Best wishes to our friends at FUDCon: Kuala Lumpur.

It continues to delight me to see the investments in our APAC region FUDCons pay off in terms of attendance.  Much like FUDCon: Pune late last year, Kuala Lumpur’s attendance — at more than 400 registrants — is just huge, and is a testament not only to the desire to learn about free and open source software in the region, but also to the excellent planning capabilities of the local FUDCon team in Kuala Lumpur.

I’m sad that I can’t be in attendance at this event, but one of the amazing things about FUDCon is that they are truly designed to be shared with the worldwide Fedora community.  I know we are all looking forward to seeing your blog posts throughout the event and social media interactions, and I’m particularly excited by the enthusiasm I have seen for some real time projects, such as the crowd-sourced FUDCon book.  And don’t forget about the #fedora-fudcon channel on IRC – it’s not just a great place to interact with folks onsite, but those of us who are at home as well.

Christoph Wickert, awesome as always, is giving the keynote talk this morning — I am sure that he will have incredibly interesting and inspiring things to say, and I know that the wisdom of his Fedora experiences will be shared with you not just during his talk, but throughout the course of the weekend – and many others of you will do the same as well. FUDCon, in many ways, is truly about sharing – sharing our experiences, our knowledge, our future plans, and a few drinks – be they beer or tea or otherwise – and I hope that everyone makes the best of their shared time together in Kuala Lumpur.  There is a large audience present — let’s be sure to send them home with some great knowledge about free and open source software, a good feeling from a positive experience, and the invitation to come and participate in the Fedora Project if they have never done so before.

Give your hosts a round of applause.  They deserve it!

My best to everyone there.  I hope you all have a lovely time. :)

2012
05/17
CATEGORY
FUDCon
1 comment

Are *you* the next Fedora Program Manager?

Many moons ago, in October 2010, I followed in the footsteps of the amazing John Poelstra (also known as Poelstra as a Service) and took a job at Red Hat as the Fedora Program Manager.

As most of you know by now… well, I have a new gig as the Fedora Project Leader, but I am still kind of toting along this job as the Program Manager for Fedora (and other projects) as well. Which means I am incredibly happy to tell everyone that there is now, officially, truly, a job opening for the Fedora Program Manager position!

So, to put this in a nutshell: The bulk of program management in Fedora-land is feeding and nurturing and publishing the schedule, wrangling features and moving them through the feature process, working with the good folks in QA and release engineering as we approach releases to get ducks in rows and do blocker meetings, release readiness meetings, and Go/No-go meetings.  There’s also an element of problem-solving, eliminating bottlenecks, and identifying and fixing broken processes.  The great thing about this position is being able to dive into problems and help people out in fixing them, and being able to do that in a variety of areas in the project. Like John, I also do some program management for other projects within Red Hat, although that was not my primary role right after joining – it was more of something to grow into, and it’s an awesome way to learn how other projects work and do things.

You can read more about the job requirements in the official job posting, but I’ll just point out that actually being part of the Fedora Project community and knowing what the heck we actually do around here is an excellent start, and you probably know more than you think you know. :)   Communication skills, and a dedication to openness and transparency, are also vital. And for those of you wanting to know if you have to be in a certain location, fear not: Candidates can be considered from remote locations, though you’re of course welcome to be in an office as well.

The job posting is here, and  if you think you might be interested or want to know more about the position, feel free to drop me an email at robyn at redhat.com.  But here is a snippet:

This person is held ultimately responsible and accountable for the Program Management side of the Fedora Project. This includes preparing and maintaining release schedules, facilitating cross-functional meetings, providing status to Red Hat, tracking and encouraging the resolution of release-blocking issues. In essence, doing whatever necessary to enable a smooth and efficient running distribution creation and release process through full engagement with the Fedora Community.

As such, this job is exceptionally public-facing and requires a high level of involvement in the Fedora Community to achieve these goals.

2012
04/19
CATEGORY
Uncategorized
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Feeling awesome because of addition!

This post, dear friends, is about one thing:

ROBYN FEELING PRETTY AWESOME, because I actually figured out how to do something.

Behold!!! Can you spot the awesome?

Yup. That’s right: The newly added, handy-sandy Trac SumFieldsPlugin has been converted into actual usage within a trac instance, and actually configured and made into queries by MOI!

Now, I know some of you are sitting there still wondering why on earth this is actually useful to anyone (while others of you are probably making grand fistpump movements and thinking of all the awesomeness this could bring).  So I’ll give you the nutshell version:

Right now, the way budget tracking works for things like Regional Support (money Ambassadors spend for events, swag, media, etc.) and for Premier Fedora Events (FUDCons and FADs) is this: People decide to spend money, we (someone with a Red Hat credit card) pay up front, or we reimburse people, sometimes before an event, sometimes after an event (or purchase, etc.)  The money spent (and thus, money leftover for the quarter or year) are tracked manually in a wiki page by the budget owner.

Unfortunately, we haven’t come up with better ways to plan out expected spending for a whole year, or to track actual expenses (for, say, an event where hotel or other expenses are incurred) directly in Trac; the receipts wind up going to the budget owner, and then they have to figure out how to aggregate everything.  It’s not efficient, and I think that with the proper mechanisms in place, that the Ambassadors and FUDCon owners and payment-makers could be more self-sufficient in terms of the tracking.

This is why the above picture is so cool: The SumFieldsPlugin allows you to do queries, and specific a field (and then column) to do Sums on.  For the above example, it is summing up spending for Q1 and Q2 of FY13, in North America (component), and only for regional spending (not fudcons). For the below example, it is showing all spending, by quarter, by region, for both Regional Support AND FUDCons.

To summarize: I am pretty jazzed about working this into an improved workflow, which a number of ambassadors are already talking about doing, which can help all of us to be less dependent on a wiki page, and even be more proactive when thinking about where spending is going for the year (for example, we could have estimated costs vs. actual costs).

Also: Thanks to a few people, of course – Spot and Nirik for doing some packaging work on a few plugins, cwickert for reviewing, to all for helping out with getting it pulled into our trac instance and for not thinking I’m c-c-c-crazzzy (outside of, you know, normal circumstances).  And to Max for grinning wildly as he reads this, right before he sends me a note telling me how totally awesome this is, I’ll just thank you ahead of time. :D

Finally: I know it’s disappointing, but BigGiantConference is not an actual Real Event :)

2012
04/05
CATEGORY
Ambassadors
Budget
Fedora
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Achievement Unlocked: Blog Bandwagon! (Cloudstack/Apache fun)

That’s right, kids: I’ll be writing about the same thing you have read from Everyone Else on Planet Earth in the twitterverse and blogosphere this morning and today (or, in some less savory cases, the middle of the night): Cloudstack moving to the ASL and the intent to become an Apache Incubator project.

That said, lest anyone read through this posting and feel cheated at the end, I will not be speculating about if this is an excellent move or not, what their motivations were, what the implied meaning of AWS API compatibility means as far as future announcements, or if that gives more street cred to the notion that AWS APIs are becoming the de-facto standard, or if this will force OpenStack to further evaluate their future governance structure. This is for two reasons, really: Numero Uno, at least 68.7% (this is a highly calculated number, not random, I can totally assure you) of other commentators are far more knowledgeable than I am (read that as “actual knowledge” as well as “knows facts about other future Cloud-land announcements by others”), and I’m pretty sure that you don’t want to read a rehash of the stuff you already read.  Numero Dos, I don’t have the damn time to write a bulletproof, insightful entry about all of that stuff which would give the appearance that I am actually knowledgeable and insightful, with or without just blindly rewording speculation from others.

One of the things that I’ve been doing in Fedora for the last year-ish or so, in addition to $newrole as the Fedora Project Leader, is (for lack of a better term) wrangling the Fedora Cloud SIG.  Point of disclosure: I have friends in many communities, including the three mentioned often today — OpenStack, Cloudstack, and Eucalyptus.  Fedora, in many ways, has strong ties with all three communities.  We have a number of Euca folks active within the Fedora community, even outside of the Cloud space, and their VP of Community, Greg DeKoenigsberg, used to sit in this very FPL chair that I sit in now.  Cloudstack also has a number of folks who hail from Fedora-land as well, including their community manager, David Nalley, who also currently sits on the Fedora Board.  I have learned many things from these people; enough about TEH CLOOOUUUD to be slightly dangerous, and more than I can ever relate about the power of community, and the importance of transparency, and openness, and meritocracy.

Thus, I will simply make these two points, and then get back to work:

  • Cloudstack has a LONG, loooooooooong list of customers. With production deployments. If you have seen any of their presentations at various shows, you should think back to the slide showing “Customers using this stuff,” and remember how you said to yourself, “Holy crap, those are big names,” before assuming *anything* about the state of the project. And after you’re done with that, read this blog post from GoDaddy, and think just for a moment or two about what happens if just a small number of those customers feel more compelled to participate in the community as a result of this move.
  • The community folks I know at Cloudstack don’t throw the word “community” around lightly.  They are 100% dead serious about it, and doing it right, and they have shown that commitment not just in the community where they presently are, but others as well, notably Fedora. I have full faith that they can continue to build their community in the Land of Apache, and will do so equitably, and transparently.  It may not be as flashy as others, but you’ll never wonder whether it is the Meritocracy in charge of direction, or the Corporatocracy.

Speaking of community, doing things right, and more folks related to Fedora with excellent track records: Euca rolled out their new (and improved) Contributor Agreement today.  Read up. The game is far from over, kids.

2012
04/03
CATEGORY
cloud
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Attention, North American Ambassadors who have any substantial quantities of swag or media

If you are an Ambassador in North America, and you have any substantial quantity of swag or media, PLEASE, for the love of pi day, put your information in these tickets:

Media ticket: http://fedorahosted.org/famna/ticket/30

Swag ticket: http://fedorahosted.org/famna/ticket/29

Seriously: We have a ton of events coming up before F17 is out, and what seems to be a serious lack of media, and an unknown quantity of swag, aside from stickers.  This is making planning difficult. You don’t have to count one by one, but if you can make a rough guess and put it in the ticket VERY SOON, that would be super awesome, so that we can figure out how to plan accordingly for these various events.

Incidentally: FAMNA meetings are back to a weekly thing, if you haven’t been paying attention, and we have a handful of awesome new folks stepping up to wrangle events, and meetings seem to have a pulse again, which is awesome! We’re practically on the edge of the summer conference season already, so if you have an interest in owning an event as an Ambassador, please attend a meeting and speak up.

2012
03/14
CATEGORY
Ambassadors
conferences
Fedora
marketing
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Saying thank-you.

It probably shouldn’t be, but sometimes it’s easy to overlook giving people thanks for helping you out.  I just wanted to give props to a few people:

  • mizmo, for helping out with a PR request for screenshots of F16. Done beautifully. Thank you.
  • spot, for packaging a handful of trac plugins for me.  And for making me laugh. :)
  • inode0, for taking the reins in FAmNA meetings on getting events rolling and actually making mustard. I mean progress.
  • codeblock, for putting up with me till 2am one night last week while I putzed around with enabling trac plugins and needed refreshes… numerous times.
  • spevack, for taking my phone calls for advice (and trolling.) More than I could ever count. :)
  • gholms, for being the steadfast, always-there helper of all things cloudy. You’re awesome.

That is all :)

2012
02/28
CATEGORY
Fedora
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Updates, Tidbits, Beefiness, and so forth

Greetings! It’s time for another occasional episode of… Random Things In Fedora Robyn Wants To Tell You About!

  • F17 Alpha has gone GOLD. Gold is the color of mustard. Mmm, the sweet taste of progress.  Per yesterday’s Go/No-Go meeting, RC4 met all of the Alpha release criteria, and we are shipping F17 Alpha on Tuesday, February 28.
  • The Alpha Release Readiness Meeting is TODAY, February 23rd.  You can read the announcement of the meeting here, but to recap: It’s a meeting that gathers many team leaders to check in on their progress/readiness for the release of F17 alpha on Tuesday, and provides them a nice forum for any cross-team logistical planning that needs to happen. We’ll be meeting at 20:00 UTC (3pm Eastern, 12pm Pacific, 6am on the 24th Noriko’s time… thanks for getting up so early, Noriko!)
  • Fedora Engineering “Open House” on IRC is TODAY: Per Spot’s email to the announce list earlier this week, there will be a Fedora Engineering Open House meeting on IRC today, at 18:00 UTC.  As he graciously pointed out in his follow-up email, that time translates to 1:00pm EST. The open house will be taking place in #fedora-meeting on irc.freenode.net.  The plan for today is to briefly present some of the upcoming projects that the Fedora Engineering team will be working on, and then gather feedback, suggestions, and comments. For more information about the Fedora Engineering team, read their wiki page; to catch a preview of their plan for the upcoming fiscal year (which runs March to February, in case anyone was wondering), read their FY13 plan.

I’m super delighted at getting Alpha out ON TIME, according to schedule.  We haven’t done that since Fedora 10.  There were a ton of moving parts in this one – between /usr move stuff, a mass rebuild with GCC, and numerous other potential pitfalls, we still managed to navigate to getting things out the door on time, and I think a huge amount of credit for that belongs to folks in QA and release engineering for really thinking ahead about coordinating all of these things. Kudos, guys.

Of course, we’re not out of the woods yet, and as I’m sure you suspected, I have upcoming reminders about the schedule:

  • Feb. 28 – Alpha Release
  • Mar. 13 – Software translation deadline
  • March 20 – Beta Change Deadline, also the Features 100% complete deadline. People with features: Pay attention to that 100% percentage, and keep your feature pages up to date, please!
  • Apr 3 – Beta Release
  • Apr 23 – Final Change Deadline
  • May 8 – F17 Final Release

I’ll be frank: While we all want to relish in the glory of an on-time alpha, there is still an a-bun-dance of work to be done. Let’s continue kicking buns and see if we can repeat the progress for Beta!

2012
02/23
CATEGORY
F17
Fedora
schedule
1 comment

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