The long anticipated Fedora Talk Activity Day starts this Friday. If you have ideas or special needs for Fedora Talk, please update the use cases on the wiki.  See our overall plan for additional details.

We’ve been doing as much planning and organizing in advance as we can so that once we meet in person our time can be focused on implementing. I’ve been to several hackfests and FADs where a majority of the time was spent identifying and detailing things we need to fix in Fedora. While valuable, the implementation of those ideas usually takes several releases (a year or more) and some never quite get done. There are valid reasons for this I suppose, but having seen the pattern repeat itself I wanted this event to be different. My hope is that this FAD will be known for the things we got done and not so much the things we plan to do later.

For the past four weeks we have been planning and brainstorming on the infrastructure mailing list, creating wiki pages, and meeting on IRC. While not as fast as meeting in person, the overall results may be better because we’ve had time for our ideas and plans to ferment.  We got a lot of admin stuff out the way like figuring out what packages we need and what servers need to be rebuilt before we start.  Bruno Wolff also did a great write-up explaining how to setup Asterisk yourself.

One of the best ideas to come out of our planning meetings (thanks to Jeffery Ollie) was creating use cases to capture the needs of FedoraTalk users and administrators. These use cases form a natural link to open infrastructure tickets (RFEs) and documentation explaining how to execute each use case. By the end of the FAD we will have documentation for the use cases that are complete and open tickets for the use cases we intend to address in the future. This was another great discovery. A lot of great ideas from other Fedora events get lost in the sea of wiki pages, blog posts and and follow-up email discussions. Using this method, hopefully everything is in one place with a clear path to the documented implementation or a ticket reminding us we need to address it in the future.

I’m also hoping we can put to to use some things I recently learned about code sprinting at the Open Source Bridge conference–ironically the same place where the idea for the FedoraTalk FAD was born. I’m excited to see what kind of results we get from working in pairs and time boxing mini-sprints to 45 minutes.