I’m here in Westford over the weekend with other members of the Fedora Design Team for their Fedora activity day. I traveled up to chilly Boston on Thursday midday, so I could assist by transporting people from the airport to our hotel in Westford.
On Friday, we convened in the Red Hat office in Westford. As is usual for my Westford visits, I pretty much spent the day running from place to place taking care of things unrelated to the Design team, but which needed to be done in my role as a manager. Fortunately most of the day was spent by the team figuring out policy and processes. I don’t feel like my input was needed there, or even appropriate since I’m not a frequent contributor to design tasks — as much as I love the team! So it all worked out for the best, I think.
Today, though, I was able to contribute. One of the major task areas was to do issue triage and fix up the team’s Trac instance. That was something I was (somewhat) qualified to do. I helped the team go through all the pending tickets, closing stale tickets (no response, unclear goals, redundant, etc.).
Then, using the categories developed by the team on Friday, I helped update the parameters on the Trac instance to match. I also set up a bunch of reports on Trac to match relevant agenda items for the reboot of the Design team meetings. This way, they can call up a set of reports to follow up on tickets methodically.
I even learned some good SQL-fu thanks to my buddy Langdon White. I finally got a start shedding my misunderstanding of joins, so I can do more complicated queries. One of the results was this report, which tells the team when an issue reporter is not responsive to questions, in line with the processes the team worked up on Friday.
People tried hard to make sure the FAD was remote accessible, so if you couldn’t be here, you could still monitor or participate. It was difficult to keep some of the facilities working. For instance, this afternoon I discovered that someone had bounced us from our own room on OpenTokRTC. That made it, well, rather difficult for us to broadcast there. I hope remote attendees will understand the difficulties and be confident we tried to make this a decent remote event.
Tonight I’ll probably think about some additional reports, and then do a little personal work. Tomorrow will be some more work sprints until I start chauffeuring people to the airport after lunch. I was happy to be part of the group and to help the participants have an effective FAD.