fixing what we can

[Karsten Wade]

On Wed, 2007-12-19 at 14:47 +1000, Christopher Curran wrote:

> I have to agree, fedora docs project is by far the hardest project I've 
> ever tried to join. Previous development projects all I had to do is 
> send an email and hey presto SVN write access. This whole process is so 
> long and drawn out it is probably marginalising a whole swathe of 
> potential contributers.

It is certain there are people who fall to the wayside with this
process.  The inevitability of that is a separate, semi-philosophical
discussion.

When you say "the fedora docs project", do you mean this sub-project
itself?  Or "the Fedora Project" in general?

Most of the challenges we've discussed so far are all about the overall
project joining process and not specific to Fedora Docs.

We can do best by improving what we have in our purview.  What have we
discovered in the recent threads that we can directly fix from Fedora
Docs or our positions elsewhere in Fedora?

The second iteration of the Fedora account system (FAS2) is close to
release.  It resolves a lot of the historical problems of the old
system.  It does not, however, remove the requirement to agree to the
CLA.  However, the need to GPG sign the CLA may be required only for
people who work on code and content that goes into a release.  Since
code and content from places such as bugzilla and the wiki can be
filtered through people who have GPG-signed the CLA, a click-through can
suffice where needed (the wiki, not bugzilla.)

As Fedora has grown, we have a strange irony.  Work we did in the past
to resolve single-point problems ("Need wiki, must be Python?  Moin Moin
it is) have come to bite us as we are growing because they don't scale
the way we need to.  However, now that we have grown, it is harder to
replace semi-broken stuff we have relied upon ("Migrate from the wiki?
But we have 10,000 pages, DocBook XML dependencies, and on and on ...")

Rooting these cases out and making them flexible, scalable, and best fit
is a challenge that the Fedora Infrastructure and (now) Websites teams
are doing a great job with over the last (almost) year.  I'm *very*
encouraged about our future here.

- Karsten
-- 
Karsten Wade, Developer Community Mgr.
Dev Fu : http://developer.redhatmagazine.com
Fedora : http://quaid.fedorapeople.org
gpg key : AD0E0C41
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