What issues are you passionate about in the Fedora Project? What are you doing to move these things forward besides talking about them on the Fedora mailing lists?
Seth Godin’s excellent post about procrastination and email reminded me of Fedora and my own resistance.
Have you ever used the Fedora email lists to avoid what you really should be doing? I certainly have.
It’s much easier to discuss, critique, and criticize another point of view instead of creating a formal proposal to solve the problem. What if our list discussions were thoughtful brainstorming exercises in search of new and better ideas towards a formal proposal instead of “point, counter-point” debates? What if those proposals were easy to access and not buried in the list archives?
That is what I loved about Stephen Smoogen’s post about Fedora and its many audiences. It expanded my thinking and said a lot of what I already knew, but hadn’t articulated. It moved things forward for me.
It is easy to focus on the easy problems–the ones that are someone else’s problem to solve, particularly when you expect someone else to write the proposal. Written proposals on the Fedora wiki have been one of the more constructive paths forward in Fedora’s evolution.
I talk a lot about Fedora needing more of a strategic direction so I proposed and now facilitate the Strategic Working Group. I saw an ongoing pattern of confusion around our release processes and scheduling so I created wiki pages and requested input from others.
The release criteria, important release milestones, No Frozen Rawhide announcement plan, and release engineering tickets project all came out of a desire to be part of the solution. Most of these did not happen over night and they were not always fun to work on.
March 3, 2010 at 3:44 am
I loved Godin’s post and this commentary. They made me recall I’ve been considering dropping off a couple Fedora lists where I don’t tend to be useful. In a number of cases I stay on a list so I know if there’s a flamefest going on. If that happens, though, invariably people let me know about it, so I doubt it’s useful for me to worry about it in advance. Certainly in some cases such a problem might require some action, but it’s exceedingly rare not to hear about them. (Many eyeballs solve email problems?) There’s only so many hours in the day, and they shouldn’t be spent crouching like a vulture over the “get email” button.
March 1, 2010 at 5:52 pm
I find that email in general pretty much *stops me* from doing what I need to be doing. In the last few months I’ve spent more time on wiki pages, and less time on email, with emails being “go to this wiki page” sorts of things.
I have grown to loathe email. There’s just too much of it. Spend a day on a plane and you’re hopelessly buried at the end of it.