As I approach my tenth year at Red Hat this coming October, I’m currently focusing on helping wherever I can with our new and existing cloud community efforts, from Red Hat OpenShift to the Fedora Cloud SIG. I’m also working more deeply on The Open Source Way, externally as the canonical upstream location for how-to and why-to do projects within community, and internally as a community consultant across Red Hat. More activity coming on The Open Source Way mailing list, if I have anything to say about it.

1. Slice the flower end (paper pointy tip) of nine or more large yellow onions.  Peel onions, leaving root end attached.
2. Hold root end in an off-hand pinched together fingertip, then slice from the flat end to make onion rings approximately 0.25 inch/0.5 cm thick.  Slicing this way cuts across the grain, making juice-release and sugar-absorption easier.
3. Fill a five quart/four liter heavy-bottomed pot with the onions, flat and layered on each other.  If you have room, you can add the other dry ingredients at this point.
4. Add 0.25 cup of water to the pan to keep the bottom onions from scorching  during initial heating.
5. Turn the pan on very low, just enough to turn the added water to steam, which helps the onions release their juices.
6. Cover the pan, keep the heat low, and check infrequently.  Use a large spoon to lift and turn the onions until enough juices are released that the onions are covered in juice.
7. Add 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon and five cinnamon sticks; you may also add other sweet/savory spices, such as a few cloves, a few star anise, a few pieces of fresh or dried ginger, ten whole allspice berries, and so forth.  Add 0.5 teaspoon of salt.  Be light on this, the point is not to make it overly spicy, just provide more background support.
8. Use a vegetable peeler to remove the orange part of an orange, leaving all the white pith behind.  Cut the peel in to two-inch/four-centimeter long pieces and add to boiling onions.
9. Juice four oranges, removing the seeds and large pulp pieces.  Add to the boiling onions.
10. Add three cups of evaporated cane juice such as turbinado (succanat or similar is OK, be careful not to use brown sugar or similar unless you can deal with the strong molasses flavor via spicing) to the boiling onions.  Other sweeteners could be substituted, but may leave a runnier consistency unless a proper caramelization is created  in the final juice reduction.
11. Cook uncovered for two or more hours, reducing and concentrating the juices.  Turn the onions infrequently.
12. When the juice is low enough to make the onions at danger of scorching or caramelizing the onion fibers, remove from heat.  Put onions in to colander and drain, then add the drained juice back to the pan and continue reducing over medium-low heat.
13. Reduce, stirring more closer to the end, until a thick syrup, several minutes after the last wisps of steam have risen.  You want it to caramelize slightly (very soft ball stage?), but watch carefully for scorching.
14. Add in any remaining juices that have drained from the onions, reducing to a thick syrup.
15. Add syrup back to onion mixture, and carefully mix with one or two soup spoons until even consistency.
16. Resulting marmalade should be very thick with no apparent wateriness. Put in clean jars and refrigerate. Eat soon!

My first run of this resulted in one and a half quarts of marmalade.

This is a first draft of the recipe, pulled from memory, and done entirely without additional research.  I am certain that the recipe needs fixes, and now we have something to work from.

Hope your 2010 is finishing well, and happy new year/2011 to you and yours.

A diversity check is the moment when you look something over you have done, such as a presentation/talk, documentation, writing a blog post or an email, where you must think, “Did I just write this for people only like me, or does it make sense to a diverse audience?  Will a diverse audience find offense where it is not intended?  Will I turn away people I want to attract and keep around?”

As an example, imagine if you were trying to build morale in a group and you wrote, “Cheer up!  Put a smile on your face!  We’ll make it through these tough times together.”  As the optimistic extrovert I am painting you as in this example, this advice makes sense to you.  You find that putting good cheer on your face helps you be brave for tough experiences.  You consider it important to simply trust that we’ll survive and thrive.  But do you know how many of your audience feel the same way as you do?  Do you know how your words are affecting them?

What is your goal, in this example?  Are you trying to bring up the group’s morale or trying to make the world be like you?  Uh, what did I just ask?

If you want to raise morale, you need to address all of your audience.  Some people are tired of being told to put a smile on their face they don’t feel in their heart.  Some feel treated as if they were children or idiots or as if their experiences and feelings are being ignored.  Some people only feel comfort when they have updated and accurate facts.  Some raise their morale with their circle of friends by sharing and recounting negative experiences.

The phrase catching me recently, one where I’ve been writing around and around it, is the admonition, “Be bold,” as in this paragraph from the page telling how to write on the Fedora Project wiki:

Be bold while editing changes. Wiki changes are tracked and can be reverted when necessary. This doesn’t mean you should be reckless, especially when making large changes to key documents.

Concentrate on how “be bold” makes you feel.

If you feel emboldened to edit the wiki, then the message works for you.

But for some of you, that instruction is going to make you feel uncomfortable.  Or it will frighten you instead of inspire you.

The point isn’t for you to understand how different views feel from the inside.

The point is to understand that there are different views and check your words and methods. Seek to be inclusive. Don’t try to create a bond by forging Us against an Other Them.

Sometimes the most important thing to do is to simply recognize there are other experiences and you don’t fully understand them.

So …

“When I feel discouraged, I put a smile on my face to give me courage and hope in the face of adversity.  Whatever I can do to help you feel better during these adverse times, please reach out to me.”

… and …

“We encourage you to be bold when editing the wiki because wiki changes are tracked and can be reverted when necessary.  We would rather you do something than wait for permission.  Our culture doesn’t run on permission, it runs on people recognizing something needs doing, then doing it.  If you feel you have found something worth doing, please go ahead and do it.  And encourage others to be bold while you are at it.”

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Contributor_CVs

It’s an opt-in system to track an individual’s contributions and recommendations from others within the Fedora Project community.  (Naturally, FLOSS for code and content, use it for your own project, etc.)

For recommendations, we can get started today with a simple process.  You leave a comment in a user’s talk page on the wiki, using the ~~~~ signature format plus the page’s history to verify the recommender.

These recommendations can later be pulled in to a semiautomagic system, which would also provide a nicer interface for making a quality recommendation than a wiki page.  (Or not, if the wiki system proves itself.)

That system can pull in all sorts of data of a contributor across the Fedora Project world.  I imagine it as a module of the Fedora account system (FAS).  Count of wiki edits, numbers of contributions to mailing list discussions, code and content touched in SCMs, count of blog posts on planet with tag cloud, IRC help statistics (somehow) … any ways we can pull in and massage data to give a meaningful result.

Run that in to a cool code/tag/collaboration swarm animation alongside a set of personal recommendations from other project members.  This page is something that can help you get in to school programs, get new jobs or promotions, and who knows what other ways that might have meaning in your life.

All of this to add value to contributors, giving them more reason to enjoy what they do around these parts.  It’s also cool to show your non-project friends and family how and why you spend the time you spend on your FLOSS and community pursuits.

Of course, the data is all exportable; you aren’t trapped carrying this CV at a fedoraproject.org domain, nor are you required to use the project’s service.  There are a ton of privacy concerns involved, solving those has to be a first priority.  People will get competitive or try to game the system, to varying degrees. *shrug*

Um, so … anyone want to help build this?

Taught by a Terrible Disease

This interested me for several reasons.

• We are all going to have phases in life where we are disabled, either in comparison to the rest of the world or by our own definition.   It’s cool seeing how people creatively use technology to not only re-enable but to improve their interactions and experiences.
• As a remote team member for the last 10 years, I appreciate seeing how people are able to do their work from remote.  In this story, we read of how the professor’s teaching has improved by being remote from her class.
• Open source methodologies provides a way for massive improvements in accessibility through various hackability efforts, such as the Open Prosthetics Project.

Sometimes the only way to show educators is by immersing them in collaborative experiences where they learn personally the value of open participation, such as POSSE.  It makes them better able to help their students become open participants when the students see the learning and modelling from the instructor.

1. Your goal is to prepare your child for a rich and abundant life in the real world.
2. Your goal is to let your individual child blossom in her way, in her time, knowing a firm grounding in her family and roots prepares her to find her best path at each step of life.

If you follow the first guideline, then you make preschool decisions that affect college choices, are working hard to make money that supports a rich and abundant life, and want your children to attend the best schools with the best programs.  You may not have spent as much of a quantity of time with your children, you focus on quality, and figure that their rich and abundant life that they’ll lead forever is the best thing you can do for them.

Or something like that.

If you follow the second guideline, you treat your children like a slow cooked meal.  Each ingredient of their lives is cultivated from the ground, locally and appropriately.  You follow the schooling they want, letting them set their own pace and break away slowly from the family constellation at a pace that suits each child.  You may work less or for less money or make some other compromise that puts the most amount of time in the hands of your family, aware that the future years are going to be unknown but most likely, they’ll be little stars moving in their orbits by then.

The first guideline is most like the guideline that our society follows.  That is, “The norm and the expectation.”  Some people follow it by clear choice, others because they haven’t thought of any other way.  Following the second guideline is more rare in the US culture, although perhaps a little less so than even a decade ago.

I was contemplating this as I looked at the International Baccalaureate site. I’m clearly in the second guideline camp, but I felt mixed emotions looking at the little baccalaureates from around the world.  How happy they look!  I be they feel really a part of something! What bright, shiny futures they’ll have!

This emotion has to do a bit of battle with the part of me that knows these children are forming a new constellation with new people precisely because they were forced from their first constellation, their family circle, at an early age.  Forced from the breast, from the family bed to the crib, from the crib to their own bedroom, from their bedroom to the nanny, nanny takes them to preschool, preschool starts a bond with same age people that is shattered in college, and after that … well, the real world starts.  A real world that is in fact nothing like those first 18 years, except where they repeat family choices with their own future families.

It’s honestly hard not to feel I’m failing in part with my children by not teaching them everything now that they’ll eventually need.  Even as I watch their peers in other lifestyles learn so much more at such an earlier age than I ever did.  If it weren’t for the pioneering experience of other homeschoolers to bolster me when the cold chill goes down my spine in the night, I don’t know how I’d make it through to the morning.

This week we went through the pleasurable experience of anointing the awesome Eric ‘Sparks’ Christensen as Fedora Docs Leader.  In all of that, the one thing that didn’t need discussing was me.  I covered my situation enough to explain that it’s really freaking important to Fedora that we keep leadership fresh and engaged.  I have become stale at leading Docs; I still work my ass off (for that measure of engagement), but I wasn’t seeing forests or trees anymore, just sawdust.  This post is to give a bit more background, and to let folks know I’m not going anywhere, just stepping back from the controls.

Wow, for the first time in a really long time, I do not have any named leadership positions in the Fedora Project.  My tenure on the Fedora Project Board ended in December 2008, Sparks is the new Docs Leader, Ian Weller is the Wiki Czar, I’m the most useless member of the EPEL steering committee, and my leading the ISV SIG is clearly part of the “get it moving and get out of the way” methodology.  I really am in a position to be a catalyst rather than being part of the old guard who is getting in the way of change.  Wahoo!

I usually find myself accidentally in leadership positions.  I don’t take the mantel lightly nor do I often handle it very well.  I’m indecisive and a poor whip cracker.  I make up for it by being a fair consensus seeker, networker, and idea collaborator.  I’ve learned to think and fake my way around this, like the way I appear extroverted when I just vont to be let alone.

To be perfectly honest, it’s not that I am really in my heart ready to let go — that is another quality as a leader where I fail, my inability to let go where I should.  My mixed feelings are entirely personal though, not a reflection on the kids currently making stuff happen.  This is clearly their time, and it’s obvious when you look at the resurgence in activity over the last few months as I lead up to this leadership change.  Now I can relax and let others take over the decision making and motivating, while I go back to kicking the occasional ass and actively helping with the F11 documentation as just another kid who happens to know a lot about how things work.  Also, since I don’t have to be the consensus building leader any longer, maybe I can start telling people who pour poison on fedora-docs-list to have a nice cup of STFU.

In looking things over for this post and for starting the Docs Project history page, I realized it has been four years since Greg Dekoenigsberg hit me up on IRC.  Aside from his great opener, “So, you appear to be the Docs leader,” Greg’s main point was something I highly agree with … and failed to do time and again.  “Get in, get it moving, then get out of the way.”  He was just doing that for (then) Fedora Extras, and it seemed like a good formula for Docs.

We formed a steering committee that I basically appointed, and proceeded from there.  My goal was to enable someone else to quickly come in and take over as the group leader.  Who did I pick in my mind as the natural successor?  You may have heard of him, Paul W. Frields.  Just when I was going to tap him to take on the mantel, Max Spevack did just that for Paul as an appointed member of the first Fedora Project Board.

With Paul effectively sidelined for the next year, I started over, working with the folks on the Fedora Documentation Steering Committee (FDSCo.)  We tried various schemes, including the first version of “should we revert to a SIG and give up on elections” discussion.  Sometime in 2008 we decided to skip the next election cycle — there weren’t enough people to run, the voting in the past elections had been dismal, and it was a distraction from getting work done.

So our tally now is — one year to get my legs underneath me and get the project moving (2005), one year to court then fail with Paul (2006), one more year to try that again with Paul before he got hired to a more distracting job (2007), one year to throw up our hands and just get work done instead (2008), and now here we are.  We brought ourselves to a pretty good place.  There are many more active people, people who are acting like leaders even without being invited to do so, and a renewed sense of purpose and possibility.

Now I get to relax a bit and be just useful instead of large and in charge.

A few minutes ago, Lucky, so named because she lost her rearward facing toe sometime in her first two weeks of life, boldly jumped on to my laptop, then to the top of the LCD. It folded flat (wide open) under her weight, and she flapped down. I had to deflect her a second time a minute later, and since then she has just eyed me a few times with that yellow gaze.

Watching them pick at then choose to skip over spiders and such, I am reminded of all the history of these animals, mammals, insects, and the various speculative stories I’ve read over the years. I can imagine being a miniature being with this cold gaze eying me as food. I can imagine that right now, because I think that is what Lucky is doing with her yellow eye.

Reading books. I guess we have to wait until first week of April for the chicks to arrive at the feed store. We decided to follow the feed store route because then the kids get to pick the chicks by personality and such.

Better hurry up. Since dragged the gypsy-wagon-prop turned play house out to work on it, the kids have been using it as a play house again.