Infra Ideas
What's Fedora missing as community that can be solved with a proper infrastructure?
Fedora as public network is a huge platform that has too many tools trying to work as one. Even if we know that some task needs a more detailed tool, we deal with this issue as if all teams and task needs a unique tool to have a good function.
Some of the common points that we need to think about and try to change are this:
- Fedora as a community has too many people that want contribute; but also has too many tool and the connection between them is not always easy to find.
- Our wiki is not a communitay site, and should not be one. This is why social networks work better with people groups. "People like to see what's everyone doing... in a pretty way"
- Wiki doesn't help to have unified content. Several times we see cases when the same info is writting more than 3 times.
- Having soo many tools makes the unifiying work almost impossible; because we send the message that "is ok that everyone try their own tool and try to work their own way"
Working on solutions : Fedora Social Network
Fedora is an excellent OS that give people the chance to get the highest productivity of their digital environment; but we also need to think that this behaviour has influence in our daily lives.
- Profile mockup: http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4105/4846314843_d209e73245_o.png
The perfect place where all ambassadors can meet
Even if we have a lot of ambassadors in each country, sometimes is difficult to make that this ambassadors meet; but is even harder to make that all ambassadors around the world meet. Also, if any of our contributors want to be part of our family, is easier to have a "social network" with fun and cool info about the team.
If we think in productivity for our contributors, we also need to know that even if we have a huge and awesome team, we still need help; and probably are those new contributors that still don't understand the tools that we already have OR that need to understand the tools but all our resources are busy with the projects, where we need to think in a better environment to provide them the proper info and tools "centralized" to make them *great contributors* and not only voyeurs.
In this case we have the problematic:
Users --> Ambassadors/Contributors
How does the new users get to be and meet the old Ambassadors/Contributor? If we consider that we have a huge wiki, not too organized, and just in one language we have a problem to reach the complete world. One of the main ideas that we should explore is to provide a centralized tool that can gather all kind of people with the same goal... Fedora.
Where you can find friends near to you
We know that we have community sites, but most of the times we only have ambassadors localized... not users, neither regular contributors. What can we do? What if each one of us could be "localized" in a simple map? what if we turn "local pages" into groups of a single website with an easy url? What if we provide an easy link navigation to find *all* our Fedora people around the world?
I can show what I know!
Most of the problems we have to identify our contributors is to "know" what they do. We as mentors lose time figuring our what our new people is capable to do.. so, we can provide a "portfolio" to each team that they want to you. This could be a great way to identify not only our contributors, but also assign task to "all the people that we already know that can help us". But what happens with the people that -want to learn about something-? we can also have several links with small guides and tips to turn that user into a contributor
- It would be nice to be able to tag things both ways: someone working on a ticket/feature/bug tags it "Python; web app; TurboGears; Programming; easy fix" People who have said they have those skills and want to contribute would be notified of the new task. There should also be an easy way to get people from the announcement to getting in touch with whoever they need to talk to.
An agenda! without leave the same tool!!
We ALL have problems to -be organized-; things like "where is the meeting?" "when is the meeting?" "if I go to this meeting will I be able to attend to this other meeting?" "when is the event?" "will I have work at the same date of an event?" "will my vacations be at the same time that this fudcon?" What if we could have a single profile personalized page where we could have a great, cool and cute agenda to handle our busy community lives?
An organized list of all the tickets that we have in a single page!!
How many of us reply tickets from different projects? In my particular case I have tickets (trac) from: - Design team - Fama But I also see some: - Marketing - FAmSCo What if we could have them in a single page with ajax actions?