Meeting:Board meeting 2010-12-13

Board Meeting

13 December 2010

Roll Call

Present

• Jared Smith
• Rex Dieter
• Mo Duffy
• Stephen Smoogen
• Toshio Kuratomi
• Jaroslav Reznik
• Joerg Simon
• Christopher Aillon
• Jon Stanley
• Tom Callaway

Absent

• Assigned meeting secretary: Rex Dieter

Agenda

Update Board business

Updates

• Schedule
  • Red Hat offices shut down between December 24th and January 2nd, inclusive
  • FUDCon Tempe end of January
  • Fedora 15 Feature submission deadline, Jan 25; feature/spins freeze Feb 08
  • http://poelstra.fedorapeople.org/schedules/f-15/f-15-key-tasks.html
  • http://poelstra.fedorapeople.org/schedules/f-15/f-15-ambassadors-tasks.html
  • 27th Board meeting is canceled
  • 20th Board meeting is canceled as well
  • Board welcomes Pierros Papadeas as the new FAmSCo Chair and Larry Cafiero as the Budget Wrangler for the Ambassadors within FAmSCo

Board Business

• Follow-up discussion on longer-term goals
  • Board's goal is to have two or three larger strategic goals to tackle over the next two releases
  • Toshio wants to work on mentoring
    • Maybe chop it up into bite-size pieces, packaging (Rex)
    • Look to see ways to expand packager recruitment from LATAM
      • Toshio has been working with gomix on this: small but working out well
      • Toshio would like to figure out how to generalize that (maybe talking face-to-face with gomix @ fudcon)
    • Jon willing to help with the mentorship on the sys-admin
    • Ambassadors have a nice mentorship system, other teams not so much
    • Could sponsor role in packaging == mentor?
• Board blogs - let mizmo know if you need to be added see instructions... https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/private/board-private/2010-December/007313.html
• Vision Statement: The Fedora Project creates a world where
  • free culture is welcoming and widespread,
  • collaboration is commonplace, and
  • people control their content and devices.

Compiled list of goals people gave on FAB (tried to group them under strategic goals, and give potential tactics as possible examples)

• Short list
  • GOAL #1: Improve and simplify collaboration in the Fedora Community
  • GOAL #2: Provide infrastructure to help people control their content and devices
  • GOAL #3: Improve and encourage high-quality communication in the Fedora Community
  • GOAL #4: It is extraordinarily easy to join the Fedora community and quickly find a project to work on.
  • GOAL #5: Recruiting new / less-common skillsets into the project (e.g., project managers, designers)
  • GOAL #6: "Access from Anywhere" strategy
  • GOAL #7: Encourage open standards
  • GOAL #8: Improve remote real-time & high-bandwidth collaboration
  • GOAL #9: Get more involved with upstream / sidestream FLOSS Communities
  • GOAL #10: Improve awareness and utilization of available Fedora community resources
  • GOAL #11: Expand global presence of Fedora among users & contributors
  • GOAL #12: Improve education & skill sharing in community
  • GOAL #13: Sharing responsibilities (mentorship, documentation of tasks / SOPs, sharing skills)
  • GOAL #14: Evaluate late-breaking technologies for inclusion/interaction with Fedora
  • GOAL #15: Improve Fedora developer experience

Suggested Goals in more detail:

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
• 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

GOAL #2: Provide infrastructure to help people control their content and devices

• Example: Writing and hosting an amazing free calendaring solution

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).

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 #5: Recruiting new / less-common skillsets into the project (e.g., project managers, designers)

• Example: reaching out to those communities with bounties?

GOAL #6: "Access from Anywhere" strategy

• Example: Sparkleshare homedirectory ??

GOAL #7: Encourage open standards

• Example: Certification for various open standards supported

GOAL #8: Improve remote real-time & high-bandwidth collaboration

• Example: Facilitate remote participation at the upcoming Fudcon.
• Example: Use voice chat more frequently "I find Fedora Talk amazingly stable and useful, but it's not used all that often outside of events. If we're interested in integrated solutions, I strongly suggest media (voice, video, etc.) should be part of that since it helps foster good relations, etc. Perhaps we could setup an idling "conference" room for chitchat?"

GOAL #9: Get more involved with upstream / sidestream FLOSS Communities

• Example: Identify the 20 most active projects on Fedora Hosted. Look closely at those 20, and further identify 5 that have the most ability to on-ramp and mentor 1-5 new contributors each. Help to find those contributors, either from somewhere in Fedora already or elsewhere, and turn them into successful developers working on new features. While doing the above, generalize the manner in which it was done so that others can try it on their own, in any project they so desire.
• Example: I'd like to see us expand EPEL over the next few year... Getting more folks in large companies involved in testing and maintaining packages. Perhaps recruiting or teaching at conferences where RHEL is big. Get more Fedora maintainers maintaining packages in EPEL. Perhaps we could offer RHEL entitlements to those folks who maintain for EPEL, which may in turn bring in more people to the community.

GOAL #10: Improve awareness and utilization of available Fedora community resources

• Example: Fedora's community has a budget that is transparent, well-known, and easy to make requests of. Make it clear how to get money, who to ask for money ... Fedora is fiscally-transparent - where money is spent, what you can get funding for, and where you obtain funding.
• Example: Ensure that contributors project-wide (and not just Ambassadors) recognize that there is funding available to further their Fedora-related work, and further create a culture of permission by default by enabling people to responsibly use small amount of budget without first having to ask for permission. Along the way, update and revise the processes for reimbursements globally.
  • Raise the awareness of http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Sponsoring_event_attendees
• Example: Centralized/global ticket system for funding requests (famsco is already doing this) - to make it more apparent to people they don't have to be part of famsco to request it

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. 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.

GOAL #13: Sharing responsibilities (mentorship, documentation of tasks / SOPs, sharing skills) (Veloci)Raptor problems -- People as single point of failure

• Example: Making sure that no essential knowledge is lost if a person disappears
• Example: Making sure that someone can get the signing keys if someone disappears
• Example: Each group within Fedora has a set of SOPs for most prominent tasks they're relied on for

GOAL #14: Evaluate late-breaking technologies for inclusion/interaction with Fedora

• Example: Investigate the cloud... More flexible architectures in infrastructure / concentrate on writing apps and getting apps into Fedora that take advantage of the cloud
• Example: mobile www.fpo

GOAL #15: Improve developer experience

• Example: Make Rawhide more useable (jcm had great idea of "dont push by default")

• Note that the Board is going to wait until after the New Year for community feedback on said goals, and then will being to rank and prioritize them

• Any other business?
• Governance discussion -- FUDCon? Prep-for a discussion then?
  • Need someone to post to wiki <= Toshio will put us down for a barcamp session #action (done FUDCon:Tempe_2011#Technical_sessions_-_Saturday.2FSunday)
  • Need mapping of what we've currently got (and think we've got)
  • Regular barcamp session <= preferred or side-session during hackfest? (if hackfest, 1st day rather than 3rd preferred)

Other Notes

• Next meeting: IRC meeting (open office hours) on Friday at 19:00 UTC (2:00pm Eastern)