What I would like to see for Fedora 15.

[Stephen John Smoogen]

I have been reading the various threads and trying not to comment too
much as I am not sure what exactly I would accomplish. Then a little
gurgle in the back of the brain finally percolated up from the various
proposals...

In the flashy days of the first Web Wars (1995-1997), one of the books
that every 'visionary' startup person had to read and at least comment
on was Geoffrey More's "Crossing the Chasm". While this book has its
faults and has been passed over by "The Cluetrain Manifesto", "Who
Moved My Cheese", or "Death By A Thousand Tickets, The Smoogen
Story".. it does have its point on the Technology Adoption LifeCycle.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Technology-Adoption-Lifecycle.png

The background theory is that groups usually fall into 5-7 subgroups
with various gaps between them. The gap Moore focused on was that
between visionary innovators and pragmatic early adopters. You can see
this chasm in between say BeOS where there was a lot of Buzz but it
never got enough pragmatic support to sustain itself into later
groups.

So what does this have to do with Fedora? Well I realized that in many
ways Fedora's job is to help throw things across that chasm to see if
it can land on the other side. Sometimes things will and sometimes
they will fall down but our job is to throw with all our might. The
big arguments currently are really about "How can we design a better
throwing tool?" Some of the approaches are quite radical and some are
more lazy-fairy like... but in the end its more about how to build
that device.

And now to my proposition (if you are still here and haven't hit Del).
I would like for us to focus on 1-3 things for say 3 releases. A SIG
would propose a set of goals of what they want to see in 18 months and
how they believe it will be accomplished. Then the focus of the next 3
releases is on reaching those goals. Somebody (or bodies) would choose
which 3 proposals are going to get focused on (I was thinking a
cascading solution would be best so say 1 gets 13,14,15; 2 would
14,15,16 and 3 would start 15,16,17 and 4 would be 18,19,20. This
allows for us to better understand our future and allow for things to
get done in achievable ways.

I hope this makes sense, and hopefully makes things better.

-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.

Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp. Or what's a heaven for?
-- Robert Browning