Meeting:Board meeting 2006-06-20

Board > Meetings > 2006-06-20

Fedora Project Board Meeting (2006-06-20)

Attendance

Present:

• MaxSpevack
• SethVidal
• MattDomsch
• JeremyKatz
• ElliotLee
• RexDieter
• PaulWFrields
• ChristopherBlizzard
• RahulSundaram

Not Present:

• BillNottingham

Notes/Summary

• MaxSpevack sent an agenda out for review.

General Business

• July 4th meeting has been cancelled due to the holiday in the US.
• The OpenVideo contest is now underway. Many thanks to AlexMaier and ThomasChung for leading this.
• Board succession: Paul will continue that thread on fedora-advisory-board .

Plone

Paul discussed the Plone show and tell, in which folks had a chance to learn more, and begin discussing the issues around Plone. RobertWhetsel was mentioned as possibly being able to offer some help with plone from him, or a few of the people who work with him, and Paul is also reaching out to the Fedora Unity guys to leverage their expertise.

The issues that have been identified so far are on the PloneIssues page. Mostly they are workflow issues, dealing with the mechanics of how plone works versus an orderly way of transitioning the docs. We need to continue to identify the use cases, and we've got a Summer of Code project working on the wiki -> docbook transition.

Why move to plone? CVS is not an easy method of contribution -- writers and editors need to get engaged without having to learn all of docbook, etc. There's lots of things we want to do that a CVS-based system makes more difficult, we want to and lower the bar to contribution of docs, etc.

ChristopherBlizzard mentioned that Mozilla used to use HTML and CVS for many years, and it was disorganized and awful. Created a wiki, moved documentation to wiki by hand, and the effect was tremendous. No barrier for entry, you can see your changes immediately. No barrier, not even a CLA. Can we get to that point? Has led to a tremendous community around documentation.

Also, it was mentioned that we should put together some sort of "Getting Started With Plone" page for contributors to easily understand what's going on, when the time is right.

ACTION ITEMS:

• Paul is going to continue to lead the PloneIssues page, send an email to fedora-websites-list, and also reach out to the individuals mentioned above.

fc6-test1

Froze on schedule, should be available on 2006-06-21. There's a pretty short turnaround for the mirrors to get the bits, which can be frustrating due to lack of time. Not sure how we resolve this while continuing with our aggressive schedule.

Sponsorship

Fedora Extras Steering Committee discussed the sponsorship lag question. A summary, as provided by SethVidal, follows.

The bottom line is that the additional responsibilities added onto a person's plate to take on new sponsors is not trivial. The process can be simplified, but it remains a tremendous amount of work to take on, especially because you're basically vouching for that person and then you're on the hook for their actions.

Reference was made to Bill's email on community building , and question of hurdles to contribution. It is bothersome that there's a bar, but the rights you are getting by learning how to go through the process are the rights to put packages on other people's computers. Must be rigorous, or else there is *major* risk.

Sponsorship helps to build trust, and also does training. Could move training out of the sponsorship process in an attempt to make things more scalable.

Acknowledge the problem, cannot compromise the quality standards. Need something that can scale larger for contributions, better trust building.

This scalability issues is an example of larger ones that will affect the entire Fedora Project as we grow. This would be an interesting topic for a new FESCO. Thursday is when the election starts.

DECIDED:

• Go to the next FESCO with this problem as one of their initial agenda items, but ideas are welcome from anyone. Ultimately, if the new FESCO is interested, we can get an "owner" from there to lead.

Review Old Action Items

Fud Con

• MaxSpevack still has this action item. Need to solidify dates for Fud Con Palo Alto as soon as possible, so that people can plan their travel schedules.

Fedora Sub-Projects/Incubators

• PatrickBarnes started some work on this. MaxSpevack needs to find some cycles to keep at it, see to it that the work doesn't go for nothing.