SELF, day 0.

I had a great flight yesterday from Dulles to Greenville — the plane was very sparsely filled, and I had an exit row all to myself! It made for a great work environment even with a short flight. When I landed and picked up my car, I was both horrified and amused to find out it was bright yellow and had a spoiler. I’ll try to find time to take a picture because that car is so not me.

Arrived at the hotel fine after a ~40 minute drive, but needed to wait for a clean room. I soon found out why: the Southeast Linux Fest had almost 500 pre-registrants — for a first-year conference!. The hotel was full, and although I did get my room after a short wait, I also found out that thankfully there are other hotels in the area, several within walking distance.

I met up with David Nalley in the speaker/organizer lounge, where I deeply regretted not being hungry because they had BBQ there. We chatted and I went off to my room to catch up on some email and other tasks.

We gathered across the street at a restaurant called Rockhoppers that is decorated in penguins. Could that have been more fitting? I think not! Soon it was overflowing with penguins of a different variety, many seeking sustenance in the form of beer. I ended up at a table with some hilarious and fascinating people from around the region. Ian Weller showed up just after first round (don’t worry, Ian’s mom, he had Dr Pepper) and we enjoyed some really excellent dinner and laughs.

I got to talk to Richard Weait from OpenStreetMap for a bit about Moksha, the framework that underlies the new Fedora Community portal, and we caught up on my own hometown LUG, which he visited a couple of months back, much to our delight (and record-breaking attendance).

Finally, I went back to the hotel to bone up on my keynote for Saturday night, and then I fell prey to the curse of Fedora Project Leaders past: rewrote the whole thing less than 24 hours before the event. Wish me luck!

I’m going off to find Greg DeKoenigsberg and whoever showed up to man the various booths. Red Hat, as a Platinum sponsor of SELF, is supposed to have a nice presence here. I’ll be at the Fedora booth on and off, and at the Red Hat booth (wearing a different shirt) for a little while this afternoon. My keynote is at 5:00pm, after which I’ll be looking forward to tomorrow’s Fedora Activity Day with a bunch of the Fedora Docs team members.

Head down tomorrow.

Due to my travel to this week’s Fedora Activity Day in Raleigh, and the marketing work around the release, I find myself a little strapped for time and with a lot of writing to do. Tomorrow I will probably be absent from most IRC and only addressing critical email so I can get those tasks done.

This weekend is the Southeast Linux Fest (SELF) and we’ll have Fedora Ambassadors on hand to celebrate the event, and the release of Fedora 11. Clint ‘herlo’ Savage is giving a talk on making your own custom Fedora Remix, and I have the honor of delivering the evening keynote. I’m really looking forward to this event, and encourage you to come by and say hi if you’re attending.

“C” is not just for cookie.

“C” also stands for “Community.” Why bring this up now? Because along with Leonidas roaring to life this week, we also have some other great news to share with our (little-”c”) community members:

Fedora Community – the new collaboration site for Fedora contributors! Fedora Community is powered by Moksha, a new, revolutionary, and 100% free software web framework that will deliver on the promise of a true infrastructure of participation.

As with all the code we build in the Fedora Project, Fedora Community is 100% free and open source software, from soup to nuts, with no proprietary bits, and no closed back ends. Because it’s built in part from best-of-breed free software solutions like Python, Turbogears, jQuery, ToscaWidgets, AMQP, and others, it provides an incredible amount of flexibility, power, and simplicity for anyone wanting to extend it.

Over the coming months, the brainshare behind Fedora Community will be showing our contributors how they can create new and exciting capabilities for the portal using Moksha. Even though the site currently focuses on software maintenance, in the future our community will be able to solve myriad problems with the tools it showcases. Translators, writers, designers, community organizers, system administrators — all of our groups of crafty contributors will be able to make use of the platform for real-time collaboration.

The site is not perfect yet, but it was important to everyone working on it to give the community a full experience of what the future has in store, as close to the F11 release as possible. And we can’t wait to see what our community does with it next!

I want to thank the Fedora Community team, John ‘J5′ Palmieri, Mairin Duffy, Tom ‘spot’ Callaway, and Luke Macken, for their tireless work on this new system, and for the innovation in the new Moksha framework, which has application far beyond Fedora Community (check out CIVX for a taste thereof). I also want to give special thanks to the intrepid and ever-vigilant Fedora Infrastructure team, which pulled out all the stops to get this site out — in the midst of record-breaking traffic due to the Fedora 11 release. You guys are the bee’s knees!

Do I sound excited? Oh yes, my friends. The infrastructure of participation has arrived — where it goes next is up to you.

Dynamic video duo.

Did you know that the wonderful Red Hat Creative team put together a video about a couple of the cool features in Fedora 11? Come check it out on the redhat.com site.

Come and get it, volume 11.

Leonidas roars to life!

Come get some.

You can read the official release announcement here, which includes other helpful links as well.

Know thy SELF.

Yes, I’m sorry about that one too. But are you getting ready for the Southeast Linux Fest? It’s coming this Saturday — a superb gathering of Linux community members, speakers from a number of different projects (including Yr Humble Blogger doing the evening keynote), and all sorts of projects to help you become a free software contributor. Of course Fedora will have an awesome presence there, and as it turns out our sponsor Red Hat will be there as well with their own booth. Please come by and say hello!

Get your goggles on.

Tomorrow is the day — Fedora 11 roars into action! Make sure that you fire up your BitTorrent client and seed for others; help to spread the love!

I want to take a moment to thank each and every person who supported this release — whether it was by writing code, filing a bug, triaging said bug, translating text, working with press, writing or editing the wiki and other docs, testing packages or releases, spreading media and message, organizing events or release parties, helping users, or any of the other activities that make Fedora an incredible and vibrant community.

Thank you for everything you do to make Fedora wonderful. We’re happy and lucky to have you with us on this journey. If you enjoy the release only a tenth as much as I enjoy working with all of you, I have no doubt this will be our most popular release yet.

See you on the tubez tomorrow!

FAD day 0-1.

I drove down from Fredericksburg yesterday in about 3.5 hours, and checked in. Found that Rex was already there but had eaten dinner, and met up with Alex Maier, Greg DeKoenigsberg, and his wife for dinner, and managed to accrete Seth Vidal and his SO. Jesse Keating and I are roomed together and by the time I got back to the hotel both of us were about ready to drop.

This morning we set up Fedora Talk so that our community could dial in and hear the proceedings. We also made camp in the #fad channel on IRC Freenode so that people could comment on the process, send in questions, and so forth. It ended up being a very efficient and effective way of communicating with each other where a free-for-all would have been really problematic.

The conference was meant to zero in on how we could make Rawhide and our development cycle support Fedora contributors and developers more effectively. As part of the brainstorming process, because of the panoply of topics which are touched by Rawhide, we ended up capturing a lot of problem areas that really fell outside the scope of this particular FAD — in fact some of them (like an Auto-QA facility) probably merit their own FAD events.

John Poelstra and a few other people wisely pointed out how this differed from our original pitch, and I think their points were well taken. By getting everyone to “vote” on the brainstorming topics we were able to whittle down our choice of topics to those that are more directly concerned with the topic of fixing Rawhide. There’s no doubt some secondary topics have to become part of that process, but we are doing our best to preserve the central focus of this FAD — and ensure that our time is going to be well spent here and not flailing away at every possible perceived weakness in Fedora.

We have a little more work to do on the research portion of the agenda, but the log for day 1 is up and linked from the FAD wiki page as well. Of course everyone is getting very excited about the impending release of Fedora 11 tomorrow, but we’ll try not to let that stop us from a productive and energetic Day 2.

It does count.

Fedora teams’ call to action.

The Fedora Project has always been aimed at encouraging participation. Free/libre and open source software continues its forward momentum and increasing pace through the growth of community and contribution. And Fedora plays a large role in that motion, through our rapid release cycle, our dedication to working with upstream software communities, and by making sure that everything we build is 100% free and redistributable. But we are not just a distribution — we are a project made up of teams, and individuals: people working together in pursuit of common goals. The more people that help, the more we can accomplish. And therefore, as free/libre and open source software advocates we need to constantly ask ourselves, Am I doing what I can to make it easy for others to help?

On many Fedora teams, we have a robust membership from all around the world. We can see the effects of solid leadership and the lowering of barriers resulting in wider participation and contribution. But in some places we could be doing better. In that vein, I ask team leaders and principal contributors: How many steady contributors do you have working on your immediate team? How many people can you count on to perform key tasks? And at the risk of sounding morbid, I’ll ask a very important question that’s simply a good way of summing up this idea: What would happen if you got hit by a bus tomorrow?

OK, I warned you that was a little morbid. Forget about the risk of death, or at least injury, but focus on the central idea. Maybe we could sum up in a more humorous fashion. My 6-year-old son loves dinosaurs, so here’s a different way to ask that question: What if you were eaten by dinosaurs?

Yes, it’s even more unlikely than the bus scenario. By restating the question in a silly way, I hope it keeps you from worrying in concrete terms about your loved ones or your insurance. That way, you can treat the question as an abstract problem in community building. But that question still has concrete solutions. The point is, if for some reason you as a team leader or participant were suddenly out of the picture without warning, what would happen to the work your team does?

If you’re doing a solid job of lowering barriers, the answer should be “almost nothing.” The team should be able to keep chugging along, more or less. Certainly all contributors are important — you’d be missed, and we’d make it a point to hunt down those pesky velociraptors and make them pay! But the overall team’s ability to be healthy and vibrant shouldn’t hinge on any one person as a linchpin.

Can other people do your work if you’re out of commission? Can Fedora continue without you manning the wheel? If not, it’s time to step back and look at what you’re doing to improve that situation.

• Are the procedures for your team well documented, in an organized fashion, somewhere people can find and read them? For many people, documentation is never as fun as the “real work,” at least not for people who don’t love writing documentation itself as the real work. (Shout out to our Docs team for being in the latter category.) But if you were eaten by dinosaurs, that very documentation helps people find the information they need to keep your work going. Rather than have contributors flounder around trying to find random people on IRC to figure things out, you can promote efficiency and motivate new contributors by having material that will tell them how to work through processes.
• Does your team have a plan, that includes goals for the immediate future? Every team has a couple of goals its members want to accomplish. Some are very broad vision statements, but to encourage participation you need at least a couple of achievable near-term goals toward which your team members can work. By tracking their progress in regular meetings, and reporting that progress to the overall Fedora Project, you make it possible for interested people to pitch in where needed. This process also encourages the team to be honest with itself. The ability to look back on a release and say, “We achieved goals X and Y, but still need to do some hard work to attain Z,” is a powerful motivational force. Never underestimate the empowerment that comes from a job well done.

These two items are completely equal in importance. Just as important as the plan is to make sure you are building a team of contributors that helps you get there! The most successful community projects ensure that the most knowledgeable people don’t make a point of performing every difficult task. Instead, they make it a point both to spread that knowledge so others can help with the work, and to enlist the team’s help to establish and support achievable goals.

If you find that you as a community team leader spend a lot of your time saying, “I wish I had time to work on this cool new idea, but I have too much of this other, established work to do,” then it’s time to evaluate how you’re doing as a community builder. If you make it possible for other people to help — and, along the way, to succeed in achieving their own goals as participants — you are doing far more for Fedora in the long term. And in the event that you do get mistaken for a convenient, bite-sized package of Oscar Mayer lunch meat by a passing T. rex, you also make it possible for Fedora to continue that forward momentum we talked about earlier!

So in the vein of this post, I want to issue a challenge to each of our teams, to do two things during the next 10 days that will help make Fedora 12 the best release yet, and help make the Fedora community an even better place to contribute to free software:

1. Check to see that all the processes you use are documented on the Fedora Project wiki — and if not, make plans to do so. Don’t worry about skillful writing; worry only about documenting what you do.
2. Come up with one or two simple goals that your team wants to achieve by F12 release, and announce them to the community via the Planet (and any other way you’d like).

We’re embarking on our 12th release, and all signs point to the next release, just like the others before it, to be the best one yet. We have an enormous and amazing community of participants and contributors, who do more than just spread the word — they lead by example. Let’s each of us make sure we’re doing all we can to ensure our teams’ and our teammates’ success, by giving them the tools they need to help as fully as possible.

Viva Fedora!