The overall Fedora 12 schedule remains unchanged, but we are still working on tuning the individual sub-team schedules.

We had a really fantastic meeting on Friday documenting the Design Schedule for Fedora 12.  It was an open meeting, announced on the Design list.  Once again Fedora Talk and Gobby got the job done!  The cool part to me is our meeting was constricted by geography.  Stickster and Mo were on the east coast, separated by ~500 miles and I was on the west coast separated by ~3,000 miles.  Even better–we reviewed and updated the schedule and got it all done in 45 minutes.

I think we proposed some new and innovative approaches to scheduling the artwork for Fedora 12.  Some of the new ideas included releasing incremental changes to the wallpaper every week and making a concerted effort to blog about the artwork after each release.  The hope is increase awareness and timely community feedback.  Feedback is usually very helpful, but not when it comes too close to the end of the release.  Here’s hoping more iterations and an earlier starting point will make this a reality.  For more detail see the Fedora 12 Design schedule or Design iCal file.

Working out the Design teams schedule highlighted the need even more for a solid marketing schedule.  Design depends on the marketing team to create a slogan that they can then include in their artwork.  One of my next tasks will be trying to add the marketing tasks from the wiki into TaskJuggler.

I’m hoping we can apply this same methodology to ironing out the final kinks in the Release Engineering and QA schedules for Fedora 12.  At last Monday’s Release Engineering Meeting I raised some changes additions to the Release Engineering and QA (testing) schedule which added more granularity.  It was proposed that we hash things out in a follow-up joint meeting.  I made the changes proposed at Monday’s meeting for the joint meeting to be held.  Unfortunately things went back and forth into more and more detailed emails by the end of the week.  I’m betting if we’d all taken the time spent on our individual emails and used it instead on a joint meeting using Fedora Talk and Gobby, we’d already be done.  Email just does not work for this, particularly when a response is not clear or the responder raises more questions.  Also when two or more people disagree on what a date should be there still isn’t a clear answer of what should go on the schedule.  I’ve rarely found that another round of email fixes it.  I’m sure if we can all meet this week using Fedora Talk and Gobby we’ll get this done in no time.

This is why I love Fedora Talk and Gobby.  Thank you Infrastructure Team!