Meeting:Board meeting 2010-06-18

Roll call

• Present: Paul Frields, Christopher Aillon, Colin Walters, Rex Dieter, Chris Tyler, Matt Domsch, Mo Duffy, Jon Stanley, Stephen Smoogen
• Regrets: Tom 'spot' Callaway
• Assigned meeting secretary: Christopher Aillon

Agenda

Organizational matters

• Welcome to the new Board members!
• Brief update on meeting and issue tracking details (Paul)
• May discuss sensitive matters. These will be noted, please keep them private.
• Board members do not necessarily speak for their employers.
• Trac access granted to new members, issues are potentially confidential in nature -- goal is to move as much of that material into minutes and IRC as possible.
• Gobby used for taking meeting minutes, posted to
• Discuss issues on advisory-board list when possible, use the private list only for confidential items

Top issues for F14 cycle

• Get consensus on agenda for next ~6 months, focus on moving Fedora to next level
  • High impact items to benefit the project or contributors
  • Will be incredibly useful for FPL successor
• Simply stating problems for now -- keep in mind that lots of Fedora works great -- we focus on the negative in this list as a way to embrace change and keep growing/moving forward
• Limit to 3 minutes per person, then prioritize with remaining time
• Christopher Aillon
  • Fedora needs a target experience, more than a target user. -- facilitate them to go from random user to someone who will file a bug (and then onward)
  • Fedora needs to be the open source development platform of choice
• Rex Dieter
  • We need to keep the community positive
  • Rawhide needs to be more consumable (and consumed)
  • Fedora needs to be easier and more welcoming for alternative desktops
• Matt Domsch
  • Fedora + Cloud: Fedora is great for platform as a service, and need to push Fedora as the OS of choice for cloud applications
  • We need to keep the community positive, and take decisive action in cases of extreme negativity
• Mo Duffy
  • Confusion around target experience.
    • Spins one area of confusion: should be closer to package groups, having to pick 1 spin is too restrictive
  • Mailing lists are a time sink
  • Losing mindshare - Need more marketing, Need more FOSS developers on Fedora, 3rd party software install is painful (especially when no Fedora packages provided)
• Smooge
  • Poisonous people make Fedora unpleasant to contribute to and are too prevalent [Noisy idiots is a better term look it up online]
  • Still too many people using EOL Fedora versions (in part due to EC2 issue)
  • We are not focusing towards eventual enterprise goals... We seem to wander from release to release without long term focus.
• Jon Stanley
  • Poisonous people tend to dominate discussions, need to find a way to fix this
  • Update stability, need to keep an eye on this issue with FESCo
• Chris Tyler
  • Joining Fedora is not as clear and consistent as it could be
  • Onramping: Make it easy for truly interested people to join Fedora and become effective contributors
• Colin Walters
  • Upgrade experience: have to do better here, not just packages but distros
  • Need to minimize regressions
  • Need to raise contributor interest in the default desktop (few new app suggestions for ex)
• Paul
  • Need to have a clear way to oppose useless trolling
• Mo
  • Negativity is a result of no clear vision or focus, we have one vision per person
• Paul
  • many of these problems are interlaced and need to be solved together to truly tackle the problem
  • Artificial separation between e.g. FESCo and Board -- need people to work closer together

Top 3 issues

• Negativity
• Fedora Experience
• Mindshare (via cloud, etc.)

Next meeting

• Proposed: Cancel 2010-06-25 -- Red Hat Summit
• Next meeting: 2010-07-02 UTC 1800, public IRC meeting