp.o Community Working Group is working on figuring out what they're doing but hasn't yet done anything visible. rdieter will touch base with them to get a status report.

Board Issues Discussion - One-year Goals for Fedora
Last phone meeting, the Board came up with a list of fifteen goals that came from the list, comments on blogs, and their own thoughts. At last Friday's IRC meeting, they narrowed it down to their favorite five and were prepared to send those to fesco and famsco (two of the main bodies that would implement them) but we discussed the ideas of the goals and what they meant more at this meeting which lead to deciding to send the whole fifteen goals to the Steering Committees. Some felt that narrowing the goals ahead of time would give the impression that the Board had already decided on them and was merely seeking approval rather than seeking partnership with the steering committees to create and define the goals. At the end of discussion it was decided to send the list of all fifteen goals to the Steering Committees and also explicitly tell them that we would welcome both more goals and more examples of implementing any goals although we, the Board, were going to both eliminate some goals and synthesize others together to come up with a final list of about three based on their feedback. The question of whether the goals were mandates or conversation starters was also re-opened with some feeling that they felt the goals were being de-emphasised too much. Paraphrasing spot: "We would never say to someone that they have to stop doing something but we want to make it clear that we want people to be working on these areas to be useful in these spaces. Maybe a hybrid between mandate and talking point.  Stuff aligned with the goals will get more promotion, etc.  Other stuff less likely to be talked about or guaranteed as a feature." Others thought that mandates would be okay but those sorts of goals should be created from the community and then synthesized by the Board rather than originating with the Board (echoing sentiments during Robyn Bergeron's question for the Board and the discussion that ensued at last Friday's IRC meeting). This aspect was left undecided at the end of the meeting. These are only the highlights from this section of the meeting, the meeting notes contain more, less important (or just less contentious) discussion items. Please read them if you're interested in this area and feel free to ask questions on the advisory-board mailing list.

Upcoming Board Meetings
The Fedora Board is attempting to meet with FAMSCo and FESCo to discuss the one-year goals. If we can the meetings for the next two weeks will be IRC meetings with those parties at times convenient to them. If we can't arrange it, we'll have a phone meeting on Monday January 17 at 2 PM Eastern time (1900 UTC), the normal meeting time. ]]> 14 2011-01-11 19:58:28 2011-01-12 00:58:28 open open fedora-board-meeting-10-january-2011 publish 0 0 post  0  _edit_lock 1295303713   _edit_last 199   5   http://topsy.com/trackback?url=http%3A%2F%2Fblogs.fedoraproject.org%2Fwp%2Fboard%2F%3Fp%3D14&utm_source=pingback&utm_campaign=L2 208.74.66.43 2011-01-11 20:47:34 2011-01-12 01:47:34  1 pingback 0 0     http://blogs.fedoraproject.org/wp/board/?p=27 Tue, 18 Jan 2011 13:18:13 +0000    http://blogs.fedoraproject.org/wp/board/?p=27    The Fedora Board meeting schedule works as follows: Every Monday, the Board meets at 2 PM Eastern time (1900 UTC). Meetings will alternate between public IRC and phone with meeting summaries of discussion that can be made public.

Yesterday's Board Meeting
Full meeting minutes: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Meeting:Board_meeting_2011-01-17 Meeting thread on advisory-board-list: http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/advisory-board/2011-January/010456.html

Board Issues Discussion
For more details on any of these, please check out the full meeting minutes.

Fedora strategic goals discussion with FAmSCo
Pierros Papadeas, the Chair of FAmSCo presented their thoughts on Fedora goals proposed by Board to the community discussion. They prepared suggestions and additions for preferred goals -http://piratepad.net/fedorafbg2011. They feel that each goal needs specific deliverables and action items (and owners also). Spot mentions that board would be looking to groups like FAMSCo to identify those deliverables and action items for themselves, with the understanding that other groups may also have deliverables/action items for the same goal. Following suggestions and additions can be found in full meeting minutes. FAmSCo would like to commit to the "goal #1 - Improve and simplify collaboration in the Fedora Community" by scheduling and events application is a key part in achieving this goal, and face to face meetings of SCo member. "Goal #3 - Improve and encourage high-quality communication in the Fedora Community" as Ambassadors have vast experience in meetings (regional, local etc ones). FAmSCo can lead the "goal #4: It is extraordinarily easy to join the Fedora community and quickly find a project to work on" and make sure by the end of 2011 make deliver a barrier-free Joining procedure for each project of Fedora with common steps to join different Fedora sub-projects and finding the right subproject based on contributor's profile. FAmSCo would like to "expand global presence of Fedora among users & contributors (goal #11)". The goal is to have 4 FUDCons on our respective regions annually but it will depend on budget approvals and clearance of Community Architecture team. FAmSCo has nothing particular to add to the "goal #12: Improve education & skill sharing in community". Summary:
 * FAmSCo preferences are #11 #4 #1 #3 (tie) #12 (in order of preference)
 * Next thing is to hear what FESCo thinks, and to remind FESCo that we want their feedback from the list of 15 (and possible other goals), rather than the "5" preferred by Board
 * Fedora Board thanks FAmSCo for valuable feedback!

Upcoming Board Meetings
The Fedora Board is now attempting to meet with FESCo to discuss the one-year goals. If we can arrange meeting, it will be IRC meeting at time convenient to them. If we can't arrange it, we'll have a phone meeting on Monday January 24 at 2 PM Eastern time (1900 UTC), the normal meeting time (Posted by Jaroslav Reznik)]]> 27 2011-01-18 08:18:13 2011-01-18 13:18:13 open open fedora-board-meeting-17-january-2011-2 publish 0 0 post  0  _edit_last 6   _edit_lock 1295902124     http://blogs.fedoraproject.org/wp/board/?p=41 Mon, 24 Jan 2011 21:35:33 +0000    http://blogs.fedoraproject.org/wp/board/?p=41    The Fedora Board meeting schedule works as follows: Every Monday, the Board meets at 2 PM Eastern time (1900 UTC). Meetings will alternate between public IRC and phone with meeting summaries of discussion that can be made public.

Today's Board Meeting
Full IRC log: http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-board-meeting/2011-01-24/fedora-board.2011-01-24-19.01.log.html Meeting minutes: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Meeting:Board_meeting_2011-01-24 Meeting thread on advisory-board-list: http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/advisory-board/2011-January/010471.html

Board Issues Discussion
For more details on any of these, please check out the full IRC log.

Fedora strategic goals discussion with FESCo
Kevin Fenzi, the Chair of FESCo presented their thoughts on Fedora goals proposed by Board to the community discussion. They discussed the goals at a FESCo meeting on January 19, and voted on the goals which they support. From the Board's list of 15 potential goals for Fedora, FESCo ranked the first 9 goals in order, not voting for the bottom 6 goals. They also selected and focused a set of 3 preferred goals: The remainder of the meeting involved discussion each of the three goals in depth, with FESCo presenting ideas on how the goals might be accomplished.
 * (Goal #1) Improve and simplify collaboration in the Fedora Community (7 votes)
 * (Goal #3) Improve and encourage high-quality communication in the Fedora Community (7 votes)
 * (Goal #15) Improve Fedora developer experience (4 votes)

GOAL #1: Improve and simplify collaboration in the Fedora Community
FESCo's ideas for working towards this goal:
 * look at our unresponsive maintainer policies again... we should really encourage co-maintainers more so packages don't sit with no one watching them.
 * how to possibly improve our morass of mailing lists
 * how to possibly reduce the number of irc channels/lists/etc to make it easier for people to join/follow
 * encourage direct communication between different groups. recently things seem to go up all the way to the board and then down again. this is ineffective collaboration. we need to have workflows for $contributor from group A requesting something from group B. ether there are not workflows or they are all different
 * As mentioned on the board wiki, calendaring and scheduling could really be improved.
 * it would be great to know when/where things are happing all the time.
 * I wonder if we couldn't designate or create some area in all the communications channels for pointing people at just where to go for something. some kind of directory service... so you could look up who you ask about helping out with $foo instead of just wandering around trying to find out.
 * say all groups have a trac instance to bring something up to their attention, just like the board opened it's trac recently. doesn't need to be trac, but a common protocol for everybody

GOAL #3: Improve and encourage high-quality communication in the Fedora Community
Nirik noted there is some overlap between practical application of this goal and goal #1. But FESCo ideas for making it happen: When asked what the number one place where communication breakdown occurs was, both nirik and notting said mailing lists: Hall-monitor / educational style solutions aren't desirable, though:
 * Teaching folks how to run meetings, and how to communicate better on lists would be lovely.
 * We could possibly use some framework like moodle to setup classes for these things so people could learn more easily.
 * Possibly we could ask mailing list owners to try and get people to avoid long threads or off topic discussion, but there's no easy fix
 * empower mailing list owners to do more management when needed. Possibly the Community Working group could propose some ideas on how they could better do so, but I think it might be better seen when coming from people who are part of whatever area that is and are managers of that resource
 * the biggest communication breakdown place. Some people just use lists and not other channels. Issues getting IRC discussions synched back to list. Issues with noise on the lists. (nirik)
 * spot says there are some crazy ideas on how to accomplish things to improve signal to noise ratio on mailing lists without acting like hall monitors
 * nirik cites [ http://mairin.wordpress.com/2010/03/16/a-rich-web-interface-for-mailing-lists/ mizmo's mailing list ui design idea]
 * Anything that is described as 'teaching people how to communicate better on mailing lists' sounds like it would trigger a backlash, however well intentioned. "who are you to tell me i can't communicate?" etc. alas. it sounds like hall monitor. You can teach people better communication, but I'm not sure that those who go OT will be in this class
 * mmaslano thinks it's like hall monitor - people who are OT usually don't participate classes to become better ones

GOAL #15: Improve developer experience
Ideas from FESCo on working towards this goal: FESCo noted there's a lot in these ideas they can't actually do, though: Another issue-to-solve related to the goal: There was a bit of a tangent argument about release engineering being of limited membership and difficult to join as there are no documented steps for joining. ke4qqq to an action item to get with releng and document instructions how to join the releng team and put a wiki page up. Summary:
 * gather feedback from developers at fudcon on areas to look at improving.
 * get more people doing buildroot overrides or some way to automate them.
 * See if we can reduce the maintainer sponsorship queue down. (so people wanting to help are there to help all of us)
 * make co-maintainers more common/expected. Possibly by auto acking requests to be a comaintainer if the maintainer doesn't respond or the like.
 * help improve repos.fedorapeople.org or kopers or whatever so they are easier for our maintainers to use.
 * support of groups of maintainers in SIG or on group of packages.
 * fesco could look at doing would be some better way to get provenpackagers helping others... some bat signal to call for help on a serious/difficult bug they can't solve.
 * better communication with bugzappers would be nice. I think they could help more packages, but it seems sometimes packagers don't know to ask for them to help
 * we cant force people to do things, but one thing that might improve some of those bottlenecks is having multiple people who do each thing/can do tasks for some team... that way there's no single point if someone is busy or the like
 * "there's little we can do to enact new initiatives other than 'set policies' "
 * we don't necessarily have project-wide roadmaps for the tools we use
 * FESCo's Fedora goal preferences in order are 1, 3, 15, 12, 14, 4, 5, 7, 9.
 * Fedora Board thanks FESCo for valuable feedback!

Upcoming Board Meetings
(Meeting moderated by Jaroslav Reznik; blog post written & posted by Máirín Duffy)]]> 41 2011-01-24 16:35:33 2011-01-24 21:35:33 open open fedora-board-meeting-24-january-2011 publish 0 0 post  0  _edit_lock 1295904936   _edit_last 6   13   http://topsy.com/trackback?url=http%3A%2F%2Fblogs.fedoraproject.org%2Fwp%2Fboard%2F%3Fp%3D41&utm_source=pingback&utm_campaign=L2 208.74.66.43 2011-01-24 17:20:00 2011-01-24 22:20:00  1 pingback 0 0   14  mrtom@fedoraproject.org  62.201.142.27 2011-01-25 01:01:58 2011-01-25 06:01:58  1  0 227
 * The next Fedora Board meeting should be live and in-person at FUDcon Tempe.
 * Note there is also a Future Goals for Fedora session proposed by the Board for the FUDcon Tempe technical sessions Saturday-Sunday.