Visualizing Earth Hour

One of my favorite RSS feeds is The Big Picture.

With javascript enabled in your browser you can click on each picture to see the before and during contrast in cities around the world.

The Wiki Is 14 Years Old

I came across this article calling out the fourteenth birthday of the wiki.  The first wiki was created by Ward Cunningham of Portland, Oregon.  An interesting interview with Ward is on FLOSS weekly.

I can’t imagine how a huge portion of Fedora would function and continue growing without the Fedora Project Wiki.  Thank you Ward and thank you Fedora Infrastructure!

Come to Open Source Bridge

If you’ve been looking for an excuse to visit Portland, Oregon, look no further!

I recently volunteered to help the Open Source Bridge marketing team with project management.  I’m not sure what all that will entail yet, but Rick Turoczy assures me I can help so I’m sure before long I’ll have plenty to  do.  I’m looking forward to working with people in the local tech scene, several of which I met last week at Lunch 2.0.  Open Source Bridge is already listed on the Fedora Events page too so maybe I’ll get the opportunity to meet some new Fedorans.  It even looks like Paul Frields is hoping to come.

When I first read the early blog posts about creating a conference to replace OSCON in Portland (it has relocated to San Jose, California) I thought it might be overly ambitious, if not impossible.  I’m changing my mind. The full purpose of the conference is  described at http://opensourcebridge.org/about/.  First, the conference is being organized by a group of Portland all-stars that have pulled off similar feats.  Second, the word is starting to get out in different places that this conference is being recognized as an alternative to OSCON.

A call for papers is still open and lots of interesting proposals have been submitted.  In an open source sort of way you can see all the proposals that have been submitted.  It is RSS enabled so you can set a  watch and see it continue to evolve.

The only proposal currently missing is yours. Time is running out. The opportunity to submit a paper ends very soon—seven days from now on March 31, 2009.  Hope to see you there.

Fedora 11 Feature Freeze Is On

It struck me today that as the Fedora Feature Wrangler I mostly focus on the things that are wrong or missing and then nag people until they get fixed. I just finished going over the list of Fedora 11 features one more time to call out the feature pages that aren’t quite in order for Feature Freeze. FESCo will review them at their meeting tomorrow (2009-03-06).

It hit me that we’ve got a lot of great things going on in Fedora 11 and that on the whole, a good number of features are close to completed. I sent the following message to FESCo following the list of feature pages to be reviewed:

Overall, this is the largest feature list we’ve ever had AND the highest percentage completion across the board for features at this time in the release cycle… realizing in advance that percentage of completion is not the exact science it may appear to be. So if the feature pages are accurate this could really be setting us up for a lot of finished content for the beta and a longer than usual run way to test it all before we call it GA. Great job to all the developers and maintainers!

Check out the Fedora 11 feature list for yourself!  And the next time you see a Fedora developer or package maintainer tell them how much you appreciate their hard work.  I know I definitely don’t do it enough!  The same goes for Release Engineering, Documentation, Translation, Infrastructure, QA, Bug Triage, Translation, Ambassadors, Marketing, and any other group I missed.

Fedora 11 Feature Bonanza

Thanks for the shout-out from Jef (which he tells me is short for Jeff) about the Fedora 11 feature list.

Jef is definitely right that this is the largest feature list we have ever had.  Some of the media outlets are starting to pick up on the feature list too.  With feature freeze around the corner I was recently thinking I should send my usual reminder that time is running out to submit features for Fedora 11.  Then I thought that might be a bad idea because we potentially have more features than we know what to do with.   I spent the time I would have used to create that announcement to chase down all the futures that had been submitted.  Definitely a good problem to have.

It is a really good thing James Laska started the test day program so that these features will get focused testing.  With a feature list this long I’m not sure how they will all get tested before the final freeze, but just like starting the feature process for Fedora 7, the most important part is starting the process and a framework that can be improved over time.

A feature list this long also calls out the need for good schedule management if we want to ship according to our original schedule.  It also calls out the need to make proactive slips to the schedule if we fail to meet important freeze deadlines (beta freeze and final development freeze) so there is enough time to test all of these features in the context of the distro we will ship.  I’ve been reading an interesting book about project management by Johanna Rothman called “Manage It!” I liked her tip in the scheduling chapter: “Late Projects Don’t Make Up Time; They Get Later.”  That has definitely been my experience, but hopefully we won’t even have to go down that road.

One important thing to note is that the feature list is still pre-feature freeze.  Based on my experience of managing this list in the past, some features will drop off at feature freeze and a few more by the time we reach final freeze.  That is okay because in a few more months they can be part of Fedora 12.  Thanks to all the feature owners and package maintainers and upstream projects for making all this possible for Fedora!