michaeldehaan.net

FedoraHosted is an excellent service backed by all sorts of great customer service on #fedora-admin on irc.freenode.net. There you can get source control, Trac, mailing lists, and everything you need to run a project — except an IRC channel, which you get from freenode, of course. Good stuff. I think it’s one of the nicer things Fedora does, but it’s a bit of a secret.

But what is Fedora to you? Well, the blog aggregator is probably mostly read by techies and people interested in newness. I see Fedora as mostly an engineering hub. It excels best at fostering technology, given it is less interested in long term support (whether or not we agree with this, it is what it is). That being said, we need to use Fedora Hosted to show the world what tech Fedora is fostering so that people can get involved if they want. Unlike Launchpad, which contains records for numerous projects that Ubuntu does not invest in (a couple of my projects are there, in fact), or sometimes even ship (like my projects), everything on Fedora Hosted is unique code that we run, manage, and grow.

Long ago, Red Hat was organized to have an “Emerging Technologies” group, which is now properly integrated with the rest of the company — many things like Virt Manager, libvirt, Cobbler, etc, all rolled into actual products. The point was, though, is that there was a place to go and you could say “here is some new exciting stuff Red Hat was doing, now join up and get involved”. et.redhat.com existed because Fedora Hosted.org didn’t exist yet. Now Fedora Hosted is this hub.

Yet, if I look at Fedora Hosted today, I see a plain list of projects and it’s hard to tell what I might be interested in and what is just going to be an empty Trac page. What we really want is a page for people to go to and see where the innovation is happening. It should be shinier than Launchpad, and all be about real upstream projects that actually happen at FHO (unlike Launchpad). More importantly, it should allow people to browse projects that they want to explore and join. While techies might not like to do marketing, the two are deeply linked. Users => reaching your audience => building community => more development power & more ideas.

To do this, we need a well managed set of categories for projects. It should be able to look at projects related to Web Frameworks, Fedora Internals, Systems Management, Docs, and so forth, and see descriptions for each of them. Different projects could be highlighted on a regular basis and there could be a blog about new ones. Descriptions should be required for everything. Similarly, no project should be allowed to sit without source code and with empty Trac pages. Unlike Sourceforge, we don’t want to be a dumping ground, as the Broken Windows Theory implies we’ll only attract more of the same. We need to prod these projects to advertise themselves, lest we risk becoming a SourceForge (good back in the day, now shininiess exists among a wasteland of abandoned projects). Projects should be able to be rated (projects, not packages, remember this is upstream), and should have a standard way to indicate what distributions (including those outside Fedora) they also support.

Thus, as we talk about Fedora Community or Fedora.com website redesigns, let’s also consider Fedora Hosted, and find out more ways how we can focus people towards the interesting projects we run here. This is where the real lifeblood of Fedora lies…. not that I discount Release Engineering and Packaging, but some of this is what makes us unique.

Unfortunately this is just a vision, I don’t have the resources to implement this — but perhaps other folks will take interest. I think we have a unique cluster of goodness on FHO, though we don’t do a good enough job of marketing one of the central features we use to develop our new technology. Launchpad is a glorified project management and build system. The life lives upstream. Let’s show that off.

Similarly, we need to do a better job of encouraging upstream folks that have sustained projects to move them over. I’m sure a fair share of those can be promoted to proper listed projects.

It could start small — just improving the index and adding categories would be a huge start, maybe a ratings system, and a spotlight on different projects in Fedora Weekly News? (And more prominent linking from fedora-project.org?).

I see this as a big win — it will be more obvious where Fedora leads, it will help folks find which projects they are most interested in, and also helps Fedora users find applications they might not ordinarily have found out about. This allows us to concentrate on, I think what Fedora is really supposed to be about — not a distribution where the goal is to make releases — but a way to hook developers up with developers and introduce people to new technology and how to work together on it. The distribution is just a mechanism of consumption.