Meeting:Board meeting 2009-05-21

Fedora Project Board Meeting :: Wednesday 2009-05-21

Roll Call

• Board Members: Matt Domsch, Seth Vidal, Chris Tyler, Jesse Keating, Paul Frields, Christopher Aillon, Bill Nottingham, Tom "spot" Callaway
• Regrets: Harald Hoyer, Dimitris Glezos
• Secretary: N/A

Export restrictions

Board/Meetings/2009-05-14#Export_Restrictions

• Paul found some trade groups that lobby for export reform, but none that would be interested in free software projects that don't put out money
• The groups of which Dell is a member are not currently investigating export restrictions

Toxicity proposal

Board/Meetings/2009-05-14#Toxicity

• paul: Language in the proposal is intentionally not specific
• spot: A code of conduct encourages people to skirt the policy with loopholes
• Public notice is not going to help because it effectively additionally shames a person, who otherwise could simply come back and say "sorry, carry on"
• Anyone can appeal to the board

Unanimous approval from members in attendance.

• Implementation details
• Who to serve as moderators?
  • Spot volunteers
  • Seth volunteers, and notes he will be off the Board after June
  • Find a volunteer to help as well
• IDEAS, to be worked out by Board and Infrastructure teams
  • Mailing list where subscribers/moderators are not listed?
  • Dead drop for complaints, equivalent of legal@fedoraproject.org
  • Moderation FAS account
  • not-excellent@fedoraproject.org (send in things that are not excellent)
  • Paul: the essential good in this proposal can be undone if we don't be sure to observe transparency.

ACTION: Take up implementation details on FAB, following meeting minutes publication.

Sponsorship

• When we last spoke, we had asked Websites and Design team principals to design some website changes
  • Better show that Red Hat sponsors a lot of what makes downloading Fedora possible (bandwidth, hardware)
  • Paul sent a stopgap change to Websites that is going up immediately post-F11
• Improve Red Hat visibility on the download pages in particular.
• Prominent Red Hat logo on every footer? See opensuse.org, which notes Novell at the bottom of every page, and other prominent sponsors in the right column. This isn't a requirement, but should be considered in a website redesign.
• Should this be part of an overall fedoraproject.org redesign?
• Concern over some pages, such as the download page being too long:
  • Should be really pushing Live DVD as a one click option, and letting "choose your own adventure" be done via JS
• Spot: Check in with MO to find out:
  • Can we do this redesign soonest post-F11
  • Primary goal: how to send the message of Red Hat's sponsorship of Fedora to people who are downloading it
  • Secondary goal: be clearer about Red Hat sponsorship throughout the site

What is Fedora?

• Board/Meetings/2009-03-24#What_is_Fedora
• Board/Meetings/2009-04-29#What_is_Fedora.3F
• et al., see Board/Meetings

MORE IDEATION. This does not represent Board policy, just brainstorming for now, except where noted.

• Paul has been working on mail/thoughts for multiple days now. What does the community want us to answer the most -- Who do we make Fedora for?
• competing ideas
  • Aunt Tilly and Uncle Jed?
  • People to preview RHEL dev?
  • f13: People who want rapid updates to a stable base
  • People who want something like RHEL, but released more often
  • ctyler: "Us", those working on the distribution, who need server/desktop
  • spot: Linux enthusiast (power user)
  • spot: People who LOOOVE updates. 336 final updates for F11, AND IT'S NOT RELEASED YET! (only 250 of those are mine)
  • mdomsch: Spins and remixes are reaching specific target audiences. Electronics lab, education, ... Fedora's audience is the makers of these.
• Paul's random crazy idea: What if we didn't produce a DVD anymore? The only thing we produced was LiveCD Desktop, and spins.
  • By going to this model, you could drop a LOT of Anaconda testing. That hurts RHEL.
  • Without a lot of choice, you also restrict the set of problems.
  • This doesn't necessarily solve the problem of not having a target audience.
  • f13: Removes the one thing that /really/ doesn't have a target audience, the DVD, which is a really mixed bag.
• paul: How can we ensure, measure and improve the quality of our releases without something to target?
  • f13: Blocker bugz?
  • f13: Hitting release dates?
  • paul: We can throw changes, but without an idea of where we're trying to get to, we're just experimenting.
  • paul: As long as Red Hat is getting a RHEL out of Fedora, they'll likely be happy. Can we do better?
• Lots of not particularly serious discussion of making the DVD spin 'Spin the Wheel Of Linux'.
• Proposal from last time:
  • spot: Suggest that GNOME Desktop spin be explicitly acknowledged as default ("first among equals") -- Changes to benefit other Spins that create a conflict should be arbitrated by FESCo, with guidance that the GNOME Desktop spin wins if all else is equal. If those changes are not amenable to the GNOME desktop SIG, then they go to FESCo for arbitration. If FESCo feels that the change is worthwhile, they should escalate to the Board for final decision.
  • f13: If we just come out and say, "this view of the distribution is our best shot at an experience," we can improve this situation.
  • spot: Getting bogged down in what we call our spins, particularly the "Fedora Desktop". Can we just call it GNOME spin, but tag it as our target?
  • Spot motions that we start calling Fedora Desktop the Fedora GNOME Desktop spin.
  • Chris thinks that if we are giving the Desktop team the nod to be the measure of what we do in Fedora, they should have the right to name their spin as they wish.
  • f13, bill: Adding 'GNOME' does not add any benefit to those who don't already know that it's GNOME and what they want respective to that.
  • mdomsch: what will the Desktop team object to in Spot's proposal? It seems to be a benefit to them.
  • spot: the extent to which users will be confused by multiple download options is going to depend on how we design our website.
  • f13: Competing interests for the "top of the page" download option.
• Board members agreed we should target F12 for (yet another) redesign of the overall download experience.
  • Paul: "First among equals" starts with "first." We should provide an easy way to get the "first," and for experts, a "follow me."
• f13: upgrade issue on LiveCD should be solved by preupgrade.
  • mdomsch: then we need some additional focus on preupgrade so it's more usable, so we can recommend that as the preferred and recommended upgrade method. Right now it's not.

• paul: still need to get back to the immediate question of who we build for, and how we prioritize requirements (quality? time? other?)
  • Matt is still happy with the time-based releases, feature process, and blocker bug process. It ensures we don't try to bite off "too much" (and thus never release), while keeping the quality sufficiently high, and providing people a _reason_ to upgrade.

ACTION: caillon to get a proposal from the desktop team ACTION: Spot will flesh out this proposal over the next couple of weeks, immediately after F-11.

Next Meeting

• Date: 2009-05-28
• Time: 17:00 UTC