Máirín put up a series of posts that not only give great visual thoughts, but are some powerfully good ideas on providing something a community can really gain from using. I’m not going to try summarizing, I just encourage you to read at least these two:

• 16 Brainstorm Ideas For Mailman’s Web Interface

• 16 More Brainstorm Ideas For Mailman’s Web Interface

… and go ahead and read 7,750 pixels of mailing list thread, which came first anyway.

One thing that really struck me about these ideas is that many of the features that rely upon posting history can be run against an existing archive of messages. That means upgrading Mailman to features like these means quickly gaining a view in to the history of your mailing list that is a sizeable part of the richness of the new features. All the ideas that rely upon keywords in posts, previous posting history and frequency and topics covered, all the reputation ideas, all that would be seeded with as many months or years of archives a mailing list has. That’s really cool!

I really look forward to seeing some of these kind of changes in Mailman. I’m a big fan of Mailman on the straight mailing list management side. But over the years I’ve seen the wider and wider divide between the users who prefer web forums and those who prefer mailing lists (many of whom are contributors who want to interact with other users, but not on a web forum.) These ideas could provide a great stitching of that divide, without forcing a big change on either party.

But all the recipes I found didn’t treat the coffee beans, cardamom seeds, or resulting brew in a way I liked. I think many relied upon an older way of making coffee, where you simmer chunky-ground beans and seeds in a pot, then strain and sweeten. I’m more of a modern, fresh-ground coffee type of person. So I built a recipe that worked for me. This is the recipe for a single cup, increase proportions for more brew, adjusting the quantity of cardamom seeds to taste.

1. In your coffee grinder put your measure of roasted coffee beans, quantity to taste.
2. Take one to three green cardamom pods and crush them on the counter. Separate the seeds from the green skin, put the seeds in the grinder with your beans. (I found three pods works for me, some people I’ve gave this to prefer two pods, use one pod if you want a lighter taste or just as starting place to work up from. For me, four pods per cup was too much, but I can see people who would prefer more pods.)
3. Grind the coffee beans and cardamom seeds together until the coffee is the grind level you want to work with.
4. Brew the coffee the way you prefer.
5. The resulting brew may be more bitter than you like. As I usually use a touch of cream or milk to lighten and sweeten my coffee, I also use a touch of honey in this cardamom coffee.

I registered this domain years ago as a community project identity for getting free expo passes to LinuxWorld. It was just an idea for a domain name that came to my head at the moment of registration, as a crossover of my interests in free and open software and cooking.

So I am kicking off this idea, with myself as Chef de Cuisine, and inviting folks who are involved in free/open source software and who like to cook to be on the planet. All these folks need to do is provide me with a feed link. For example, when I write for something to appear on the Linuxchefs planet, I’ll use the tag ‘linuxchefs’ for the post, and it will automatically appear on the Linuxchefs planet.

Interested? Drop me an email.

Where it comes to talking about all the technologies involved, I admittedly fell a bit short. I haven’t been keeping up on every TLA in the related technical spaces around oVirt and KVM, and I didn’t get through a full research on all the topics before the presentation. One of my strategies, though, is to just run this presentation to learn what is and isn’t appropriate for a presentation. So I told the audience it was a new presentation, thanked them for being beta testers, and acknowledged that some in the audience certainly know more on the topic than I do and I appreciate chiming in with answers.

Which happened a few times, thank ye gods and goddesses.

In addition, I chopped up the original 21 slide presentation in to 91 slides, with each slide covering one topic. This is similar to one paragraph for an idea when writing. The decision to do this came from a late-Saturday-night discussion with Josh Berkus, who has some fame and skill in presenting. (Once I learned that a slide of mine from a State of Fedora Lightning Talk had made it in to Josh’s deck-of-shame – slide 5 in this PDF -  I figured it was worth  a rethink-of-approach. Hey, we all make mistakes.;-D ) The 91-slide version was not optimal, but it was better than the 21-slide version.

Now, to help this slide show be more useful, I will do my part in filling out the notes sections where I actually know what I’m talking about. Jason Brooks is working on a consolidated deck that improves on this one, and I’ll get my notes in to that one as the canonical.

Although a brand-new presentation, I think this one went over pretty well. All of the material I know by heart and can speak on extemporaneously (i.e., for many hours on end). For this reason, my notes section is unusually (for me) empty. I’m going to work on filling out those notes – that makes it more useful for others to reuse, thus adding more fuel to the Creative Commons licensing – and I’ll make a generic version available in TheOpenSourceWay.org presentations directory.

This was a good enough talk that I think it can be useful again in other locations – it really does a good job of distilling a huge amount of the information you need to start, sustain, and grow an open source project. I’ll be submitting it other places, hopefully more people agree with Gareth and put me on somewhere!

• FOSS Mentoring on Friday, I talk at 3 pm.
• SCALE: The Next Generation on Saturday at 11:30 am, Malakai, Saskia, and Mirano are presenting for the youth event.
• In the Cloud and Virtualization track on Sunday at 11:30 am, I’ll give a second talk on oVirt.

So my Friday talk at 3 pm is,”How to start and sustain an open source project of any size“. I’ll be going through the start/sustain bits, and trying to do some actual work with the audience. I’m hoping some of the audience will be interested in starting a project, or already working on it, and we can do some work for their efforts as a group.

Also on Friday I’ll be attending the Fedora Activity Day (FAD) that starts at 10 am – I’ll be there to help and learn.

My daughters are joining their friend to give “Ultimate Boredom 2.0” at 11:30 am on Saturday as part of the SCALE: The Next Generation youth conference. I think the talk title is an allusion to how much they think they will bore you (ultimately), which must be greater than the two other times they have given a similar talk (2.0). In addition to talking about how they’ve participated in open source projects, they’ll cover some of their favorite free/open source software – last I saw the presentation covered GIMP, OpenShot, TuxPaint, and Hydrogen.

Finally, on Sunday morning at 11:30 am I’ll be giving, “oVirt – Infrastructure and management platform for the data center“. This is a general what-is-oVirt, how-did-it-come-to-be, where-might-it-be-going presentation, similar to the one Carl Trieloff gave at the start of the oVirt workshop in November 2011.

See you in LA!

This event is the open sourcing of the code behind the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) management console. These assets have been rewritten in Java from the original implementation by the team that was originally from Qumranet before their acquisition by Red Hat.

As with the rest of the open source virtualization stack (Linux kernel, KVM, etc.), we all benefit the most from a strong, sustainable open upstream. Having that upstream dominated by one vendor will greatly restrict the innovation possible by the project. For this reason, Red Hat went out to a number of interested parties, offering a seat on the initial board (which is later filled meritocratically) for any organization willing to put 10 resources to work on the project. For the initial board, that list is Canonical, Cisco, IBM, Intel, NetApp, Red Hat, and SUSE.

I got involved in this because the project’s technical director, Carl Trieloff, called on our Community Architecture and Leadership team to help with community scaffolding for the launch and beyond. Since then I’ve been building the ovirt.org website, setting up the communications, creating and filling the wiki, helping with the source repository, starting an open services infrastructure team so all community members can help, and organizing this workshop with Robyn Bergeron.

So this is what I’ve been up to, which I really should have been writing about, but … ah, life.

Right now we are looking for someone who can take over significant focus on Fedora, as well as provide skills in community consulting and strategy for other Red Hat efforts.

Myself, I’m looking for another rounded, senior-level person who can apply the open source way – thinking & doing – as well as help make practitioners out of other people. Just spread this word around – someone out there hasn’t thought her or his self in this role yet, but could be.

Looking at this role, it is an example of job skills and merit that can be learned and earned while working on open source projects. You may not be currently in the field of “community relations and management”, but you may already have all the skills needed to teach and do the open source way inside and outside of software projects.

And you certainly don’t need to have come up through the Fedora Project, but that can’t hurt. Historically, we do what anyone would do – hire the people we know are great at doing the job we want done. Your work in Fedora should reflect that. If you have other open source project experience, it’s out there. If you’ve been practicing the open source way correctly, you’ll be able to show us that experience using open content in public archives.

Check out the job posting. I’m not in control of the process, but I think the location could be flexible for the right person, so it’s worth considering even if you don’t want to move to Raleigh and be our voice-in-the-seat-at-Red-Hat-HQ.

If you are someone who I would recommend anyway – so I would be biased toward you in a selection process – I’d be more than happy to pass you into our resume system with a recommendation.

(Updated to fix my incorrect interpretation of the job requirements; having worked in the Fedora Project already is a written job requirement.)

We had to wait until nearly the last minute to plan this trip, since I want to take my wife … and if she can’t go, that means I have reason to stay home. Hand-in-hand like that. We finally made a decision that works, booked our tickets, and now have to find a hotel in Paris.

Part of this trip is that from Sunday 25 September through Thursday 29 September, I’ll be working early in the day in Parisian cafes, and spending the evening with my wife and whatever friends we make as we go. We’ll be open, exploring, photographing, and looking for great food and wine (and music and dancing …)

Debora has a passion for the French language, which she has studied since she was a child, but has never visited France. Myself, I’ve never even been to Europe. We’ll get to break some personal barriers and have some fun.

So I’m looking for whoever I know, or friends of friends, to help us find what artistic, musical, underground (restaurant? catacombs?), alternative, and interesting Paris fun is out there. (I expect Milan to be completely filled with FUDCon, except Sunday evening when Debora and I will explore and discover together.)

Also, if you know a good hotel (conference one is full) or have an apartment we can rent for the week … let me know.

Now, to go sort out power adapters, SIM card for my Droid 2 Global, wireless broadband for the laptop …

One reason I’m going to FUDCon is to connect with people about open source cloud communities. While there isn’t enough momentum for an entire conference (yet), consider that at FUDCon Tempe this year there were enough discussions of cloud-related topics that they practically formed a track.

What will the cloud discussions at FUDCon Milan be?

I know of a few cloud/virtualization-related developers who are attending:

• Two folks from Red Hat’s Brno office who work on the Aeolus Project, Francesco Vollero and Michal Fojtik.
• Marek Goldmann, who works  on BoxGrinder as an oddfellow.
• Some other folks from Brno who may work on other parts of the operating system platform that are relevant to the cloud, at a very deep level?

OK, that’s not a very long list.

Who else is going? Who can we invite?

What interest can we generate? Anyone want to do  do a “build a cloud with Fedora” or something that attracts systems folks?

What is interesting for developers who want to build on top of these clouds as infrastructure and platforms?

One of us from the Cloud SIG can talk about the general activities in Fedora, so I count at least four cloud related talks in those I’ve listed here.