Schedule hackfest

[Paul W. Frields]

Hello Artwork, Docs, L10n, Marketing, and Websites teams!

First, I hope you all have a happy holiday season, and enjoy some time
with friends, family, and loved ones.  We've had a really big year in
Fedora and I am so incredibly proud to have worked with all of you
each day.  We've pushed out two incredibly great releases of Fedora
this year, Fedora 9 and 10, each stronger than the one before.

As we are now deeply into the Fedora 11 development cycle, I've been
thinking we really all want to know the various team interdependencies
before we get to the Alpha phase of the release.  If one team has a
particular deadline, and that requires input from some other team to
complete, we want to know that.  In the best possible world, each team
will be producing what its partner needs in plenty of time for that
partner team to work effectively, and so on down the line.

We've had release day planning meetings over the last couple of
releases which have helped, I think, quite a bit to ensure people have
what they need from other groups.  We have an opportunity to make this
process work even more smoothly, and driven more by each team, if we
can figure out the very broad tasks that each team has to complete for
a release, and map them out on the release schedule.

Some of the teams receiving this message have done preliminary (or
maybe even more) work on the schedule already, which is fantastic.  I
think FUDCon gives us a chance to bring together people from most of
your teams to flesh that work out where it's helpful.  I don't believe
we need to "finish" the schedule, and that might be a hazy goal
anyway.  We'll probably end up finding places where we can refine it
after this release to do even better for Fedora 12.  But each
iteration brings us something that we can use to help releases go more
smoothly.

Many of us are volunteers, and we all still want to know, first and
foremost, that our work is important, and valued in Fedora.  The work
we do is far more important than simply hitting a date on a calendar.
But we also all want to know that we are helping our fellow community
members, and that each of us is doing our best to help Fedora move
forward as a project.

I've asked John Poelstra to help me put together a hackfest at FUDCon
Boston 2009, bringing together people from each of your teams to talk
through these interdependencies and record them.  The result, I
believe, will make each succeeding release easier, more efficient, and
more enjoyable.

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
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  irc.freenode.net: stickster @ #fedora-docs, #fedora-devel, #fredlug
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