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QA wiki renewal sounds great, just a few suggestions …

12-Feb-09

Adam Williamson made a blog post about Revising the QA Wiki Space and I have a few requests for them.  (I tried to leave a comment on his blog, but comments are only for registered users, and registering never got me a password, so I’m doing this here.  So I guess my first request is to ask Adam to turn comments on for his blog.  If he doesn’t trust Akismet to protect him from spam, can you allow OpenID access from *.id.fedoraproject.org?)

  1. As you update the QA pages, please follow the wiki page naming and structural guidelines.
  2. At least a few of you working in QA and maintaining wiki pages should join the fedora-wiki mailing list.  It’s a relatively low volume, high value list where we discuss wiki policy, tips, and so forth.
  3. If you are going to be renaming some or all of your pages (and you should if they are in the unsearchable format of “Some/Content/Deeply/NestedWithCamelCase/Names”), then take a look at the wiki page renaming project.  If you have commit rights to anything on fedorahosted.org you can check-in and maintain a pipe-separated values (PSV) file.  Take a look at the existing ones for format.

If you’ve any questions about this or other best ways to work with MediaWiki, drop by #fedora-docs anytime and ask for guidance.  If you are fortunate, the Wiki Czar will be lurking.

Filed in Fedora, Wiki | | Comments (2) »

Updated 2009 FAQ for Google’s Summer of Code

10-Feb-09

A heads up to anyone interested in being a Summer coding mentor or a student, the fine folks at Google’s Open Source Program Office have updated the frequently asked questions for the 2009 Summer of Code:

http://code.google.com/opensource/gsoc/2009/faqs.html

Read that before asking a bunch of questions on some mailing list!

Filed in Fedora, Open Source, Summer Coding | | Comments Off

Free and open texbook FAIL

07-Feb-09

An article this week (“Free College Texbooks: Fad or Fabulous?“) got me excited that truly free content might be making its way to a more mainstream use in education.  The company, Flat World Knowledge, promotes their content as being, “Created by experts … enhanced by users … free to all,” and they appear to be making some headway in education circles.  Unfortunately and very sadly, their content is not free and open.

Looking through their catalog, every single book I looked at is under the Creative Commons BY NC SA.  The NC means the work cannot be redistributed as part of a commercial venture.  This could be interpreted to mean that, for example, I cannot offer a class for pay and use their books.  I cannot modify the book and make it available from my website for download if my site has advertisement banners on it that are gathering fees for me.  (None of this is tested in a court that I know of, I am not a lawyer, and I am merely conveying the common understanding here.  For an example, Fedora, the well known and 100% free/libre and open source software Linux distribution, does not permit the CC with the NC clause to be used for anything in the distro.)

Contrast this with Wikibooks, which releases their content under the GNU FDL.  I’m not the biggest fan of the FDL, I prefer the easier to use Open Publication License (OPL), but I’ll take the FDL over non-free any day.  Ironically, Flat World Knowledge could build their entire business by taking Wikibooks content, adding expert knowledge and editing, and rebranding/distributing the books through their catalog.  The one thing they could not do is to make the subsequent works non-free.  Similarly, Wikibooks cannot use any of the Flat World Knowledge material in any of their truly free and open textbooks.

This is another example of people either completely misunderstanding free and open, or deliberately and disingenuously using the term ‘open source’ to gain marketing advantage from a lie.  From the article, Flat World Knowledge co-founder Eric Frank refers to their “… free and open textbooks …”  As Chief Marketing Officer, he is clearly setting up the connection and trying to gain buzz from the open source movement.  Mr. Frank is a “textbook publishing industry (veteran)”, along with his other co-founder Jeff Shelstad.  This means they are coming from traditional publishing with what they are touting as a new business model.  I agree it is new in comparison to traditional textbook publishing, but it is not free and open by any measure.

There is a part of the Flat World Knowledge website they call “The Hub”, which is supposed to be for users to create modifications or new works to distribute.  I have not been able to find that part of the site with my normal user account.  It is possible that one needs to be an instructor, which is asked about during registration for the site.  They specified that the instructor status would be questioned and confirmed, and I didn’t attempt any dishonesty, signing up as a regular user.  (I reckon they won’t take my status as a homeschooling Dad to be the same as a college level instructor.)  Perhaps “The Hub” exists only for instructors.  According to the site’s legal page, content posted in “The Hub” is under a license chosen by the author during posting; I cannot confirm what license options are available.  Thus, it’s possible that one could use Flat World Knowledge as a way to write and distribute truly free and open textbooks.  (This only seems possible because the legal terms recognize the license chosen as being predominent on the work; the site legal notice is non-free as it restricts the reader from accessng “free and open content” if one does not agree to the site terms, which can be changed at any time at the discretion of Flat World Knowledge.)

Any college instructors out there willing to test this for me?  I’d like to see a Wikibook textbook modified and redistributed under the FDL from the Flat World Knowledge website, just to see if it is possible.

Filed in Documentation, Education, FLOSS, Free Culture, Open Source | | Comments (1) »

Two reasons to read the Mentor Summit wiki

06-Feb-09

You may let go of your breath now, the wiki for the Google Summer of Code 2008 Mentor Summit is now available. (It took a little bit for all the mentors to have a chance to remove any content that was not intended for public view, since the original wiki had been mentors-only with people’s private data such as cell phones and travel details.)

There are two reasons I think this wiki is important and worth a read:

  1. These are the mentors for the software projects you care most about, who guided students through the GSoC experience.  There were many metric tonnes of brain power and experience packed in to that conference, everyone was a heavy lifter wherever they came from.   A good amount of the results of the two days sessions are packed in to that little wiki.  There is a lot of juice to squeeze from it.
  2. It’s a kick-ass example of a wiki built during a conference.  The days were a mix of hackfest and un-conference.  A good amount of those sessions were documented.  I strive to see FUDCon wiki efforts approach this in terms of coverage and depth.  (I wish I had a portion of the stamina that Leslie Hawthorn has for cracking the whip and reminding people to put it on the wiki, put it on the wiki, put it on the wiki.)

If you’ve got any questions about the summit, Eugene Teo and Manik Surtani were there too, and I’m happy to answer any questions about it.

Filed in Events, Fedora, FLOSS, Summer Coding, Wiki | | Comments Off

Font rock

01-Feb-09

Like most of people I can imagine, fonts meant only one thing to me for a long time — another option to mess around with in a word processor to make things look “good”.

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.

Filed in Design, Fedora | | Comments Off

Leading from the comfort of my armchair

31-Jan-09

One of my favorite things about writing this blog is that I get to talk about me.  See, it’s right there in the name: “i, quaid.”  If you don’t figure it’s all about me, you are just not paying attention.

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!

More…

Filed in Art of Living, Fedora, Leadership, Responsibility | | Comments (3) »

Release note for disabling PC speaker actually in Fedora 10!

26-Jan-09

Lots of discussions about what to do with your PC speaker, I didn’t see anyone note that the CLI fix is described in the Fedora 10 Release Notes:

http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f10/en_US/What_is_the_Latest_on_the_Desktop.html#sn-Disabling_PC_speaker

Not sure how to make this easier to find.  Maybe a search for “fedora 10 pc speaker disable“?

(Updated with fixed link/URL for the release note.)

Filed in Documentation, Fedora | | Comments (1) »

Where are your FUDCon session notes?

16-Jan-09

One (of the many) things I appreciated about the last Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit was the immediate availability of session notes on the wiki.  For each session, people wrote a wiki page and linked to it from the main schedule.  I may even have started this practice two years ago, when only the sessions I attended had wiki pages linked to the schedule.

Looking at the schedule for the recent FUDCon BarCamp … it still looks like that Mentor Summit wiki of a few years ago, where mainly the sessions I attended have notes and are categorized.  Noteable exceptions, though. Mel Chua, from Sugar/OLPC, was keeping great notes and session transcripts (via IRC logs.)  Paul W. Frields wrote in some notes from his git talk.

If you kept any notes, create a [[Natural language page name]], such as [[RPM vs XO FUDConF11 BarCamp session 20090110]], link it from the wiki schedule page, and put in the page the link to add it to [[Category:FUDConF11 BarCamp sessions]].

If you have any memory of what was covered — make the page.

If you were one of the presenters and maybe have some presentation notes, slides, or demos to refer to — make your page and link to it.

While I appreciate the extra effort we all go to when we travel to FUDCon, we also have to remember all the people who cannot attend.  There is a lot of valuable work shared and plans made during those sessions.  It is all invisible to the larger community.  Keeping some notes and posting them where others can read and learn is an essential part of bringing a FUDCon to a proper close.

Filed in Documentation, Events, Fedora, Responsibility, Wiki | | Comments (2) »

Moving toward a content management decision

11-Jan-09

While the wiki covers 90%+ of the content collaboration needs for Fedora, we continue to need a content management system (CMS) for the Docs Project.  A CMS gives us workflow tools that makes it easy to turn any contributor in to a publisher, while ensuring the ongoing quality of the content throughout the lifecycle of a Fedora version. For more information, read the background from the CMS solution for Fedora page.

We’ve had a lot of discussions around CMS here at FUDCon, none of which actually got us closer to a physical choice.  Every choice is a double-edged sword, a phrase which here means, no matter which way we swing it, it cuts our target and cuts ourselves.  It was great to have so many parts of Fedora able to talk about this with us; we were able to see traps and pitfalls more easily in the quality of these discussions.

Ultimately, my biggest concern is that any choice have a team of people who know how to deploy and maintain the solution.  Aside from technical capabilities, this is perhaps the most important criteria to meet.

The solution we are walking away with today is to take the topic to fedora-devel-list, fedora-list, and the blogs.  Tell people:

  • We are picking a Docs Project CMS
  • We are going to go with whatever CMS that meets the minimum must-have requirements and has a team willing to step-up and do the work for the Fedora community.
  • The work will happen within the Fedora Infrastructure project in a semi-isolated environment to minimize contact risk from potentially insecure apps.
  • The new team must be at least two to three experienced web system administrators, with no more than one team member already overly busy in Infrastructure.  (We need to minimize overloading too small and too busy a group of people.)

How does this sound?

Filed in Documentation, Fedora | Tagged | Comments (2) »

Finding content output from FUDCon F11

10-Jan-09

The main schedule …

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon:FUDConF11_BarCamp_schedule

… has links to some pages, and hopefully people are adding more.  Ideally they add [[Category:FUDConF11 BarCamp sessions]] to their page, too, so they get included in this page …

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:FUDConF11_BarCamp_sessions

I’ve extracted promises from most of the video/audio crew to do uploads of whatever we can tonight, at the hotel after FUDPub.  We’ll link it from a main FUDCon F11 video page, as well as each per-session page.  Plus blog posts.  And fedora-announce-list.  Maybe a town crier.  Whatever it takes to get the word out.

Filed in Events, Fedora, Presentations | | Comments Off