Kevin's musings

There has recently been a bit of noise in the Fedora community around the general “feel” and direction of the community. Some folks are unhappy with some things and are voicing their displeasure. I thought I would collect a few links I found of note recently and my thoughts in general on this.

First, go off and read Spots excellent post if you haven’t already: February 1

Next up, the bugzilla folks had a very nice post about their community and growing it: Open Source Community, Simplified

So, from these we can note a few things:

• If you run into a problem, try and propose a solution. If you don’t have enough info to propose a solution, how about gathering information for others to allow them to look for solution? Something? Anything?
• Be kind and appreciative, avoid negative. Toward that end, I am going to try and praise people who propose or implement fixes or solutions and not worry as much about the people who are not.
• Removing barriers is a good thing. I’d like to see more parts of Fedora have “easyfix” lists or other things that can get people easily involved.

Now to get to the subject of this post: I think Carrots are much better than Sticks. Surely in open source communities. A reward for fixing/doing something (even if it’s only a “great job”) is much better and more productive than a “I hate this” or a “I don’t like the way things are going here”. Enough of the negative (stick) and people will stop listening to you or leave, but with more positive (carrot) others, including yourself will get more done and have a more fun time of things.

So, if you find yourself trying to get something done in Fedora and can’t get there due to too many people waving sticks at you, feel free to drop me a line and I will try and assist you into reaching for and grabbing that carrot (or at least pointing you in the right direction).

As many of you may know, I’ve been happily working at Tummy.com for many years. It’s almost always been fun and all the folks I have worked with have been great co-workers as well as friends. I’m going to miss working with them, and I am sure they will continue to be awesome. 🙂

Starting in April, I will be moving on to a new challenge: I have accepted the position of Fedora Infrastructure Lead. 🙂

It was not an easy decision to make, but I am really looking forward to helping out Fedora full time. There’s lots and lots of things to do and improve, but also some pretty big shoes to fill. I still intend to be active in all the places in Fedora that I already am, as well as local groups like the Boulder Linux users group and boulder hacking society.

Looking forward to the next few months!

<begin PSA>

If you’ve filed a ticket in the Fedora infrastructure trac at some point in the past (you can quickly check this by, logging in here and then going here. ), can you please take a minute to:

• See if the ticket is waiting for information from you => Please provide it.
• Has had no activity at all => Perhaps you could elaborate on your request, or add details
• Is no longer needed/wanted => Please close it
• Could perhaps be better filed somewhere else. In particular, bodhi, fas, websites and pkgdb all have their own trac instances. You’re likely to get more attention from their developers there than in the infrastructure trac => Refile and close the infrastructure ticket.

Thanks for your consideration.

<end PSA>

I’ve lately noticed an increase in what I call “Drive by reviews”.
They say that “first impressions are lasting impressions” and I can understand that. Everyone wants to make a good first impression and it takes a lot to overcome a bad one. However, I’ve seen more folks of late instead taking a first impression of something as a only impression, or over-generalizing based on one first impression.

A good example of this happens all the time to restaurants. How often have you heard someone say: “I went to that new restaurant and I am never going to go there again”? When asked for more details how often do they say:

• The line was long and we didn’t want to wait
• The service was slow
• The waiter carded me! (asked for ID for a adult beverage)

Of course there are many great reasons for not wanting to go back, but thinking logically about some of the above makes me at least think that I would give the place another try. Long line? It was just opening and you have no data at all what the place was like, you never even went in. Slow service? Just opening and getting the hang of things. Carded? Perhaps their is a law they are following to do so. Bad mood? Stomach ache? Ordered the wrong thing? A host of issues that could well be solved if you give the place another try in a few weeks.

Another trend seems to be “I went to $foo and didn’t like it, so I am never going to another $foo again”. Sure, some things would be the same or very similar in other restaurants in a chain, but others would not be. Is your reasoning related to one of those variables?

Which brings me to the Fedora/Linux tie in here. Every few months I see a sad tale of someone who tried the Fedora {mailing lists|forum|irc channel} and had a bad first impression, which leads to a “I am never going to use {Linux|Fedora} again!”. Please take a few moments to think logically and not judge an entire Linux distribution or Operating system based on one forum post, email or 5 minutes in an IRC channel. Do some research, work on explaining your problem better or in a different way, try a different support channel, or at the very least note that your impression is based on only one single drive by. It’s hard to overcome a bad first impression, but do consider giving more than a single chance.

The release of Fedora 15 is just around the corner (this tuesday, 2011-05-24)!

As always, we will be having a on-line release party over in #fedora-social on irc.freenode.net. 🙂

Please join us in celebrating the release…