Take a lesson, Lenovo.I’ve been having a problem with the CD+DVD rewritable drive in my Dell laptop. It only recognizes new media about 10-15% of the time, and has a habit of “marking” discs I put in it with small, stuttering scratches. (I learned quickly not to put anything in it I really cared to keep pristine.) So yesterday I got on the phone with Dell warranty service to see what they could do. On the whole, I give Dell service an “B+.” The only reason I can’t rate them higher is because I had to repeat all my contact information and service tag numbers about three times as I went through their support lines. This simply tells me they, like every other medium or large organization I’ve seen, have severe integration problems with their customer-facing systems. But the actual service I got was simply splendid, and even though I had to be on the phone for a while, the end result is that there will be a new drive in my hands this afternoon. Then I get to follow in Jesse Keating’s footsteps making a quick DIY repair. |
Board election results.(Apologies for this being late — the announcement isn’t news now, but at least some of the follow-up is fresh.) Tom “spot” Callaway, Jesse Keating, and Seth Vidal have been elected to full two-release terms on the Fedora Project Board. Jef Spaleta has been re-elected to a half-length, one-release term. You can read the entire result set here. Chris Tyler has been appointed to the final seat on the Board. It should be noted that out of over 4,000 accounts with a completed CLA, only about 250 people voted, or a little over 6% of the eligible population. However, that is roughly twice the number who voted in the last Board election in November/December 2007, so there is a bit of an improvement at least. The Board’s mandate is to address the overall progress of the Fedora Project, and in doing that we delegate much of the technical decision-making to other components like FESCo. The Board maintains a stronger focus on community empowerment in the collateral parts of the Project, and addresses other legal, policy, and strategic issues as needed. I believe all the current and new members of the Board will do an excellent job of helping us maintain this focus. Of course, the Fedora Project has never eschewed change, so there’s been a quite interesting (if at times contentious) thread on the FAB list thread on whether the succession planning for the Board is achieving the goals that we want for the Board and Fedora in general. I’m interested in improving this system too, and there have already been several good suggestions floated on the list. This will be one of the first action items for the new Board to consider. I’m still a little perplexed as to how to fix one of the most pernicious problems the Board has faced since its formation — how to show accomplishments. Many of the issues the Board takes care of are ones that can’t be posted to lists or written in our notes, because of their sensitivity. This includes legal issues, for example. I’m not sure how many people follow the work of their local (as opposed to national) governments, but separating these issues from public meetings and working on them in “executive sessions” is pretty much de rigeur. However, this doesn’t mean the Board can’t do a better job of exposing the non-sensitive work publicly — maybe through including additional notes, more frequent public meetings, or other improvements. In addition, Fedora members should not hesitate to ask questions of Board members or on the FAB list, in the same way as people should question their government leaders. If you have a question where a Board member stands on a specific issue, just ask. The answer can guide you in casting your vote in later elections. (And public support matters for appointees too, as Jesse Keating pointed out earlier on FAB.) This kind of dialogue leads to much healthier governance than sitting on the sidelines and complaining about those guys in {Washington, London, Paris, Berlin, the Board…}. (But we still welcome those discussions too — and after all, “They also serve/Who only stand and wait.”) |
Whittle while you work.The community came up with a list of over 60 possible names for the Fedora 10 release. That’s a list that’s far too long to send to Red Hat’s legal department for trademark searching, so to conserve some time and resources, the Board voted, using the new election system, on a “top ten” list that was more likely to come back from legal before the actual release.
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The list, in alphabetical order:
Recovery mode.So, FUDCon is over now and it’s time for everyone who attended to ratchet up the talk about what got done there. FUDCon is all about setting wheels in motion (and keeping them so) for the next development cycle, assessing where we can do better, and making sure people understand the new features and ideas taking shape for the future Fedora releases. To get the community interested and engaged, we need to talk about it publicly so that people who couldn’t get to FUDCon can still get involved. So take a few minutes and keep those blog entries rolling! Overall FUDCon went very well, but there were some things that need improvement next time around. For instance, we didn’t have good vegetarian fare for the attendees. That won’t happen again, just need to keep it on the list for planning the next event. I took too long on the closing comments, although there were a number of reasons for this — additional logistics to sort out, people to thank, and the request by BU folks to stretch it out a little to make sure the pub would be open by the time we got there. (Went overboard.) Anyway, point taken and I promise next time will be very different. I had a lot of people I wanted to single out for amazing work, and I’ll save it for a blog next time. We need video coverage for these events, and Greg and I will see what we can do to set aside funds for people to do just that. This worked out great down in Raleigh in January, because we were local to the crew from Red Hat’s communications team that shoots all their excellent video promos. If we could fly one or two folks to FUDCon for the same purpose, it would better document a lot of what gets done, and also would allow us to show community members how easy it is to show up and get involved. We still need to extend our technology further to enable more FUDCon attendance. If we can figure out how to use our new Fedora Talk system to stream audio for people not on the site, we’ll be able to move to a whole new level of collaboration at these events. I’m fairly certain that’s not a very distant goal; I look forward to seeing what people think we can do in that regard. Hopefully none of these minor missteps were enough to turn anyone off FUDCon — it seems from some of the stories I’ve been reading thus far this morning, it was a very successful conference overall. One of the things I’ve come to grips with lately in my new role in Fedora is that FUDCon for me is no longer about getting things done, as it used to be. Now it’s about making sure that others can get things done without barriers or obstacles. (Or long-winded speeches.) I’ll continue to strive for that, and if you have suggestions on what I can do to make FUDCons better in the future, I’m all ears. I need to thank Jon Stanley here, who put me up for the week at his hotel room — I tried to repay him a bit by helping him with odds and ends in light of his broken wing. (Part of lowering barriers, right?) Jon, hope you feel better soon. I also want to thank the Boston University crew in print, including the Computer Science department for their cosponsorship and the Engineering and IT departments for their help as well. They took care of all the Saturday logistics so that we could worry about the ones at the Summit on Thursday and Friday. My flight leaves later tonight, so to make things easy, after I check out I’ll probably just work down in the hotel lobby until it’s time to go. Then I plan to take the day off on Monday and get back online on Tuesday. See y’all then, and thanks for making this FUDCon a success! |
Market hard.Tomorrow is the BarCamp, my favorite part of the whole FUDCon experience. It’s the ultimate “un-conference,” where the sessions are dialogues and not monologues, and the audience has as much to teach as the speakers. Because FUDCon is free and open to everyone, we hope to have a big bump in attendance from people who couldn’t come over to the Summit during the work week and are excited about the weekend session. We’ll gather at 9:00 a.m. sharp at Boston University’s Photonics Center, and kick things off with a very brief explanation of the proceedings. Then anyone who wants to talk — about anything — is allowed to pitch a session in 30 seconds or less. After all the pitches, the audience adjourns to the lobby where they proceed to mark their attendance in tallies on the sessions they feel are interesting. The organizers and speakers watch the progress and negotiate the schedule in a way that makes sense. At the end of the process, and in under an hour, we have a day long conference of several dozen sessions that are an incredibly fascinating mix of topics for everyone. People are encouraged to attend as many talks as they want, even if that means going from talk to talk while sessions are ongoing (“grazing”). The result is one of the best days you’ll spend in an open source community. We hope you’ll join us for the fun tomorrow! |
Saturday morning fever.On Saturday, the FUDCon moves to Boston University’s Photonics Center, where we will hold our BarCamp sessions. I’ve just updated our wiki page with directions and other information you need to get to the BarCamp. Take a look! |
Summit Day 1, FUDCon Day 0.With many thanks to Jon Stanley (injured but not out for the season) for use of his EVDO card — worked like a champ in Fedora 9, no tweaking required. Today my work consisted of:
Tomorrow is FUDCon Day 1! Should be very exciting, and I do hope I’ll have time to blog something during the day, although it’s a cautious hope. |
FUDCon Thursday.FUDCon is being held at room 301/302/303 in the Hynes Center starting tomorrow at 10:00 a.m.. We’ve moved the opening an hour later so that we don’t force people also attending the Summit to choose between keynotes and hearing about our logistics. Remember that Jim Whitehurst will be coming by at 4:00 p.m.! He will be speaking in our large conference room (the midlde room). Please make sure you’re there a little early for a very special announcement, if possible. We’ll start hackfesting and run until 5:00 or 6:00 p.m., then everyone will naturally gravitate to evening plans of their choice. Probably some of the hacking will continue at the hotels, and probably others will choose to avail themselves of the many fine establishments vending tasty food and beverages in the area. Can’t wait to see our community there again for another productive weekend of fun, coding, and collaboration! |
Master of the fantastic.I read with great sadness that visual effects legend Stan Winston just passed away at the far too young age of 62. If you can name an amazing moment in visual effects in the movies, chances are he was either involved, did it before, or did something that showed it was possible. What a loss to cinema, the untimely death of this particular wizard. |
Like Mighty Casey.By the way, if your plans have changed and you can’t attend FUDCon, please take a moment to strike out your name on the attendee list. Don’t bother removing your name, since it’s also helpful for us to know who missed out this time around. Just use <s> and </s> codes to surround your name on the list. |
