Fedora Board Strategic Working Group

On Tue, 12 Jan 2010, Luke Macken wrote:

> have the base desktop spins like xfce, lxde, gnome, moblin, sugar,
> kde, but you also have higher level spins built on top of those.
> These spins, such the electronics lab, security lab, or the design
> suite, are custom molded operating systems designed to lower the bar
> for accomplishing a common subset of tasks, by not only providing
> custom menus and defaults, but ideally by fostering a community of
> contributers and users that are passionate about using Fedora to solve
> many different types of problems.
>
> I don't see spins as being a detriment to Fedora, actually quite the
> opposite. I see them as helping us cultivate a variety of
> sub-communities that help to make it easy to do incredible things with
> Fedora. With these these sub-communities each with their own clearly
> defined goals, the question of our unified "Target Audience"
> disappears, as we now have many.

Luke: you and I are basically arguing that the idea of Spins (or
Remixes) are basically a tool (albeit an *optional* tool) that SIGs can
use to help advance or promote their related-to-Fedora work.
Spins/remixes give a SIG an actual deliverable that is more than just
"packages in Fedora's repo".

Mike's basically arguing that while those points *may* be true, the
additional overhead from a rel-eng, testing, and marketing point of view
may not be worth the extra effort.

What I come back to as the key point is this:

People who are working on stuff appreciate having a way in which they
can highlight their stuff. If you, Luke Macken, want to produce an
insane amount of material related to Fedora & security, maybe you find
it useful to have something called the Fedora Security Spin that you can
show off.

Chitlesh has seen doors opened to him because there was something called
the Fedora Electronics Lab, and not just Fedora, a Linux distro that
has a bunch of electrical engineering stuff in it.

Bottom line -- marketing *is* valuable, and if part of the spins/remixes
idea is related to marketing, that doesn't mean it's wrong.

Maybe this is a cheating answer -- but I'm inclined to believe that the
moment the Fedora $FOO Spin becomes more trouble than it's worth, it
will stop being produced.

--Max
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On Tue, Jan 12, 2010 at 01:14:19PM -0500, Colin Walters wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 8, 2010 at 3:39 PM, John Poelstra <poelstra@redhat.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> > I've heard a few suggestions for holding these discussions in IRC.
> > Considering that board meetings can run 2 hours over the phone on this topic
> > I cannot imagine discussing these topics over IRC. *We can certainly address
> > any questions or issues people want to raise at our monthly IRC meetings.
> >
> > == Timing ==
> > o I'm looking for feedback until Wednesday, January 13, 2010.
> > o Thursday to Sunday I will find out the best day and time to meet each week
> > o Weekly "working group" meetings will start the week of January 18, 2010
> >
> > == Big Picture ==
> > o A committed group of board members that are passionate about
> > satisfactorily finishing the "What is Fedora" and "Target Audience" agenda
> > items.
> > o Provide status at regular board meetings
> > o Bring specific structured proposals to the regular board meeting
> > o All decisions by way of proposals are reviewed and voted on by all board
> > members at the regular meeting
> >
> > == Framework ==
> > o Meet one day each week (outside of our regular meeting) for one hour on
> > the telephone
>
> If we're thinking of this as producing something, why not try to say
> create a wiki page as we work? Or proposed modifications to existing
> definitions like the first few paragraphs of fedoraproject.org.

We definitely will be producing written work for consumption by any
interested parties. The wiki's ideal for that.

> As far as scheduling goes I'm flexible, though ideally not Thursday.

We'll probably broach this as soon as we have the list of people
finalized.

Chris Tyler indicated to me at some point he was interested, but he
hasn't popped up here as of yet, unless I missed some mail along the
way.

--
Paul W. Frields http://paul.frields.org/
gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233 5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717
http://redhat.com/ - - - - http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/
irc.freenode.net: stickster @ #fedora-docs, #fedora-devel, #fredlug

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On Tue, Jan 12, 2010 at 15:26:55 -0600,
Mike McGrath <mmcgrath@redhat.com> wrote:
>
> Spins don't create sigs. Spins create extra work for the sigs to do that,
> at best, are a marketing tool.

That's how I treat the games spin. Once you have Fedora installed and enough
disk space, you can install all of the games (at least properly tagged ones).
So I don't view the games spin as something you run is installed.

Instead I view as a way to demo Fedora. The games that are on it are there
because at least someone thought it was a good game. By limiting the games
on the spin to the better ones in several genres I hope it is easier for
someone to find one they like. The spin can also be used to demo how broken
3D is, though I am hoping soon it will be useful for showing 3D support off.
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On Tue, 12 Jan 2010, Paul W. Frields wrote:

>> I have always thought that a "Fedora Crazy Experimental" spin --
>> which allows folks who want to try to build an OS without a firewall,
>> or with some crazy-different version of a critical package -- and
>> came with tons of warning lights and a marketing drive that
>> associated it with the truly bleeding-edge,
>> playing-with-a-revoluntionary-idea kinds of people could lead to some
>> interesting proof of concepts, or could be used as a way to make a
>> hypothetical and flame-ridden argument on fedora-devel-list into
>> something that is tangible and can be evaluated for real, is a
>> valuable sort of thing.
>
> As a spin, this seems problematic to me. Even though we produce a ton
> of written material already for every release, with the dedicated
> efforts of a great group of people in the Fedora Marketing and
> Documentation teams as well as the contributors who help and support
> them, there are lots of people who don't read important information
> about the general release. If a release like this changed some
> behavior in a critical package like the kernel, glibc, or yum, it
> could potentially create some significant issues for triagers,
> developers, and maintainers.
>
> No reason this couldn't be done as a Fedora Remix, however.

I mixed up my terms. The sentiment still stands.

--Max
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On Tue, Jan 12, 2010 at 4:15 PM, Toshio Kuratomi <a.badger@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Conflict of interests. *If the high level group becomes too invested in what
> is happening to a single product that we are making, then the decisions that
> the group makes becomes colored by that focus. *The SIGs that produce spins
> should be defining a target audience but for the Project to be defining
> a target audience is detrimental to embracing contributors who have
> a different vision.

You seem to be ruling out the possibility that there could be
agreement on this target audience.

> The high level group needs to be able to make decisions
> that negatively impact the default distro offering if it helps empower more
> contributors to work on the areas they want to see flourish.

What kind of negative decisions?

> I disagree with this idea of the Fedora Board's role. *I believe that
> vision for the Fedora Distributions should come from the people who are
> presently creating those distributions.

Again, I don't think it makes sense to preclude common agreement on
goals. And I think that's what the board needs to be doing *as a
participatory* thing. It's not like the Board is going to inscribe
rules on stone tablets and hand them down to everyone with a FAS
account.

The goal should be to define a target that we can agree on, and work
on meeting that target using rough consensus and working code.

> My question would be -- why is it the Board's purview to decide what the "Gnome
> desktop"'s target audience should be? *Shouldn't that be up to the SIG that
> creates the spin?

A general purpose desktop image consumable is very important for the
project as a whole; I don't have any metrics to back this up, but I'm
sure it's what most of the people using the project now want.

Backing up a bit - this discussion is quite abstract. Let me ask a
distilled question - do you see it as a fundamental problem if the
Board works to define a target audience at all? Or you just don't
like the proposed definition work so far?
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On Tue, 2010-01-12 at 17:11 -0500, Max Spevack wrote:
>
> Maybe this is a cheating answer -- but I'm inclined to believe that the
> moment the Fedora $FOO Spin becomes more trouble than it's worth, it
> will stop being produced.

More trouble to whom? Production and distribution of spins is not just
a SIGs problem. It takes resources from releng, QA, Infrastructure,
etc... Even if you tried to say "just let the sig do all the work"
you're still consuming disk space, bandwidth, releng time to coordinate
the releases, marketing and artwork time to prepare the web pages,
etc...

The cost to benefit ratio is a very difficult one to measure,
particularly when the cost is spread out over many groups/individuals.

--
Jesse Keating
Fedora -- Freedom² is a feature!
identi.ca: http://identi.ca/jkeating
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On Wed, 13 Jan 2010, Colin Walters wrote:


My question would be -- why is it the Board's purview to decide what the "Gnome
desktop"'s target audience should be? *Shouldn't that be up to the SIG that
creates the spin?


A general purpose desktop image consumable is very important for the
project as a whole; I don't have any metrics to back this up, but I'm
sure it's what most of the people using the project now want.



And I think the above is where things fall apart.

You may believe what you want but given that preceding statement I believe
you to be wrong.


-sv
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On Wed, Jan 13, 2010 at 3:11 PM, Seth Vidal <skvidal@fedoraproject.org> wrote:
>
> You may believe what you want but given that preceding statement I believe
> you to be wrong.

Hmm, well I've heard it said that actually OLPC is the biggest Fedora
deployment. So perhaps in terms of numbers, my statement was
currently inaccurate. But is that what you were referring to? Can you
offer some sort of alternative, other than just "you're wrong"?
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On Wed, 13 Jan 2010, Colin Walters wrote:

> On Wed, Jan 13, 2010 at 3:11 PM, Seth Vidal <skvidal@fedoraproject.org> wrote:
>>
>> You may believe what you want but given that preceding statement I believe
>> you to be wrong.
>
> Hmm, well I've heard it said that actually OLPC is the biggest Fedora
> deployment. So perhaps in terms of numbers, my statement was
> currently inaccurate. But is that what you were referring to? Can you
> offer some sort of alternative, other than just "you're wrong"?


You said:

A general purpose desktop image consumable is very important for the
project as a whole; I don't have any metrics to back this up, but I'm
sure it's what most of the people using the project now want.


And you also said:

You seem to be ruling out the possibility that there could be
agreement on this target audience.





And I'm saying that, in fact, there isn't common consensus. If you need
evidence of this ask the board themselves. Better yet, ask all past and
current board members.

There isn't common consensus, evidenced by this argument existing.

It's like the Athenian Oath - if everyone acted in the way the Athenian
Oath dictated then they wouldn't have needed the oath, would they?

-sv



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