Car parts vs. a Shiny Blue Car: What makes a better Fedora story?
For a very long time, when putting together release announcements, talking points, or other marketing-related materials, we’ve tended to group features (or, in the future, “changes” as approved by FESCo, + “shiny” as approved by presumably marketing or docs) into the following 3 categories: Users, Developers, and Sysadmins. (And of late, Cloud, or virt & cloud.)
Which has seemed reasonably fine, and may well still be fine, or at least, not broken. The question is: Are these groupings adequately representing the coolest things Fedora has to offer?
My line of thought, comments are welcome:
- The lines are increasingly blurry between these three areas. Seriously blurry. Particularly on the dev/sysadmin end of things (who is packaging more for? What about a PaaS? Is syslinux, an optional bootloader, more for a user or a sysadmin, if I’m just using it to boot my own guests and i’m not necessarily doing the role of a sysadmin?).
- We write a LOT of stuff that basically sounds like this (and I will use references from the current feature list to illustrate, along with language I wouldn’t actually use in a release announcement, if you are worried):
- We have things for sysadmins. They include:
- Checkpoint/restore: Enables checkpointing for processes
- High availability container resources: Use the cluster stack to manage VMs and discover/use containers on those VMs
- systemd resource control: dynamically modify c-groups based resource controls for services at runtime
- syslinux: optional bootloader, ideal for cloudy things, virt appliances
- Thermostat: tool for monitoring/servicing java apps as they run
- etc.
- Other things for users
- Even more things for developers
…Which basically sounds, IMO, like we have a bunch of stuff, mostly with vaguely technical descriptions, and not very often a description of *what that actually means* to the potential end user / audience, nothing out there to grab the eye of someone who is wondering what is in Fedora that will solve specific problems or use cases they have.
So: As described in mail to Docs and Marketing – I’m wondering if it makes more sense to tell the *stories* or overarching themes that we seem to have in a release – which could well change from release to release – if that helps show that there are improvements in broader areas, helps to define use beyond “the how to” into the “what for” area.
As a suggestion/draft, I wrote up the following areas & short (unrefined) descriptions to the docs and marketing lists, and am adding in some possible examples of what could go into those stories HERE, on this lovely blog post. These are basically the three big areas I see of “cool stuff” going on, primarily around “things that are NEW” and not incremental improvements (but not totally detailed, just a quick draft of potential feature matchups):
- Develop and Distribute: Languages, compilers, and tools for developing software, and tools for packaging software. (Could also be: Create, Develop, and Distribute??)
- Start and Recover: Enabling a variety of options for easier launching of hosts/guests, improving boot times, as well as quicker recovery from system or software failures. (Could also be: Launch and recover, Boot and recovery, etc.)
- Monitor and Manage: Systems and resource management, and tools for diagnosis, monitoring, and logging.
What do you think? It seems like “manage” often has overlap with start and recover. I think there would be a need to extend the bucket descriptions as to “why it’s important” – ie, “start and recover is often a focus point for those running applications in the cloud,” etc.
You’re welcome to come be part of the development for the F19 talking points (or at the bare minimum, the process in which we contemplate which features are best for highlighting).
If your feature doesn’t yet have a reason by it, don’t panic: It may be that your feature is less “totally new” and more of an incremental change, which may not land it on the Talking Points page (but may well stlil land it in others mailboxes. OR… it could be that, at first glance, it was hard to determine *what this actually means* to the audience by just looking at the feature page. Seriously: If you have a feature in F19, and you can tell some overriding story about what it means *in practice* – let me know here (on blog), or join up to the marketing list, or join us in #fedora-mktg.
