I drove down from Fredericksburg yesterday in about 3.5 hours, and checked in. Found that Rex was already there but had eaten dinner, and met up with Alex Maier, Greg DeKoenigsberg, and his wife for dinner, and managed to accrete Seth Vidal and his SO. Jesse Keating and I are roomed together and by the time I got back to the hotel both of us were about ready to drop.
This morning we set up Fedora Talk so that our community could dial in and hear the proceedings. We also made camp in the #fad channel on IRC Freenode so that people could comment on the process, send in questions, and so forth. It ended up being a very efficient and effective way of communicating with each other where a free-for-all would have been really problematic.
The conference was meant to zero in on how we could make Rawhide and our development cycle support Fedora contributors and developers more effectively. As part of the brainstorming process, because of the panoply of topics which are touched by Rawhide, we ended up capturing a lot of problem areas that really fell outside the scope of this particular FAD — in fact some of them (like an Auto-QA facility) probably merit their own FAD events.
John Poelstra and a few other people wisely pointed out how this differed from our original pitch, and I think their points were well taken. By getting everyone to “vote” on the brainstorming topics we were able to whittle down our choice of topics to those that are more directly concerned with the topic of fixing Rawhide. There’s no doubt some secondary topics have to become part of that process, but we are doing our best to preserve the central focus of this FAD — and ensure that our time is going to be well spent here and not flailing away at every possible perceived weakness in Fedora.
We have a little more work to do on the research portion of the agenda, but the log for day 1 is up and linked from the FAD wiki page as well. Of course everyone is getting very excited about the impending release of Fedora 11 tomorrow, but we’ll try not to let that stop us from a productive and energetic Day 2.