Playing hooky, 2010-04-30.

I'll be away from the keyboard for most of the day today to take in the weather, get some personal errands and other stuff done. Tonight I'm heading to a club with a friend to possibly suss out a potential opportunity for a long-term side gig (music, that is). I may check my email once or twice this afternoon or evening, and I should be back around this weekend off and on.

As a reminder, nominations for elections close this Sunday night 2010-05-02, so if you haven't thrown your personal fedora into the ring but want to, now's your chance!

FUDCon headed to the Southwest?

Well, we'd definitely like to erase that question mark in the title if possible, when it comes to the next North American FUDCon.

Why? Well for one thing, our last several FUDCons for North America have been held in northern locations. And since those events are held between December and February at some point, as part of our rotating schedule of premier Fedora events, that means it's can be pretty cold at FUDCon North America. (Sometimes even for the people who live in the host city.)

So when I found out some of our contributors were hip to get a conference in Tempe, Arizona, I thought to myself, Hooray! Finally a place where we won't have to wear earmuffs for FUDCon! Robyn Bergeron started the ball rolling, and has a bid page on our wiki for FUDCon NA 2011.

The remaining issues need to be ironed out, though, and they're fairly important:

1. Hotel costs
2. Internet connectivity

Item Number Two seems especially important because we all know the pain and suffering inflicted by bad broadband on a FOSS conference. So enter one young matriculating Arizona State University freshman, Ryan Rix, who is helping track down, through the ASU LUG, faculty contacts at ASU that might be able to help us assess the state of conference space and secure an appropriate venue with decent Internet.

We'd love to bring a Fedora event to a major university like ASU, not the least of which reasons is that it's full of inquiring young engineering minds who could benefit from a nice big frothy mug of open source goodness. Sorry for the beer metaphor there… just a college flashback, I guess.

I've asked Robyn and Ryan, as the bid team, to help us get answers to these questions before June 1, so if needed we can make alternate plans.

Work is, of course, going on openly on the fudcon-planning list, so if you're interested in helping to organize the event, please sign up and introduce yourself. Thanks again to Robyn and Ryan for their continued efforts. If they approach you for assistance, and you'd like a warmer weather FUDCon NA 2011, be sure to say thanks and give a little extra.

Keeping up with everyone.

Fedora people attend a lot of events. I mean, a LOT of events.

Our Ambassadors are constantly on the go, representing Fedora at conferences, conventions, symposia, expositions, and other gatherings around the world. Just this weekend, esteemed Fedora Ambassadors throughout Central and South America were involved in the FLISOL (Festival Latinoamericano de Instalación de Software Libre) events taking place across the region. In Bellingham, Washington USA, Fedora friends were at the LinuxFest Northwest event spreading Fedora freedom and love. By the time LFNWers were just waking up, in Thessaloniki, Greece, FOSSCOMM 2010 was already in full swing with several Fedora Ambassadors in attendance.

Whenever these events happen, Ambassadors and Fedora community members can help promote our incredible community by posting about the events. Your blog, plus the Fedora Planet aggregator, are a fantastic way to spread the word about the event. Your interactions with attendees and free and open source software communities are one of the best ways to build interest and energy around free software.

If you don't have a blog, but would like one, you're in luck. We have a Fedora Blog system where you can set up a weblog based on the fabulous 100% free software publishing platform, WordPress. Then once you're setup — or if you have a blog already — just visit our easy instructions on the wiki to get added to the Planet Fedora aggregator.*

Let us know how your event went! You can talk about the people you met, post photos of the booth, describe the talks you saw and what you thought went well (or even not so well). One of the things about this community that I love is the way that we can socialize across all sorts of boundaries, borders, and timezones through open communication. Fedora community members love to hear about the work their peers do, and events are no exception.

Fedora 13, our best release yet, is around the corner on May 18th, and many Ambassadors have release parties planned on or around the big day. And of course the summer is in front of us (for the northern hemisphere at least), and promises to be a spectacular season for free software events around the world. I am very much looking forward to hearing about FLISOL, LFNW, FOSSCOMM, and all the events going on worldwide.

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* We do recommend that if your blog supports tags or categories, that you use a special tag or category for Fedora stuff, and mark your posts for the Planet appropriately. That way you have the option for posting blog entries about things that may not be about Fedora, or which you'd rather not post on the Planet feed.

The name game, no. 14.

We now have a wiki page open for suggestions for the Fedora 14 name.

Every release, we provide our community a chance to give name suggestions for the next one. Each consecutive name must be linked to the previous one, but that link must be different from the link that connected the previous releases. So for example, Fedora 12, Constantine, and Fedora 13, Goddard, are linked by being names of rocket scientists. Fedora 13 and Fedora 14 must share a different link.

You need to be able to truthfully complete the sentence, “Goddard is a ______, and so is <my suggestion>.”

There are links we don’t use because they’re too mundane or vague (like “is a place” or “is a word”), so those kinds of links will be discarded. Also, we simply can’t use names of companies or brand names for products, especially not if they’re related to IT, software, computers, or technology.

The wiki page has some helpful guidelines that will help your name suggestion pass muster. After the names are collected, the Board and Legal provide input for a short list, and that list comes before the community for a vote. We’ll announce the winning name around May 11, approximately a week before the release of Fedora 13.

We could use help in winnowing down that wiki list. If you’d like to help run some simple tests to ensure we have a clean ballot for our community, you can either respond on the advisory-board list, or let me know here or by email.

Upcoming dates.

On Saturday, April 24, we open nominations for the next round of elections for Fedora. Seats on both the Board and the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) will be open.

FESCo is delegated responsibility for dealing with, among other things, the technical issues of production of the Fedora operating system. FESCo is an excellent place to contribute if you have a knack for technical issues that arise from building Fedora and providing its content to millions of users every day. FESCo’s mission and other useful information are found here on the wiki.

The Board is a group that is much like a board of directors for a company, dealing with big-picture issues such as vision and growth of the project as a whole. The Board’s mission and other useful information are found on its wiki page.

Elections help the Fedora community maintain a strong voice throughout the leadership of the Fedora Project. Like all elections, they work best when they are not seen as a popularity or name recognition contest but rather as a way of finding nominees who the community feels are well equipped to lead in the areas that each group covers. I hope interested community members will not only consider nominating, but also use their votes in a considered manner.

I want to extend sincere and deep gratitude to John Rose and Larry Cafiero for volunteering to work on the elections this cycle, dealing with the IRC town halls and nominee questionnaires. Thanks guys!

Also, expect news very shortly about the opening of name suggestions for the next release, Fedora 14!

Never a dull moment, no. 98.

So much going on today!

At 10:00 am US Eastern time (1400 UTC), Fedora 13 Beta is released. The Beta is our last milestone before the final release of Fedora 13. We’d like to have as many people test it as possible. It’s available in a “Live ISO” format you can write not only to CD DVD, but also to a USB key, and boot off the USB key. I really prefer the USB key, because you can update the key with fixes as you use it using the “persistence” feature. It also gives you nifty options we created along the way, like an encrypted user data area, very fast booting, and very fast installation to hard disk as well. Who loves ya, baby?

The Beta announcement will show you where to get the pre-release, see a list of known problems, and file any new ones you might encounter. You can find instructions for Live USB creation on our wiki.

Also, today starts our Graphics Test Week, beginning with the Nouveau NVidia driver. Graphics drivers affect almost everyone who uses Linux, so this is a fantastic opportunity for you to help make a difference. We’re having one today for Nouveau, tomorrow for the Radeon ATI card driver, and on Thursday for Intel graphics cards. How do you do it? Very easily, it turns out — you join IRC Freenode at #fedora-test-day to participate. Just about anyone can help, because all the tests are fully documented already. You just follow a simple set of instructions, and if you encounter a problem, the QA crew will help you get a bug filed.

But what if you don’t run Fedora? No problem! There are Live ISO images available for the test day as well, meaning you don’t have to install Fedora to participate. And why would you want to help if, heaven forfend, you don’t use Fedora? Because even if you use another distribution, your time is still worthwhile — because Fedora works hard to send changes upstream to the driver developers, so the entire Linux community benefits. That’s how collaboration and open source work. It’s not about hoarding, it’s about sharing.

Adam Williamson, a Fedora QA contributor and seemingly unstoppable force in community testing and quality, wrote more about the Video Test Week here. (There’s also a Phoronix article here and a LWN article here as well.)

By the way, to see what kind of graphics card you have, you can open up a terminal and type or copy/paste this command:

/sbin/lspci | grep -i vga

And be sure to download and try out the Fedora 13 Beta today. You can find the downloads here, and the announcement here.

UPDATE: The ever-helpful Josh Boyer reminded me that the Fedora 13 Beta, Live Desktop edition, needs a DVD because of size reasons, although this won’t be the case for the final release of Fedora 13. Seriously, use the USB, it’s awesome.

Rocky road made smooth.

Thanks to hard work by people working on the Fedora Infrastructure team, we have a newer Transifex working on translate.fp.o. I wrote more about this in an earlier post, so I won’t endlessly repeat the whistles and cheers of a grateful (Fedora) nation here. But it’s now, while the Docs and L10n teams are hip-deep in translation of release notes and other written content, that we really appreciate having that new version online.

In Fedora 11 and 12 cycles, we had to do a very painstaking process involving manual runs of the gettext utilities to produce translation files that the old Transifex could understand and deal with. The newer Transifex 0.7.4, on the other hand, understands perfectly the way that our documentation tool Publican produces translation files. It’s a tremendous time saver.

Now for Fedora 13 we just merge some git branch content and update the translation (POT/PO) files, and Transifex handles everything else for us. It’s made the process so smooth this release that at the Docs meetings I keep scratching my head and thinking, “Where’s the danger? Where’s the fear and loathing? The sturm und drang?” No more rocky road!

Except for the ice cream of course. Mmm, ice cream.

FUDCon North America 2011.

This blog entry has a double purpose:

1. To help announce the opening of bids for FUDCon North America 2011 to be held this coming winter.
2. To describe how this process was adopted, and where to get more information.

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The Fedora Project holds a number of global Fedora Users and Developers Conference (FUDCon) events each year. Typically the Community Architecture team’s budget supports one of these large events each Red Hat fiscal quarter (with the fiscal year starting on March 1). This year we have the Latin American event, FUDCon Santiago in Chile, in Q2; the event for EMEA, FUDCon Zurich in Switzerland, in Q3; and a North American FUDCon event in Q4.

In each case, typically the event will happen sometime in the first two months of the quarter, so that we can ensure all bills are paid by Red Hat’s financial deadlines. That deadline usually comes a couple weeks before the end of quarter, so the first two months are the ideal time to actually stage an event. So the North American FUDCon event will happen in either December 2010 or January 2011. The bidders will work with the Community Architecture team to resolve the exact timing.

In the past we’ve often heard from community members that they’d love to have an event in a warmer clime during the chilly winter months. We couldn’t agree more, and now we have a way to empower our community to make that happen. FUDCon Honolulu? Maybe not, but we’re open to other possibilities! We want to find a place for the next North American event that includes:

• Reasonable travel, room and board costs
• Availability of inexpensive or free event space
• A little warmer than Boston (we hope!)
• Active FOSS/other interested communities that might like to attend
• Consideration of academic schedules for students who want to attend
• Consideration of holidays for people in North America
• One or more organizing Fedora community members with the time and energy to help prepare

We now have a bid process that lets interested community members propose FUDCon in their region, or even backyard. Nothing Olympic style — simply a way for excited Fedora folks in the locale to help secure event space, lodging, and other logistical details. We’ve already kicked this process off for FUDCon Zurich 2010, and are looking to start this cycle for North America as well. In the summer, after FUDCon Santiago concludes, we will kick the same process off for Latin America again for a 2011 conference.

So here’s what you need to do to get the ball rolling:

• Join the fudcon-planning list and let us know you want to bid.
• Make a wiki page called [[FUDCon:Bid_for_<Your_Town>_2011]], with the information outlined on the bid process page.

The bid process will be open for a period of approximately 2 weeks. At that point the FPL and Community Architecture teams, as major stakeholders in the event, will go through the bids and make a decision on where we’ll locate FUDCon North America.

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So why have this bid process anyway?

At the Events FAD in February, we convened a crew of people interested in extending how our premier Fedora events work. For a while now, we’ve had two kinds of these events — FADs (Fedora Activity Days) and FUDCons. While FADs are quick-hit gatherings of a few people to achieve a specific, targeted purpose, FUDCon is a much larger event that can have hundreds of attendees and spans many different topics, experience levels, and goals.

Another important distinction previously separated the two. While FADs are put together by interested community members, FUDCons were typically planned by just one or two Red Hat employees — typically the Fedora project leader, sometimes with help from a member of Red Hat’s Community Architecture team. Because of a variety of financial and logistical constraints, this meant that FUDCon over the years has often ended up in one of a couple places. Most often this was Boston due to the proximity of the core of Red Hat Engineering people nearby who could provide support for the event. However, we did manage several times to move to other locations, such as Raleigh in January 2008 and Toronto in December 2009.

For the Toronto event, however, we tried a slightly different model — while Mel Chua and I provided funding and some organizational support, much of the logistical work was done by superstar (and current Fedora Board member) Chris Tyler and a crew of wonderful people on the fudcon-planning list. The event was incredibly successful in terms of number of attendees, the discussions that were had, the quality of sessions and hackfests, and costs involved.

We knew going into this event that it would be a proving ground for a new model of having the community empowered to make FUDCon even better than it can be with just one person handling all the planning. By moving to an open, transparent process, our community members got a better appreciation for the amount of work that goes into a FUDCon, and could easily participate in that work. The results were as expected — with the load spread wider, the event ran more smoothly and with less stress per person involved.

So we went forward with an events planning FAD, with the specific goal of identifying how we could make this process repeatable and scalable. That way FUDCon events could be held anywhere there was an appropriate budget and people willing to make the events happen.

Although we knew the first couple of events following this process — EMEA and North America — wouldn’t have the full preparation time we wanted to provide, we also knew both of them had far more than the six months it typically takes one or two people to plan the event. And our community members being the awesome people they are, they’ve of course proved us right again. As we go forward, the rolling nature of the schedule should be sustainable. At the conclusion of one regional event, we can start bidding for the next one. So over time these wrinkles will naturally be smoothed.

Thanks for reading, and your fellow community members are looking forward to seeing bids for FUDCon North America 2011!

Holiday notice.

Red Hat in the United States celebrates the Friday before Easter Sunday as a holiday. So tomorrow, April 2nd, I expect that some USA-based Red Hat folks may choose to spend a little extra time with family, loved ones, pillows, bicycles, race cars, or other pastimes that might not have a keyboard attached. And of course, some of us will choose to hack anyway because hey, we love it.

My kids will be in school, oddly. It’s very rare for me to have a day off where that happens, so my wife and I may use the opportunity to do some errands and see a movie during the day.