Also another milestone tonight, I broke open the new mailing list and sent some random messages.  I have a lot trapped in my head, and getting it down and able to be organized in to tasks  is an important project goal.

Topics on this list, and the kind of things I’m going to begin writing about, include:

• The future direction for content;
• Specific discussions about the business chapter;
• How we produce the book, from wiki to XML to git;
• What needs to be done on the collaboration/contribution side, e.g. fedorahosted.org/tosw;
• Sysadmin fun;
• Project goals, direction, tactics, and strategy;
• Meet on IRC?

Early on a Saturday morning this July, Mel and I arrived at the Community Leadership Summit to help with setup. We found folks such as Amber Graner, Grant Bowman, and Jono Bacon working on the last morning touches for the day’s events.

When we walked up, the crew was rolling out two side-by-side, 30in by 8ft (72cm by 2.44m) sheets of white butcher paper.  Pen and ruler in hand and at Jono’s direction, they were making hash marks along the top edge.

“What’s this for?” I asked.

“We’re going to hang this on the wall for the BarCamp sessions,” someone explained to me.  “We’re marking a grid on this paper, then people write their session titles on these papers and hang them up using sticky-wall-putty stuff.”  The ‘papers’ were little 5in by 7in (13cm by 18cm) with a small Community Leadership Summit logo across the long edge.  There was still plenty of room to write, but it gave the pages a nice consistency and crispness:

I was able to quickly get the vision in my head of what Jono had in mind.  It would be a bit of polish that, for some of the audience and especially anyone new to the BarCamp format, gives a feeling of professionalism and attention-to-quality.  When people walk up and see the session grid all laid out, it is an attraction.  In the end, it looked about as I figured:

The irony is, a few weeks before I was on #cls on irc.freenode.net, where I told Jono a bit about how Fedora does BarCamp days.  For the session grid, I said, “We mark columns on a blank wall with blue masking tape, because blue is better.  Then we write our session title on 8.5 by 11 (A4) paper, taping it to the wall with another small piece of tape.  This makes it easy to move sessions around, combine them, etc.”  It’s also inexpensive, quick and easy, and gets the job done so we can move on to other things more quickly … such as having the sessions.  Here’s an example from a FUDCon:

There are a few more good pictures to look at, including people rearranging talks (that’s me in the middle, left forefinger on an item), a tight view of the finished schedule, arranging sessions in action, another view of the schedule showing all the masking tape glory, and someone pitching a talk in front of the in-progress schedule.

As it happened, I ended up finishing the grid, using one of the 5×7 papers as a guide.  I made a few suggestions along the way, but primarily, Jono had the vision, and I could see the value to be gained in following him through the process.  For example, while drawing row lines with a long ruler, I had a chance to reflect on this situation I was in the middle of.  In essence, I began writing this article at that very moment.  For another, I wanted folks there to know I could go along with the flow and help them enact their vision rather than spend effort advocating for my own.

For folks like me, the Fedora process has appeal.  First of all, it doesn’t require me to be there at 6:30 am to execute it.  It’s low resource usage, low technology, and a low barrier to entry.  Everyone could see how the sticking of signs was done, for example, and people could move things around, add and combine, without having to ask permission or how-to.  Sessions weren’t even combined on to a new sheet; the two or three were stacked together in one time slot.  The process invites contribution.

For another large group of people, the extra polish that Jono was doing provides the something special that makes them feel they are where they belong.  The central leadership, single vision accessible to all present, and sense of being ready-to-roll is important to those people.  It invites participation.

All of these ways of being and doing are natural, expected, and desired.  Diversity breeds innovation, quality, and a wider pool to fail … and learn from it.

This led in to a week at OSCON where I did a bit of thinking and talking about how people could be choosing their Linux distro.  Not through the idea of finding the “team” where they can be a “fan”.  More an idea of putting forward our best faces, in authentic stories written, told, and captured.  Maybe that’s the sort of service Linux.com DistroCental can provide – a way that shows people new to Linux what the day-to-day of being in one community and another is actually like.

California love, y’all.  Peace out.

This comes up in my house, with my daughters and wife, who hate to fail.  HATE IT. I know where this comes from.  Even when you try your supportive best, it’s easy to focus on the success and the praise.  How often do we praise failure?

I’ve been telling them, telling Fedorans, telling anyone who will listen that the secret to our success is in fact our failure.  You cannot learn without failure.  Even when you dock a massive fail boat, you at least learn after all is done what not to do next time.

Last night I caught a shortened version of a Honda documentary, full version available here on youtube.com.  The moment in the video that grabbed me initially is Indycar driver Danica Patrick talking about racing:

You’re driving your car and you feel frightened a little bit.  We bump up against that feeling as much as we can to try and push that limit further, and get comfortable there, and then push it again, so, you know, you’re constantly on the brink of crashing because that’s the fastest.

In an engineering-oriented organization such as Honda, “Failure is a by-product of pushing the envelope,” as one engine designer puts it.  It’s a culture that goes back to the organizational founding, as explained by Takeo Fukui, President and CEO of Global Honda, when talking about Soichiro Honda’s ideas of trial and error.  “We can only make fantastic advances in technology through many failures.”

What we do to make free/libre and open source software better is a rapid a process of fail, learn, succeed, push the envelope, fail, learn, succeed, push the envelope, ad infinitum.  Fedora happens to be particularly good at this, more willing than some, more like Danica Patrick, to be frightened, get comfortable, then push the limits again.

(Post updated with spelling correction and being added to the Red Hat category.)

A few years ago I got on an internal Red Hat mailing list for design discussions, and one thing that kept popping up was font lust from the various designers.  Like you and you and you, I enjoy reading the various web pages friends and colleagues send around, so I read about font tours in big cities — walk around and look at all the styles old and new; read about the subway system that has 50+ years of font decisions with one central station that happens to have examples of all of them — was that Toronto?  I learned about the reasons why fonts matter and how they affect the audience, both positively and negatively.  I now am aware of fonts wherever I go in the modern world.

These days, the thing that excites me the most about fonts is the Fedora Font SIG.  This is for a lot of short reasons, which begs for the ubiquitous bulleted list:

• Fonts are a subtlety that escapes the thinking attention but really do make a difference in how people perceive things.  More free fonts for Fedora is overall a good thing for so many reasons.
• The SIG’s font pages on the wiki were the first to undergo a transformation after the conversion to MediaWiki.  Nicolas Mailhot (nim) chose to use a category as the SIG front page, so the page auto-populates with new content whenever [[Category:Fonts]] is added to a page.  Content is organized and searchable; Ian Weller and I regularly refer to this as an example of how you can organize your wiki content effectively.
• The fact that “just fonts” can be a potentially big feature is something that Fedora does again and again.  It gives an outlet for people’s passions, and a location for others with similar interests to get involved and use the hard work.  The fact that designers can start being envious and interested about more than just our desktop artwork is a great thing.
• Font packaging is going to be part of the first North American Fedora Activitiy Day (FAD) at SCaLE 7x.  I am going to learn how to package a font and make my first package submission.  This feels like a lower barrier to entry packaging effort that adds to a great tidal effect.
• All of this because someone was not only passionate about starting a font interest group, but also smart enough to know to invite others and make it easy and interesting for them to help instead of just trying to do it all himself.

If you are going to be near Southern California on 20 February, I encourage you to come by the FAD. We’ll be there until 7 pm when the BoF sessions start.