Insight into Insight.

As you may remember, Gentle Readers, not too long ago I changed roles in Red Hat to work more on management and administration within the platform engineering department, where I work for Tim Burke. Even if you haven’t run into Tim at one of our Fedora Users and Developers Conference (FUDCon) events in North America, you can see him in a recent customer testimonial video he did for the Fedora 14 release, as well as some of the media around the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.

Tim and I joke about being in a battle royale to see who can be the biggest camera hog in Red Hat media. I have to admit he’s probably pulled ahead this fall season! With my new role, I’m a lot less likely to be on camera saying wonderful things about Fedora, even though I have a lot to say. If you have ideas for how I can remedy this inequity, comments are open.

One of the Fedora related things I’m still involved with is Fedora Insight, a Drupal instance I and a few others are trying to learn and launch. We want the capability to pass on interesting tidbits from the Planet, Fedora Weekly News, and even original media in a simple way.

And we love Drupal, especially because it’s packaged in Fedora and EPEL, and because of its very practical and compatible approaches to licensing (GPL!). However, we could use some help with our work.

Theme

Unfortunately our theme ninja suffered some data loss, and to add insult to injury, the work wasn’t pushed to our upstream repo. But, since we’re quick to find the silver lining in any cloud, we realized things weren’t all bad! In the meantime, the fabulous new Fedora Project web site has been launched. We’d really like our Insight appearance to match the updated look of fedoraproject.org, so we see this as an opportunity, not a setback.

We could use the help of one or more web design ninjas to help us visualize the new theme. Then our coders can turn it into working CSS, just as they’ve done with other web sites. Actually, if you have the ability to do mockups and CSS, you’d be twice as ninja-ish, and we’d bake you twice as many cookies! Basically, the things we are working on now are:

1. Mockups for a site that complements fedoraproject.org
2. A set of CSS files, maybe a subtheme based on Zen or NineSixty, that make that dazzling mockup a reality

Plus, you get to work with really friendly people from around the world. And we may actually send you cookies, no kidding.

Administration

We are learning as we go when it comes to subjects like Drupal Views and CCK. I actually bought a bunch of Drupal books and (slowly, in my shrunken spare time) I’ve been making my way through them to understand the system better. I actually created my own module to allow our Drupal instance to authenticate to the Fedora Account System — and it works well, believe it or not! Drupal has a powerful system of hooks that allow you to customize almost every step of input and output, and I took full advantage of their ample documentation to learn how to use those hooks.

For a lot of what we need to do, we could use more experienced experts to advise us. So if you’re an intermediate or expert Drupalista we could use your participation! In some cases, we might be asking you to teach the uninitiated about how some of the powerful functions of Views or CCK might help us achieve our goals. In others, we might ask for module suggestions or implementation hints. But no matter what, you’d be lending a hand to fellow FOSS champions.

Rather than being quite as directly task-oriented, this work would be more a matter of just camping on our mailing list and maybe responding to an email or two if you find a problem you can help solve. We also hang out on IRC Freenode at #fedora-mktg if you are hip to IRC.

Other stuff

Of course, we’re also looking for good ideas for making use of the platform. To me, that’s not so much about just bringing in random modules that we might think are cool. Instead, it’s looking for ways that Drupal could be made to serve the Fedora community. Then together we can figure out the best, most scalable, most open, and most effective way to make that happen.

The opensource.com staff worked with Acquia on their Drupal instance and I think that site turned out wonderfully. You can see Drupal in use all over the place, including everyone from the White House to Warner Bros. artists (talk about a wide range!). It’s not as steep a learning curve as some content management systems, and has a fantastic community backing it. So we’re looking forward to doing more with it, and we’d love to have others join us on the team.

How we work

We work in an open, transparent way — that means we prefer talking to each other on the list, not private email. Talking to each other publicly is a lot like having a party in a common area. Anyone can come by and become part of the conversation and join the team. By having public conversations we can keep each other informed about what we’re doing and the issues we run into. That also makes it easy for us to help each other, which is what free and open source software is all about.

My friend Mel often says, “If it didn’t happen on the list, it didn’t happen.” Collaborative communication is a powerful tool for teamwork. Even if you’re a little shy, don’t worry — we don’t bite and we are happy to see newcomers! Just ask Peter Borsa, who just joined us. He’s already becoming a valuable team member of our team and I know he would love to have help too.

What to do

Join the logistics mailing list and introduce yourself. It’s that simple! We have regular meetings but you can usually find some of us in our IRC channel, #fedora-mktg. See you there!

Pick me up, no. 9247.

Last night, in the wake of the excellent Fedora 14 release, I was feeling a little wistful. In part that’s because Fedora 14 marks the last release where I participated as the Fedora Project Leader or helped with FPL-ish release tasks. I’m confident Jared will do a great job with Fedora 15 and beyond, but I guess it’s a little like watching your kid go off to school for the first time. You’re excited for them, and hopeful about the future, but you also think back to how much fun it was to have your child around the house all the time, and see so many of the experiences they have, in real time.

So anyway, my wife had brought home the new Blu-ray edition of Toy Story 3, which certainly surpassed my expectations in being possibly the best of the three Toy Story movies. Now, if you haven’t seen the film, I’m not going to bother telling you why — just go out and see it now. In fact, if you haven’t seen any of the Toy Story movies, you need to start with the first one and watch all three. I promise you they are just as enjoyable for adults as they are for kids.

Interestingly, digital animation has come so far in the past 15 years that you can easily see the difference between the level of detail in the original Toy Story and what you find in TS3. But the story is what counts in every film — animated ones are no exception. And the people at Pixar are very clear that the story rules, first and foremost, in what they do. Each of the films is a masterpiece of storytelling, from the first frame to the last. Doubtless that’s why they’ve all been incredible box office successes, and have touched the hearts of literally billions of people around the world. See all of them at the first opportunity. Seriously!

So anyhow, we watched TS3 and greatly enjoyed it for the second time (having seen it in 3D in the theater with our kids this past summer). But then I got an extra bonus when I popped in Disc 2 of the set, the disc that includes a bunch of supplements. During the supplements, the filmmakers and crew at Pixar show off a lot of the work that goes into making one of these groundbreaking films. And thanks to the exceptional resolution of the Blu-ray format, you can pick out a lot of detail in the material they show.

Including the fact that the animators were running Fedora on a number of their systems!

This really made me happy, and quickly drove away any residual blues I might have had. What a wonderful thing it was to know that Fedora, in its own way, had something to do with bringing so much joy to so many people, including my own family! It was a really nice way to celebrate our latest Fedora release, and I just wanted to share that with everyone.

Also, I want to congratulate everyone who contributed to this release, and continues to do great work in the Fedora Project — whether it’s easy or difficult, fun or painstaking, lofty or detailed. You help make Fedora a great community, and that in turn has helped Fedora bring joy and freedom to countless people. WAY TO GO!