Yesterday we decided on some leadership changes in the Fedora Docs project. Fedora is, in many ways, an interesting bird. The Fedora Project is very much a community project. Most of the contributions come from volunteers, although there is not insignificant support from Red Hat. Partly, I suspect, because of history, the Fedora Project works hard to be very transparent, and to push hard to get volunteers to offer their ideas and talents.
In the software business, it has become almost traditional for projects to be months, or even years, behind schedule. Fedora consists of over 11,000 packages, and as such, is a huge undertaking. Yet in spite of that, and in spite of being almost totally volunteers, Fedora releases every six months and rarely misses their date by more than a couple of weeks. In spite of being a volunteer effort, there is an amazing level of professionalism among the contributors.
To keep a fresh inflow of new ideas, the leadership of projects within Fedora is changed frequently. Karsten Wade led the Docs Project for Fedora 10 (and maybe before - I wasn't involved), and also the Release Notes, probably the biggest chunk of effort. But Karsten needs to direct his attention to other things. For many projects, leaders are elected, usually annually or for a release (six months). The last time the Docs project tried to hold an election, few people stood up as candidates, and few voted. In discussions on IRC and on the project's mailing list, it was decided that basically Karsten would pick the key players for F11.
There had already been some concensus that Eric Christensen (Sparks) would take the Fedora 11 Release Notes, and since he was only willing to do one release, I would pick up 12. But that left the project lead open. Meanwhile, Ryan Lerch had also raised his hand for Release Notes. Yesterday Eric got pressed into taking the project lead, and Ryan will pick up RelNotes for 11, giving me another release to get my head around the entire process before taking the Release Notes for 12.
Ryan is just coming off doing the Release Notes for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, so he is in a good position to pick up the Fedora Release Notes.
But RHEL is a commercial product, built by people who do that for a living. Fedora is an open source project, done mostly by people who simply want to give something back to the community. One of the things I have been trying to learn by watching Karsten, and also Paul Frields, the Fedora Project leader, is how to deal with the community. The whole dynamic is very different than it is in a professional setting. I don't know whether Ryan has background with Fedora before his latest RHEL project, but I am going to miss watching Karsten and Paul.
Meanwhile, now that it has been publicized to the community that I will be taking Release Notes for 12, my whole perspective has changed. Previously I took care of a few beats, and while from time to time I may have raised my hand on something somewhere else in the project I felt needed help, mosty I worried about my little corner of the world. Now I feel a responsibility to the whole project in general, and to the Release Notes in particular.
This probably wouldn't be a problem except that I don' t know Ryan well enough to know whether it will be a problem. Oh well, we'll just have to see. Meanwhile I'll just be the bull in a china shop I'm inclined to be, and let the chips fall where they may.
