Fedora Talk

Fedora Talk is the Asterisk-based voice-over-IP system for Fedora contributors. Fedora Talk is an effort to bring Fedora contributors in closer contact when needed for high bandwidth meetings and conversations.

Fedora Talk can be used with one of the many VOIP soft phones that comes with Fedora. Ekiga and Twinkle are popular. It can also be used with most SIP compliant software and hardware phones, or from a land line or mobile phone.

For more information, visit the Fedora Talk web site at http://talk.fedoraproject.org.

Usage guidelines

Be careful how you use Fedora Talk.

It should not be used for regular meetings, for example. It does not have the low-barrier, broad open access that the Fedora Project requires.

If you are conducting community business, it is best done in mailing lists and via open IRC meetings.

That said, it's acceptable to collaborate with a small team via Fedora Talk. You must be careful to document your work and reasoning, since there is not the same ease of auto-logging and so forth as email and IRC.

Why be careful?

For pure social communities, it is probably unimportant that voice chat creates a significant barrier to many potential participants. Social communities are somewhat selective by nature, and what one is socializing around is often exclusive-creating in itself, whether it's gaming or brew pubs.

In an open source community of practice such as the Fedora Project, it is a very important consideration.

Here's a quick list of the problems that arise when voice is used as part of conducting community activities:

• It excludes people who cannot hear, who cannot understand English, or cannot understand the accent of the speaker(s). Meetings that are conducted via voice exclude all of those people from participating.
• It is difficult to obtain a log of the discussion (a transcript.) Any notes or summaries are always interpreted by the people doing the writing and generally focus on the conclusions and decisions. A chat log or a email list discussion can be archived and referred back to later to understand why something was done.
• It's hard or impossible to have multiple threaded discussions in voice; generally only one person at a time can speak. This presents challenges to anyone who feels uncomfortable speaking in public or a group. People who can otherwise participate in a written English-only discussion may not be able to participate in a voice only discussion.
• Translation is very difficult with voice, unless a full transcript is provided. This excludes a sizable part of the Fedora contributors.