Where’s Pauldo?

When Jared started as the new FPL in July, I started a process of transitioning to a new role in Red Hat. A lot of the parameters of that new role, which is currently called an “operations manager,” were yet to be defined. (In fact, some of them still are.) I realized the other day after a couple questions from friends in Fedora that maybe people were interested in what I was doing. I’m always surprised by that, but I’m happy to give some more details here.

I continue to report to the same manager, Tim Burke, currently the VP of Linux Development and a frequent participant in Fedora events such as the most recent North American FUDCon in Toronto. Among myriad other duties, Tim is accountable for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux product; Spot, Jared, and I all report to Tim.

When I started looking for other opportunities in Red Hat, Tim brought this new operations manager role to my attention. It would consist primarily of working with various teams in his department, coordinating cross-team initiatives, improving communications, performing some management activities, and exploring ways to enhance productivity in the department.

If that sounds somewhat vague, it’s because he wanted to adapt the role somewhat to my skills and abilities. I’ve really come to respect and enjoy that kind of flexibility and openness, which is a hallmark of life at Red Hat. Having the support of your manager to succeed in a new role is certainly very important, but when they also want to help you define it, the challenge is larger but even more fulfilling.

Another major requirement of the new job was to help Jared have a smooth transition into his role as Fedora project leader. I very much appreciated the recognition that leadership changes are complex and time-intensive for everyone involved. New leaders require time to get to know their constituents, responsibilities, and influence, and develop their vision and priorities for moving forward. To that end, the vast majority of my time now and over the past few months has been devoted to providing that runway for “the new guy.”

Jared and I communicate constantly about the work going on for the Fedora 14 release, and I support his transition in part by taking on tasks with which he’s not yet familiar. That work lets him concentrate immediately on critical path tasks that must be done by the FPL. It also gives me an opportunity to show him what I’m doing, so he’ll be familiar and comfortable with it for the Fedora 15 cycle. During this release, I’ve been doing the following:

• Working on Fedora Insight, a content management system where we plan to start by publishing Fedora Weekly News and expand, in accordance with community participation, to other areas
• Providing information to RHEL teams about progress and expectations
• Helping with release materials from the Fedora Marketing team
• Assisting Jared with the PR schedule items for Fedora 14
• Serving as the primary Red Hat point of contact for the upcoming FUDCon Tempe 2011
• Helping connect volunteers in different parts of Fedora with additional teams where it makes sense to coordinate

Of course, over time my role in Fedora, including that kind of support, will taper off to a large degree, especially following the release of Fedora 14. I won’t be disappearing from Fedora in any way. My plan is to continue working on Fedora Insight, as sort of a “10-20%” project, in my new role, and I have support for doing that. Also, where Fedora is relevant to RHEL department improvements (and it often is!), I expect to continue having conversations with Jared and many other individuals and teams in the Fedora community, to explore how Red Hat can continue and improve its level and quality of contributions.

So that’s the long and short of what I’m doing nowadays. I’m very proud of the work our community has done in Fedora over the past several years, and looking forward to many more. I’m grateful for the constant support of the community, my peers, and my management. I’m also excited that, in terms of a career at Red Hat, I’ve not only been able to hopefully contribute in some way to the success of the Fedora Project, but also to find a new way to help free and open source software succeed by taking on a different kind of role in the company.

Thanks for letting me prattle on. I hope this helps people understand my new role at Red Hat a little better. And of course, I’m sure that, as the old song goes, I’ll be seeing you in all the old familiar places!*

* Yes, I know the song is a little melancholy, which isn’t quite what I intend here, but the line’s too good too pass up!

Passing it on.

Today I’m meeting a nice couple from up the road in Bristow to hand over our much loved minivan. I was never ashamed of being a minivan owner. We called it our “golden funk machine” because it was so often used in service of bringing asl the band gear to gigs.

In fact, I used to drive my parents’ when I was in high school. And even though my friends may not have admitted it, I think they liked it when I was the elected driver on a weekend out, because everyone would be comfortable for the ride.

We bought this van right after Evie was born, and it’s been a good car. It brought us on several happy family vacations and other adventures. I’m not feeling overly sentimental about letting it go, just appreciating that we got more than our money’s worth from that van. Hopefully we’ll be saying the same thing  some day about Golden Funk Machine II!

FUDCon sponsorships, fares, roommates, and you.

One of the hallmarks of the Fedora Users and Developers Conference, or FUDCon, is that it’s gone global. We just wrapped up another stupendous European event in Zurich this weekend, and we’re already deeply into planning another FUDCon in Tempe in January. Lots of people may also know that we make sponsorships (subsidies) available for our global FUDCon events.

But how do these sponsorships actually work, with regard to paying for stuff like airfares and lodging?

Travel fares

The cost of actually getting from Point A to Point B can be a hindrance for contributors. So we try to make it easier for people who are doing good work to get to FUDCon where they can collaborate in person. The way we do that is by directly buying airfares or other travel tickets. To some extent, we become a little travel agency that serves a small pool of attendees who otherwise couldn’t get to FUDCon. Sending cash advances is possible in some cases, but it’s non-optimal because of the way the accounting works. Buying directly saves time and effort, plus it’s a little more of a personal touch.

No matter the method, there’s always some work involved. It’s worth it, though, when you consider not only what contributors get out of the event, but what they put into it as well! A day of person-time to book travel for a dozen people yields a dozen people coming to FUDCon and clocking several dozen hours of learning, teaching, and good old-fashioned work. That’s a pretty phenomenal ROI before you even start counting the thanks and goodwill of colleagues that you get to send to a fantastic event!

Lodging

We rely on the subsidized people to make their own hotel reservations. Most people who come to FUDCon can cut their costs by sharing a room with someone — double occupancy saves money. The logistics of finding roommates can seem complex, but I’m hoping this post makes it simpler:

• We have a space on the wiki pre-registration table for Room sharing. When you mark a yes there, it means you want or need a roommate to share costs. When you find a roommate, you mark your roommate’s name in that box — and so does your roommate.

• We ask the people we subsidize, wherever possible, to find a roommate who is also subsidized. That means we can simply put their room on our “master account” at the hotel, and the subsidized folks don’t have to worry about a thing when they check out. Putting together people whose funding comes from one place just makes sense. If we get all the subsidized folks rooming together, it’s much easier for other people to figure out open roomsharing connections.

• Finally, all the people who have an open connection for roomsharing — a yes in the Room sharing column but no identified roommate — can easily contact each other through email or IRC to find roommates. It’s like the way BarCamp works. The crowd can solve the problems more easily in a pareto efficient way than just a few planners.

At the hotel, sponsored folks should have to worry as little as possible about their lodging. We take care of the bill for anyone we’re subsidizing at checkout time — it’s that simple. Having a group set up at the hotel where the organizers can deal directly with the hotel management makes things easy for everyone, and also ensures us a good rate on the hotel.

By the way, for the upcoming Tempe event, we were able to secure a rock-bottom price on lodging for a very popular area (the Phoenix area in wintertime) because we knew there were a lot of people who would be participating in the event and would want to stay for the weekend. You can help by making your reservations as soon as possible. Our group rate ends on November 5, so visit the lodging section on the FUDCon Tempe wiki page now, and use one of the handy links to make a reservation!

Decision making

We have a wiki page devoted entirely to the sponsorship/subsidy process. The decisions are made by those who show up to help plan and execute the FUDCon event, and they’re all Fedora community members who want to make sure the maximum number of participants can attend. And just like other FUDCon events, the planners work hard to include people from other regions, ensuring we have some participation from LATAM, EMEA, and APAC regions for the North American event for example.

In the specific case of the upcoming Tempe event, the planners focused on bringing in people who would commit to help plan and execute future FUDCon events in their region, regardless of whether it was held in their locale or country. That helps us spread the sparkling, rainbow-shooting unicorn magic* of FUDCon globally, and increase the community’s ability to drive and improve these events.

Current status

While we have hit our limit on subsidies for the moment, we are still looking for other ways to enhance our subsidy fund. For instance, some of the event organizers are reaching out to potential sponsors who love free and open source software, to see if they’d like to help us defray a few costs. That helps us divert more funds to sponsor additional community members. You can see our current ticket list in the Trac instance we use for planning.

If you’re interested in helping with the work of planning and organizing, why not join our mailing list and come to a meeting? We welcome community participation and you’ll find it’s a great way to help your fellow Fedora community members. See you there!

* Just seeing if you’re still reading.

FUDCon Zurich best wishes.

I was in Raleigh, North Carolina all day yesterday. I drove down in the morning so I could appear on a panel with a couple amazing people — Chris Grams and Tom Rabon. Returning to the home office today, I’ve been reading some of the blog reports that have started rolling in from Fedora contributors who are attending (and in some cases organizing!) the FUDCon in Zurich this weekend. It looks like it’s going to be a marvelous event, and I hope everyone there enjoys it.

I was able to attend two FUDCons in Europe (both in Berlin) during my time as FPL and I can’t begin to say how valuable and important those trips were to me. I was able to meet a lot of people I only knew by their IRC nicknames, and make some lifelong friends. I imagine a lot of the people at FUDCon Zurich will be returning, long-time contributors, and others will be new folks who are looking to get involved in Fedora in some capacity, or even just curious about who we are, what we do, and how we do it.

FUDCon events are a good way for us to renew the social bonds that help reinforce and support our collaboration with each other. They’re also an ideal place to reach out to new people and show them the large and friendly nature of our community, and help them find ways to participate and “learn the ropes” of our community. That includes finding areas where we need more help, including teams where contributors have moved on, or want to step back to give others a chance to lead.

I’ve heard people often talk about the fifth foundation of Fedora — in addition to the four everyone knows: freedom, friends, features, first — being fun. I think fun makes a good addition to the list because it starts with f! However, I think it’s more accurate to say fun in the sense of being rewarding. Not everything we do is 100% fun, after all — certainly many of us have soldiered on, trying to solve a problem by fixing a bug, sweating over a translation, trying to craft a procedure in our documentation, make our websites look a little better, correct a service in our infrastructure, and so on, when perhaps we’d rather be doing something else. But when we complete that task, hopefully we feel that time spent was rewarding — even if it wasn’t completely fun. We should constantly strive to make Fedora rewarding for people who are contributing.

That brings me back to making it easy for new contributors to learn and to lead. We can’t expect everyone currently in Fedora will be here forever, after all. People’s lives, priorities, and available time change constantly. They find new jobs with different schedules and demands, they have relationships that require time and attention to nurture, and so on. We sometimes have to re-balance things that may have been rewarding in the past against other priorities so that we can continue to lead full, happy lives. This is a natural, continual process, and we can easily accommodate it in a big project like Fedora.

To do so, we should always look to provide other people easy access to participation, and easy access to lead our efforts. Depending on the same people to always be around to work on the same tasks is a certain road to burning them (and perhaps ourselves) out. There are at least two things each of us can do to prevent that from happening.

First, take a look at what you are doing in Fedora. Ask yourself, how did you learn how to do it? Could someone else do the same with a minimum of effort? Or is the knowledge required to do it scattered in many different places with an uncertain road to finding all of it? Make a plan for bringing that knowledge together, collaborate with your colleagues to make sure the plan is solid, and then execute it.

Second, look around you at other people you know or see regularly in Fedora and ask them if they need help doing the same thing. Help them document what they do, so someone else can do it too. You might just find out that it’s something you’re interested in doing, too. I know this happened with me personally in a number of areas (such as helping with the Websites team). Sometimes turning to a new challenge can give you a real boost of interest and energy that you didn’t expect!

Attrition is a natural process in any group — whether it’s a volunteer community or a company. The groups that have real staying power figure out how to meet the challenges of attrition, with tools that quickly help new members learn and do things proficiently.

What are some practices you use to prevent burnout and to make it easy for people to help you and others?

On a side note, I wanted to give some kudos to Jesse Keating, who heads up Fedora’s release engineering work, for taking on this challenge head on at Zurich. A couple weeks ago we talked about the opportunity at Zurich to get attendees looking at Fedora’s release engineering SOPs (standard operating procedures), finding remaining gaps, and enlisting people to help fill them. We have great technical people in our EMEA community who could easily understand and help document those processes, especially with one of our lead practitioners in attendance. Jesse was very bullish about this idea and I can’t wait to see the results that come out of the travel.

Similarly, we have groups of Ambassadors, packagers, translators, designers and artists, and other colleagues together in Zurich. We can accomplish a lot with all those great minds and talented hands in one place at one time — best of success to everyone!

‘Til Tuesday.

Many moons ago, Max Spevack wrote about why Fedora releases on a Tuesday. I thought it might make interesting reading for people who haven’t been around our releases long, or might have their heads so full of important knowledge that they let this piece slide off the queue. I know that in my advanced age I’m starting to lose bits of knowledge so I can remember, for example, when my kids need to be picked up at piano lessons.

Domestic duty day.

After Ohio Linux Fest this weekend I’m taking a day to do some domestic stuff, during which time I’ll be online sporadically. I’ll be back around the intartubez as normal tomorrow morning.

OLF 2010, day 1.

Yesterday the Ohio LinuxFest kicked into high gear, with dozens of talks and sessions geared toward free software aficionados of all skill levels. I don’t know the attendance numbers but I heard people saying the conference felt even bigger and busier than last year. (I was last at Ohio LinuxFest in 2008.)

We had discovered that, besides the Fedora booth, the generous folks at OLF had also set up a booth for Red Hat, who sponsored the conference in part as well. Since we had a fair number of Red Hatters in attendance — Spot, Ruth, and myself — and had a full complement of Fedora Ambassadors on hand as well, we decided to work that booth. The booths were helpfully right next to each other so we could all easily collaborate and converse with each other during the day.

It was a wonderful day spent talking to enthusiastic software freedom lovers from all over the region. There was one aggressively rude individual who wasted a lot of people’s time at many booths (not just ours), but he couldn’t put a damper on an otherwise fantastic day. I probably could have seen a few talks myself, but just when I thought I might slip away to do that, we would get some visitors at our booth and it was simply more interesting and fun to chat with them and answer questions!

I think shows tend to let me do a sort of “extrovert sprint.” Generally I like solitude and quiet, but it seems like a one-day show is the perfect length for me to be a 100% social animal and really enjoy it.

In any case, I was also at Ohio LinuxFest to do a talk on “PyGTK for Beginners,” which I did in the afternoon. Despite my talk happening at the same time as those of David Nalley (SELinux) and Amber Graner (burnout), but even so I had an enormous audience who asked great questions and appeared to really enjoy the talk — as much as I enjoyed giving it! I had done a longer version of this talk at the Southeast LinuxFest conference in June, so I felt more at ease with the material and a little more “loose,” in a good way, doing it for the Ohio audience. Hopefully that came through — someone in the front row of the audience told me he had recorded it so I hope he’ll make it available.

I did manage to catch Monty’s (of Xiph.org and Red Hat fame) evening keynote, in his inimitable style which I find very enjoyable — both eloquent and engaging. I think his talk was really more like two different talks spliced together, with one part being about loving what you do, and the other about the promised subject of the state of codecs. I liked both parts and I hope the rest of the audience did too.

In the evening we had several groups going to disparate places for dinner again — I ended up with a different group from Friday night, at a Mongolian BBQ place down the street which was not bad. Later we made a rendezvous with the rest of our crew at the next door Hyatt Regency bar, and were joined by our dear friends who had organized the Southeast LinuxFest conference. They generously picked up the tab for a bunch of us and everyone had a superb time socializing, laughing, and winding down from a great conference.

A big “thank you” to Bethlynn, Moose, and the entire Ohio LinuxFest crew for their hard work on this event, and for giving me an opportunity to speak. It was a great event and I look forward to the next one!

I also want to say a special thank you to the magnanimous Brian Pepple, who provided Spot and me with rides from and to the airport. We’re killing time at the hotel for a little while, then off into the wild blue yonder and returning home.

OLF 2010, day 0.

I’m writing this from the Red Hat booth at Ohio Linux Fest 2010, which is bustling with visitors, so sorry if this is a little brief. For me Day 0 was yesterday (Friday). Some people, like Mel Chua, Ruth Suehle, and Robyn Bergeron, were here yesterday doing some awesome talks and generally spreading open source gospel here in Columbus, Ohio. Meanwhile, I drove about 2 hours to Baltimore, Maryland to catch my flight to the event. When I landed I met Brian Pepple at the world famous Cup O Joe stand, Spot landed soon after, and Brian took us to the hotel.

After a quick emergency email triage, we met up with everyone in the lobby. Several of us, including Robyn, Dave Nalley, and Mel, headed over to the speakers dinner where we proceeded to schmooze and enjoy a nice dinner. Meanwhile, Spot took a bunch of Fedora crew out for a nice sushi dinner (my dinner was good, but I missed out on the sushi, darn). Later, there was a spectacular party thanks to the wonderful folks at Nagios, who set everyone up with shirts, pizza, veggies, snacks, and drink tickets. You guys are fabulous, thanks!

Today, Spot, Ruth and I are pimping opensource.com heavily at the Red Hat booth, while the Fedora Ambassadors — including of course the intrepid Ben Williams and son Jamie — are passing out loads of cool swag to the crowds around the Fedora booth, showing off the software, and generally being great . I’m going to go over my talk once more in a few minutes to make sure I’m prepared.

FUDCon Tempe update #2.

Yesterday I sent a big update regarding FUDCon Tempe to the Fedora announcements list. Among the other important stuff in the update was highly anticipated lodging information. You can find the links you need on the FUDCon Tempe wiki page. Find yourself a roommate if desired and note it on the pre-registration table, and then make your hotel reservations!

The special $99 rate at the hotel is a real steal for the Phoenix area in wintertime, so don’t delay. The block rate is only guaranteed until November 5th!

US Labor Day holiday.

Just a note for Fedora friends in other geographic areas — today (Monday 2010-09-06) is a US holiday so chances are a substantial number of US participants will be out doing holiday stuff. Personally, I have some errands to run, some housework to do, and a new dog to play with. I’ll be back online tomorrow per usual.