User:Pfrields/Goals

FPL Goals

The goals for the Fedora Project Leader are varied and often overlap with the work of other Fedora functionaries such as the Fedora Engineering Manager, the Fedora Program Manager, and Community Architecture. As the face or voice of Fedora, the FPL is accountable for everything that happens in Fedora, but the FPL must have some measurable individual achievements besides simply participating in discussions or rubber-stamping ideas.

FY09/Q1 (and first 90 days)

Link here

Foster a broader audience for Fedora

This is not just boosting the number of users, since Fedora is about enabling contributors. It might mean creating new partnerships between Fedora and corporate entities that enhance our ability to drive the adoption of FOSS in places other than the user desktop.

Help Community Architecture build the Marketing plan for F9 to create a better organized message around Fedora, such as "The Future, First," showing off best-of-breed features, etc.	Does it exist? Yes. Not only have we made significant progress , but I worked personally on developing the talking points that I then used throughout F9 pre-brief and release interviews in Q1.
Work with those responsible for Red Hat Summit planning on the first instance of FUDCon at the Summit.	What did I do? In Q1, I've worked successfully on setting up space, arranging for refreshments, power and A/V support, signs, and some of the logistics for Summit interaction.
Build Fedora brand recognition and ascendancy in the open source community by making public appearances, giving interviews, and performing other key communication duties.	What did I do? I've given a large number of interviews in the press, appeared at the FOSE trade show (with many more planned for Q2), and to community groups such as FredLUG and UMLUG.

Lower contributor barriers

It is too hard for collateral contributors to join Fedora, but the nature of the process requires some interaction with complex applications. Automating these processes makes Fedora more attractive for a larger number of contributors.

Sell the idea of a JoinKit to the Desktop team. Encourage them to contribute resources to ease the join process for collateral contributors (non-developers)	Has the project started? Not yet. However, the programmatic APIs developed by Fedora Infrastructure do make this more achievable, along with the FAS2 and the outlook for SSO.
Work with Red Hat Legal to establish guidelines for implementing the lowest possible CLA barriers.	Do they exist? In progress. Working with Legal on how to improve this process and make sure the community is clear on why we have one, what the terms mean, etc.

Clarify roles where needed to improve direction and performance of Fedora

It is not always clear where issues need to be decided in Fedora. The will of the community needs to be maintained, while minimizing the chances for initiatives to stall while waiting for an owner.

Drive adoption of a FESCo charter to clarify relative roles of the Fedora Project Board and FESCo in Feora's technical direction.	Does it exist? Yes.
Improve Board transparency and effectiveness by holding monthly public meetings via an appropriate channel.	Do they exist? Yes.

Develop key technical and management abilities

The FPL needs to maintain a level of skill and knowledge of Engineering department processes, platform capabilities, and leadership.

Make significant progress on RH Engineer Accreditation, including at least 2 courses from that curriculum.	Did I do it? I took one course thus far, hoping to fit in another by the end of the quarter.
Complete at least 1 leadership course from Red Hat University, possibly web-based if relocation has not occurred by 45 days into the quarter or 75 days into the new hire period.	Did I do it? No.

Continue personal contribution to Fedora

The FPL maintains a better community standing by participating in one or more parts of the Project as an equal contributor. Although this work should be secondary to achieving the broader project goals, it's important for the FPL to have context for decision-making and to understand contributor barriers.

Continue to participate in ongoing Documentation Project work.	What did I do? Worked on Release Notes and Installation Guide, including documenting process for later contributors to follow. This process documentation still needs to be integrated into our formal publications.
Continue to maintain assigned Fedora packages in cooperation with other community developers.	What did I do? Maintained nautilus-open-terminal and my other packages. Also participated in getting out new opal, ekiga, and fedora-release-notes packages for F-9, and helping with istanbul.

The Rest of FY09

Link here

Foster a broader awareness of and audience for Fedora

This is not just boosting the number of users, since Fedora is about enabling contributors. It means creating new partnerships between Fedora and corporate entities that enhance our ability to drive the adoption of FOSS in places other than the user dekstop. It also means making sure the FOSS world knows about Red Hat's enormous contributions in the FOSS space.
Help determine the progress toward a compelling feature set in Fedora. Develop a theme for the upcoming F10 release and preliminary ideas for where to go post-RHEL 6. Rally the internal and external community around them.	Do they exist? Post-RHEL6 is at least beyond F11, seeing as how no public schedules are yet available. Developed talking points and organized feature messaging for both F10 and F11 (in progress). (2009-04-01)
Work with Engineering Services personnel (Woods, Poelstra) to unite QA and triage programs and build more community participation by documenting what people can do easily.	Q2 - Does comprehensive documentation of QA processes exist where contributors can see and use it? With FPM, helped lead requirement for test plans with feature process to improve community uptake on feature testing. QA docs overall continue to be outdated. (2008-10-08) Q3 - Has the number of core contributors increased substantially? Somewhat. QA days have dramatically increased targeted feature testing and I continue to work with QA leads on improving visibility of their work. (2008-10-08) Q4 - Drove additional interest in QA Test Days to ramp up community involvement in targeted testing. Communicated regularly with Fedora QA lead to extend this process and make plans for post-F11 QA improvements. (2009-04-01)
Work with RHT Marketing to produce PR media about Emerging Technologies products such as ovirt, Thincrust, and the upcoming Fedora community grid -- each at an appropriate time frame in FY09. Emphasize that these are RHT seeded upstreams in which the entire FOSS community can participate.	For each quarter, produce one or two of these stories about a different technology that RHT has committed to the FOSS community. In progress, oVirt and more targeted messaging about KVM's future as the virt platform of choice. (2008-10-08) This goal has reverted to Community Architecture, which is somewhat logical given that it falls outside Fedora proper. Drove a much stronger KVM message in Fedora, to be augmented in FY10 by a strong push for the Fedora Cumulus project to showcase oVirt technologies. (2008-04-01)
Work with the FEM and RHX to bring at least one ISV into the Fedora Project formally. This means getting their software into Fedora, and having the ISV personnel maintain the software for Fedora and/or EPEL. Because this effort depends on outside participation, it may end up spanning more than one quarter.	Q2/Q3 - Did it happen? Thus far, all signs point to YES! Zmanda, specifically Ken Crandall. (2008-07-17) Q4 - Unfortunately Zmanda fell through due to personnel changes. There is still involvement from Alfresco and some other ISVs, but there are significant pain points for them that Fedora cannot solve without a major change in our engineering strategy that doesn't have much upside for Fedora.
Once ensconced in Westford, set up a schedule of producing short videos on new technologies. We don't need a whole crew to do this, just a video camera and a few hours of time.	By Q3, produce the first one and have a routine in place for one or two every quarter. Done for Q3 - NetworkManager connection sharing for F10. For Q4, will push for production of video on new Ogg Theora technologies coming in F11 timeframe. (2008-10-08)

Lower contributor barriers

It is now easier for contributors to get accounts, but the nature of the process requires some interaction with complex applications. Automating or documenting these processes makes Fedora more attractive for a larger number of contributors.
Drive the Fedora Infrastructure team to roll out Asterisk solutions for the community to communicate more effectively. Pilot with Board meetings and move on to ad hoc teleconference capability.	Q2 - Does it exist and integrate with SSO? YES! (2008-07-17) Q3 - Can project contributors schedule ad hoc teleconferences? More or less, using existing conference rooms. Still need automated solutions for recording and publishing. (2009-04-01)
Drive production of a capability to do more automated smoke testing of the distribution using existing technologies like libvirt, cobbler, and Dogtail. This really needs to be done in the month or two immediately following release, since it will be needed in the testing phases. Full development probably requires a couple release cycles to complete.	Q2 - Has this project started? Not yet, but this may be blocking on availability of an automated testing system. (2008-07-17) Q4 - Can we do automated Anaconda smoke testing of most or all of the test matrix? These goals were a little ambitious, and have moved to FY 2010. (2009-04-01)

Clarify roles where needed to improve direction and performance of Fedora

It is not always clear where issues need to be decided in Fedora. The will of the community needs to be maintained, while minimizing the chances for initiatives to stall while waiting for an owner.
Drive Fedora Documentation team to maintain the rest of the project's material, rather than revamping every six months basic user guides already available elsewhere. Trimming and maintaining the wiki will provide the most impact to user and developer support with the lowest drag.	Does this team effort exist? YES! Wiki gardening will be a focus of the Docs team, and incoming student groups. (2008-07-17)
Establish guidelines for operation of the Fedora Board vs. FESCo, to keep technical direction from being mired in managerial issues and vice versa.	Do they exist? YES! FESCo has formally determined its areas of work, as distinct from the Board. Ongoing effort in Board meetings to make sure our Engineering principals do not re-muddy these waters. (2008-07-17)

Develop key technical and management abilities

The FPL needs to maintain a level of skill and knowledge of Engineering department processes, platform capabilities, and leadership.
Renew RHCE by Q3.	Did I do it? Yes! (2008-09-22)
Finish Engineering certification curriculum by Q4.	Did I do it? Not by Q3, so moved to Q4. (2008-12-23)

Continue personal contribution to Fedora

The FPL maintains a better community standing by participating in one or more parts of the Project as an equal contributor. Although this work should be secondary to achieving the broader project goals, it's important for the FPL to have context for decision-making and to understand contributor barriers.
Turn current auxiliary documentation in Fedora hosted projects, and work on an in-distro tool that is RPM packaged and which provides rel-eng the capabilities needed to bring in proper release docs automatically. Enlist participation and help from the Red Hat Documentation team in Engineering Services to strengthen their community participation.	Did I (help) do it? Fedora Docs hosted repositories now exist. Docs team is now using Publican for an in-distro tool, provided and maintained by RH EngSvcs. Community participation is still sub-optimal but somewhat improved from FY2009 Q1. (2009-04-01)
Continue to maintain assigned Fedora packages in cooperation with other community developers.	What did I do? Developed new odfpy and python-mwlib packages; maintained others, including ongoing revamp of fedora-release-notes. (2008-07-17)