Board goals 2011

What this is

The Board discussed many overarching goals that we'd like to help focus effort on for the next year. These are the five that the Board members present at the January 7, 2011 IRC meeting prioritised as the five most important.

Input from FESCo, FAMSCo, the SIGs, and individual contributors could add or subtract things from this list. It is not final.

The goals being outlined here are meant to seed discussions and help people who want to work on several things to prioritise their time. It is not meant to tell people what they can and can not work on. At the January 7 meeting the Board members present tentatively advanced the position that those sorts of goals should bubble up from the contributors rather than be mandated from the top.

The full list of goals from which this is was consolidated from are in the meeting minutes from 2010-12-13

Board members present at the meeting

• jsmith
• rdieter
• smooge
• kital
• ke4qqq
• abadger1999

Five highest ranked goals

• • GOAL #1: Improve and simplify collaboration in the Fedora Community
    • Example: Improve our governance structure (too much making it hard to do things; not knowing which body to collaborate with)
    • Example: Make Fedora fun (putting the commonplace in collaboration?)
    • Fluffy Statement: Collaboration in the Fedora community is amazingly easy, effective, and fun - there is very little grunt-work involved.
    • Example: Have amazing calendaring for scheduling in Fedora (also recommended by FESCO)
    • Example: The Fedora Board should meet face to face for a few days twice per year. Those days should be organized in advance using FAD best practices, and they should be intensive working sessions where the Board lays out and advances most of its agenda for the coming chunk of time. The Fedora Project has sufficient budget to enable this.
    • Example: Revisit/rework Spins
    • (from FESCO) look at our unresponsive maintainer policies again… we should really encourage co-maintainers more so packages don’t sit with no one watching them.
    • (from FESCO) how to possibly improve our morass of mailing lists
    • (from FESCO) how to possibly reduce the number of irc channels/lists/etc to make it easier for people to join/follow
    • (from FESCO) encourage direct communication between different groups. recently things seem to go up all the way to the board and then down again. this is ineffective collaboration. we need to have workflows for $contributor from group A requesting something from group B. ether there are not workflows or they are all different
    • (from FESCO))I wonder if we couldn’t designate or create some area in all the communications channels for pointing people at just where to go for something. some kind of directory service… so you could look up who you ask about helping out with $foo instead of just wandering around trying to find out.
    • (from FESCO) say all groups have a trac instance to bring something up to their attention, just like the board opened it’s trac recently. doesn’t need to be trac, but a common protocol for everybody

• • GOAL #3: Improve and encourage high-quality communication in the Fedora Community
    • Example: Make mailing lists not suck (http://mairin.wordpress.com/2010/03/16/a-rich-web-interface-for-mailing-lists/)
    • Example: Summarizers (like nirik did for the update criticism)
    • Example: We should do more to teach contributors how to run meetings effectively. We should probably have some best practices documentation, as well as find times to teach this (at Fudcons, when a mentor and a mentee are at the same physical location and participating in the same meeting).
    • (from FESCO) Teaching folks how to run meetings, and how to communicate better on lists would be lovely.
    • (from FESCO) We could possibly use some framework like moodle to setup classes for these things so people could learn more easily.
    • (from FESCO)Possibly we could ask mailing list owners to try and get people to avoid long threads or off topic discussion, but there’s no easy fix
    • (from FESCO) empower mailing list owners to do more management when needed. Possibly the Community Working group could propose some ideas on how they could better do so, but I think it might be better seen when coming from people who are part of whatever area that is and are managers of that resource
    • FESCo believes mailing lists are the biggest communication breakdown place. Some people just use lists and not other channels. Issues getting IRC discussions synched back to list. Issues with noise on the lists. (nirik)
      • spot says there are some crazy ideas on how to accomplish things to improve signal to noise ratio on mailing lists without acting like hall monitors. nirik cites [ http://mairin.wordpress.com/2010/03/16/a-rich-web-interface-for-mailing-lists/ mizmo's mailing list ui design idea]
      • Hall-monitor / educational style solutions aren’t desirable, though. Anything that is described as ‘teaching people how to communicate better on mailing lists’ sounds like it would trigger a backlash, however well intentioned. “who are you to tell me i can’t communicate?” etc. alas. it sounds like hall monitor. You can teach people better communication, but I’m not sure that those who go OT will be in this class. mmaslano thinks it’s like hall monitor – people who are OT usually don’t participate classes to become better ones

• • GOAL #4: It is extraordinarily easy to join the Fedora community and quickly find a project to work on.
    • Example: Quickly find project to work on
    • Example: Improving the new user experience
    • Example: Mentorship
    • Example: Helping users become contributors
    • Example: raise the role of the Ambassadors as a first point of contact for new Contributor on our Media, Website...

• • GOAL #11: Expand global presence of Fedora among users & contributors
    • Example: FUDCon in APAC (India was specifically mentioned by Max, "Attract at least 500 people to this event, and use it to try out at least 3 new ideas that could become permanent fixtures of FUDCons.")
    • Example: More FADs, and being more vocal about the FADs we have

• • GOAL #12: Improve education & skill sharing in community
    • Example: It would be great to expand on and keep flowing the Fedora Classroom. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Classroom. I'm afraid I am not so great at marketing, and have been really busy, so it's been hard to gather a large enough pool of teachers and students to keep the classes flowing. Given enough interested people and energy, we could expand to phone based classes, hold them more often and help anyone interested to learn anything at all about Fedora. You could even use this to teach people about the other goals. I'd like to see us use moodle and/or other cool teaching tools.
    • Example: Alleviate the indispensible person problem by making sure there are SOPs for the most prominent tasks that any person is relied on for.
    • Example: Make sure we have multiple people that can do any given task (for instance sign packages with the signing keys)