FOSE ’10 FTW.

Thanks to our Fedora Ambassadors for a special assist last week. We were asked to support Tux.org, a nonprofit umbrella group in the Washington DC area, and the Northern Virginia LUG (NoVaLUG) in their presence at FOSE, the USA’s biggest federal government IT show. Our Ambassadors came through with flying colors — David Nalley sent out a box of discs since Fedora is incredibly popular in federal government offices.

Although I wasn’t able to attend this year because of a prior scheduled travel, I received some very nice correspondence back from the folks at Tux.org about our assistance there. In addition, a friend from my local FredLUG was on hand to help at the booth, and he arranged to have copies of our handy one-page release notes PDF printed out for people as a helpful pamphlet. He mentioned:

The Fedora CDs were a big hit at FOSE. We “sold out” early Thursday on the last day. I had printed the flier you pointed me to in “book format” so it folded up, had the 3 pages easily read. That turned out to be very helpful for several people interested.

He also added a point of interest:

One of the most often asked question [sic] was the difference between the distributions. Since I had one blank page left, it would be nice if the last page would highlight the “why fedora” answer.

I would argue that in the case of the Fedora operating system, there’s a particular combination of freedom, innovation, beauty, and relevance that make it unique. Certainly other Linux distros communities feature one or more of these qualities, but it’s the combination of all of them that makes Fedora such a pleasant distro to use.

There’s a page on our wiki that addresses some of these ideas in greater detail. If you’re looking for a way to help out, maybe you’re interested in using the sources provided and building a new single page that makes those ideas as easy and fun to learn about as the rest of the one page release notes.

Great contributors, part 102.

I wanted to give a special shout of thanks and gratitude to Sijis Aviles of Chicago, Illinois (USA) and Hiemanshu Sharma of Bangalore, India. They’ve been intimately involved with work on redesigning pieces of the Fedora websites. They’ve demonstrated an enormous amount of ambition, effort, persistence, elbow grease, patience, and just darn good spirits in helping out. Together and separately, they’ve done work on the Spins sites, other coding work for the redesign process, and general upkeep throughout the fedoraproject.org domain.

Thanks to both of you for being such great contributors to Fedora!

There are many stories in Fedora just like this one that deserve telling, but I had a few minutes to make an entry, and these two wonderful individuals just happened to be on my mind at the time. Who’s someone in Fedora on your mind today that you don’t think people hear enough about?

FPL future.

I’ve been the Fedora Project Leader for a little over two years now, and now that we’re rocketing (sorry!) toward my fifth release in that role, I’m interested in branching out into other ways of championing free and open source software at Red Hat.  Before I do that, I want to smoothly pass on the role of Fedora Project Leader, and make sure the next FPL can not only be fully successful, but continue to build on a process of growth and change for the future.

My peers and managers in Red Hat and the community at large have been incredibly supportive, and there’s no one driving this decision other than me.  The Fedora Board, and key managers and engineers in Red Hat, are all part of the process of selecting the next FPL.

This process will naturally take some time, but I’m glad that the partnership between Red Hat and the rest of the Fedora community allows me to give people an early heads-up about these plans.

It’s important that Fedora always be able to make opportunities for fresh and energetic leadership that will help take our Project, and the distribution we make, to the next level of achievement. Regardless of what I’m doing next at Red Hat, part of my job early on will be to give as much assistance as possible to the next FPL, just as Max Spevack did for me, allowing that person to successfully take over this position, and continue leading Fedora into the future.

By the way, it might have been difficult to figure out how to write this message, except for the fact that we are all working together in a very special area of endeavor — free software.  And thankfully the Fedora Project not only embraces the concept, but the practice of free software, so there is always source to look back on, recorded history to examine, and open and transparent process to draw from.  In short, we have giants’ shoulders on which to stand.  So of course I looked to see how our previous FPL handled the delicate matter of succession.

I’m sure no one, including Max, will mind if I took a look at that text for a starting point.  Unprecedented transparency has continued to be a hallmark of the Fedora Project, and it’s a legacy we can all be proud of.

Denizen for a day.

I flew up to Boston yesterday to be in Westford for a couple of days. As it turns out, John Poelstra is also in Westfrd this week for team meetings, so I met up with him and another coworker to ride out to Westford. I got to meet some other program managers from Red Hat’s Brno office last night for dinner which was a nice bonus.

This morning I took up residence at the “Paul Frields Memorial Desk,” which is normally traded off between visiting interns and Community Architecture team members. I’ll be working from here until Wednesday afternoon when I have to leave to catch my flight home.

There are many people to see here that I normally don’t catch face to face. So if you don’t see me on IRC as much over the next few days, don’t worry, I’m probably just having a chat with someone in person. And feel free to send me email if you need anything and can’t find me online.

Documenting the goodness.

The Fedora Documentation team uses a fantastic tool called Publican for their documentation work. Publican allows people to turn DocBook XML source, a popular and fairly ubiquitous format, into beautiful renderings in HTML, PDF, ASCII, and even RPM. Publican was developed by Jeff Fearn, who works at Red Hat’s office down under in beautiful Brisbane, QLD Australia, and of course a cast of many people who contributed bugs and enhancement requests.

The Fedora Docs team uses DocBook XML for a number of important release documents like the Installation Guide and the Release Notes. By using source in a git repository, they can collaborate quickly on new and existing documents, and Publican helps them quickly produce translatable POT files that our awesome Fedora translation teams turn into localized documents. (That’s the meaning of L10n by the way — “localization.”) The work the Documentation team produces can be turned into dozens of local languages this way.

When Publican originally debuted, it was fairly robust but it did take a while to build things. Recently, though, it’s taken an enormous leap in efficiency, and rendering documents is incredibly fast, which makes the lives of writers, editors, and translators better by a huge margin. When your workflow speeds up by a factor of ten, thanks to the hard work of developers, it does tend to put a smile on your face!

Wait — did I mention the hard work of developers? Well, let me not forget the next step in this toolchain of wonder and majesty: Transifex. The genii over at Indifex haven’t been sitting on their laurels either, and we’re now using a newer branch of their product on our translation site. That allows our translators to work incredibly quickly and efficiently on documentation and software, localizing all of them so that we can bring Fedora’s free software to people all over the world in their own languages.

In fact, the Indifex guys work so fast that they’ve already turned out version 0.8.0 even though we’ve just migrated to 0.7.4 for our translation site. (I hear the transition up to 0.8.0 isn’t difficult, and it’s likely we’ll be doing this in the near future.) I should also note that a bunch of people spent cycles on getting our translation infrastructure updated, including Dimitris Glezos, Mike McGrath, Noriko Mizumoto, Jens Petersen, Diego Búrigo Zacarão, Ricky Zhou, and others. You guys just kick hindquarters all over the place.

The great thing about moving to Transifex 0.7.4 is that it now supports Publican’s method of divvying up POT and PO files for translators. Rather than have just one big file for the original format, and for each language, Publican divides them up. This makes collaborative work easier, and it also increases translators’ morale because their individual and iterative progress is more visible.

As a result the Docs and Translation teams are ready to kick out the jams for the Fedora 13 release. Translators can quickly and easily test their translation; documentation folks can test builds quickly and collaborate faster on content changes; and we can publish the results immediately to package updates which we can push out regularly leading up to the final release of Fedora 13. It’s going to be amazing!

Marketing FAD, Days 2 and 3.

On day 2, Chris Grams of New Kind and John Adams and Jonathan Opp of Red Hat joined us to talk about growing and strengthening Fedora brand. They talked to us about the 10-plus year work that has gone into building Red Hat’s brand, and helped us find the right questions to ask about Fedora’s brand. The full log is probably more illuminating than quick notes on a complex topic. I also got a chance to take a look at the excellent book Designing Brand Identity, and did some reading in it overnight — enough to know I want to go get a copy of my own.

It seems like Fedora has been doing a good job of maintaining consistency in the way we present Fedora, and that our reliance on the same essential four foundations of freedom, friends, features and first can continue to serve us well into the future. We spent much of the rest of the day trying to flesh out our answers to the questions Chris, John, and Jonathan passed on as a good exercise.

Russell Harrison also took some wonderful head shots of some of the participants at the very tail end of the day. They turned out great and I can really see how much there is to learn as a novice photographer! Then we headed off to the Carolina Ale House for a fun dinner, followed by several hours of packaging introduction by the inimitable David Nalley (ke4qqq).

On day 3, we focused on PR and press-related content. Our guest speaker had a last-minute emergency and we rearranged some of our schedule. Henrik Heigl (wonderer), who’s an experienced press person himself, gave a fantastic presentation on press relations from the perspective of having a foot in both worlds. He’s helping to drive our work on a more modular, expressive, and useful press kit. Everyone worked on content for the kit, drafting up pages that we can shift in and out of such a kit over time and depending on where and to whom we’re giving it out.

Last night I had to hole up in my room to get some non-Marketing work done. Today we are pumped up for a day of video work with the awesome Red Hat Creative team. I’ll be leaving late this afternoon, bringing Neville Cross back to the airport to catch his plane back to Nicaragua, and then heading home.

Marketing FAD, Day 1.

People have already posted about much of the goings-on from Day 1 of the Marketing FAD, such as the draft of our new, low-drag marketing plan, and our approach to spins, but I wanted to call out a specific area for people to notice. Back in the fall the board talked a lot about expanding the user base of Fedora, and ultimately set out four points to describe a user base that represents a wide audience of people, yet includes our current contributor base. One way to think about this user base is as a minimum bar. If, at a minimum, you fit all of these four descriptions, you are someone Fedora can make very happy — or if we’re not, then we should:

1. Voluntary consumer — Someone who’s choosing Linux (even just to try it) for any of a large number of reasons, including stability, security, free of cost, free as in speech, and so forth
2. Computer-friendly — Someone who’s not necessarily a computer expert, yet not someone who’s never used a computer before
3. Likely collaborator — Someone who may not be using the communications channels that we rely on as experienced contributors, but would be willing to provide information on a problem if we provide the opportunity
4. General productivity user — Someone who regularly performs non-technical tasks with their computer as the primary tool

A lot of details about these descriptions are set out on the wiki and come directly out of the discussions from last fall. We spent a good deal of time at FAD day 1 describing the intersection of these very broad groups of people. I illustrated this on the board with a simple Venn diagram, with these criteria as four large circles that shared a very broad common area in the middle (the intersection).

That intersection is still a very large population of people, and we contributors are a small subgroup somewhere in the middle of that intersection. We all have particular interests in Fedora that can make it easy, if we’re not careful, to exclude a lot of people from that large population. And sometimes we may have to re-tune our own expectations or priorities to effectively serve them. (Providing a more stable update user experience is just one example.)

Does this mean that we don’t want people outside these areas to use Fedora? Let’s take some guy named Edward as an example. What if he’s not a likely collaborator, but still wants to switch to Fedora and be productive? We want him to be comfortable too. But when we make decisions about how to set up certain systems in Fedora, we want to make it easy for people to collaborate. We’ll make decisions to encourage them. Often that will have no bearing on Edward, and his experience will be no worse for it. On the other hand, there might be some tool installed that offers collaborators an opportunity in which he’s not interested. Who knows, one day Edward might change his mind and take advantage of the opportunity presented. If not, he’s welcome to ignore or uninstall that thing.

After talking about these concepts, John Poelstra popped out a nice pyramid-style graphic illustrating the concept without painful Venn diagrams. I’m hoping he’ll post it in his blog at some point. (Hint!) Mel Chua also brought up the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition and the four stages of competence. These are worth understanding as they affect our approach to users, and ability to look beyond our personal skill levels and understand how to properly on-ramp users into new contributors. It’s interesting to see how many of the conversations around change play directly into the pitfalls predicted by these models.

The beginnings of our new marketing plan are less scholastic than our previous attempt (seen for now on the wiki) but make a lot more sense in terms of broadening the user base, and more importantly, determining how future Fedora plays a part in helping more people get things done that are important to them. Getting out of our comfort zone may be difficult, but I believe it will be rewarding in the long run, and do nothing but increase Fedora’s relevance. Moreover, it will increase our ability to advance free software, pursuant to our philosophy of open collaboration.

We also collected post-mortem information about our F12 marketing efforts, where we were successful and where we were not, and everyone took back homework to complete, such as collating all the existing ideas for marketing tasks into a list we can prioritize and then assign or defer at the next couple of Marketing meetings. (That will help us ensure we’re not taking on too much and under-delivering, but rather picking the things that are really important to do, and exceeding expectations.) I drafted my homework, a general page on post-mortem information collection, after returning to the hotel.

Before that we watched the ‘Canes be outplayed by the Coyotes from the comfort of Red Hat’s swank private box at the RBC Center. We were joined by Russell Harrison’s lovely wife Doracy, and Greg DeKoenigsberg and his wife Mel stopped by as well. It would have been nice to see the home team make good, but we had fun anyway — especially Robyn and Ryan who are from Phoenix!

By the way, there’s a reason I called out open collaboration earlier. We have a great treat coming up for Day 2 — we’re being visited by Chris Grams (of New Kind), Jonathan Opp, and John Adams to talk about evaluation, growth, and spread of brand, and how to expand our opportunities to do those things in a community. Our agenda continues on the wiki today, and we’ll again be on IRC Freenode at #fedora-fad.

Marketing FAD Day 0.

I had a pretty uneventful drive from Fredericksburg to Raleigh, and arrived at the hotel with plenty of time to unwind. I met up with Henrik, Ben, and Neville at the lobby, and after a couple quick phone calls I rejoined them and we did a little catching up. It’s great to have the opportunity to host some non-US folks for this FAD and I’m so grateful that Neville and Henrik were able to spare the time and make a long journey here to be with us.

We felt bad about being the only people hanging around the lobby being boisterous and having fun, so we repaired to one of the rooms to hang out. Henrik is an expert photographer and was willing to impart some of his experience and recommendations to me, an eager novice. He gave me a couple tips for cheap but effective equipment that was suitable for beginners and beyond. I got to see some of the goodies he had with him, like a simple flash diffuser, which I tried and was amazed at the effectiveness. I quickly placed an online order for some extra stuff for my Canon DSLR, which I will hopefully receive before I leave for Westford next weekend. I know my wife reads my blog so I will take a moment to reassure her it was not expensive stuff.

We headed out for dinner at the Carolina Ale House, which some of my readers who attended the previous and very wintry FAD down here in Raleigh will recall. Any place with Dogfish Head ales on tap is tops in my book. Ben and I conspired to pick up a gift for Mel and Robyn as well, which will be awaiting them in their room when they arrive.

We’ll be picking up Robyn, Ryan, and Mel at the airport late tonight, and tomorrow morning we’ll head to Red Hat HQ for Day 1 of the event. You can see the entire agenda laid out on the wiki, and we’ll be on IRC Freenode at #fedora-fad where interested people can join in as remote participants. The Marketing team will definitely rock it astarting tomorrow. (These are the jokes.)

Marketing FAD 2010.

In just a little while, I’ll be heading offline to pack and then hit the road for the Marketing FAD in Raleigh, NC. Our plan is very well fleshed out on the wiki and I’m looking forward to seeing all the participants from around our community — some for the first time in person. It’s going to be a very exciting and energizing weekend, between wonderful guests, an ambitious agenda, and remote participation.

I’ll be returning home late on Tuesday night. I’ll likely take some sort of time off next week so I can finish a set of documents for a bunch of guys called the IRS. I have more I wanted to post this morning but time has caught up with me, so I’ll likely do it tonight from Raleigh.

Link tracking

Starting with this release, a few of us have tossed around and then quickly ramped up a process for link tracking. This started with a question from Mike McGrath on the logistics list, and the purpose is to know where people are finding our download site and other properties. Eventually we can build some of this into our community maintenance practices. We’re not doing anything fancy yet, but certainly we would love people to help improve the idea and the process, and help make it easy to find ways we can better promote Fedora.

It would be helpful if everyone pitched in with links they make to the Fedora 13 Alpha release (and beyond, to the Beta and then the final).  You can read about how to do it on the wiki. We’ve also set up some additional links for your use in status tools like Identi.ca, Facebook, Twitter, and so on.* You can copy these links to use in your own status updates and blog entries:

• u.nu
• is.gd
• bit.ly
• tinyurl.com
• ur1.ca (100% free!)
• 2tu.us (100% free!)

If you think of other major areas where we might want to track links, so that we know where people are finding their download links, feel free to contribute to the link tracking wiki page.

UPDATE: Forgot to mention — this is all being coordinated by the community Fedora Marketing team, and since we have an event coming up this coming weekend, hopefully we’ll have a chance to see how the idea and execution are working out.

UPDATE 2: Two new link trackers added above for your blogs and status updates, totally free software services!

* Of course we prefer fully open source platforms for these services, but we also know there are a lot of reachable people out there, and want to leverage all the channels we have available.