submitting ideas to Fedora [the little sleep approach]

[Stephen John Smoogen]

Ok I am running on fumes watching a load balancer and a router fight
over who has the right routes.. and so read up on the current long
debate.

What is the problem we are trying to fix?

>From reading all the emails, the issue looks to be summed up as

1) How do I as Joe Random user help make the distribution more like I want it?
2) How do I as Joe Random user feel like I matter if I am not a
developer, am not a QA person, am not a documenter, etc?

Some people see the answer as being adding websites to gather data of
what people want so that developers would know what ideas people want
or do not. Others see the answer as the user has to be active in the
community to make a change, and that polls etc are passive-aggressive
methods of finding things out (the old webnote on the Fedora fridge
versus an honest discussion of why a feature should or should not be
there)

The bigger issue is that I am not sure people really know how to be
involved, and modern society really teaches a lot of people to be not
involved in things. We need to find ways to retrain people to be
involved, to be less anonymous, less irrelevant, and less immeasurable
(to steal from Patrick Lencioni via John Poelstra
http://poelcat.wordpress.com/2008/02/23/miserable/ [Thanks John for
finding this and pointing it out.])

Developers know how to be involved.. they hack on things until they
get done.. no matter what that thing and whether or not it gets
included (they can always find some distro that makes it included
somewhere). Artists and writers know how to be involved.. but how does
someone's dad who just downloads a DVD and plays around with it a
couple of hours a night know how to be involved? How do we change a
person who is trained to be a consumer into a producer? And a producer
of what, especially when he feels that all he has is questions about
is he doing this or that correct.

A second question that I see from this is... if I am say a Fedora
ambassador, triager, artist, developer etc how do I influence the
parts of the system that I am not immediately part of (not part of my
monkey circle so to speak?). How do ambassadors, artists, triagers
help developers see what would be useful for them and vice versa?
Those are the more complex part of a society especially a society
where I may never personally see the other people beyond an anonymous
IRC nick or email address. And I think they are the questions any
debate or solutions should be about.



-- 
Stephen J Smoogen. -- CSIRT/Linux System Administrator
How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed
in a naughty world. = Shakespeare. "The Merchant of Venice"