Secret plans revealed: what CommOps hopes to accomplish in Fedora 30 release cycle

Project Discussion
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In today’s meeting, CommOps discussed three goals we want to accomplish and focus our efforts on in the Fedora 30 release cycle. We want wider feedback and opinions on some of these ideas – feel free to leave any thoughts or opinions here in this thread.

What’s next?!

Since Fedora Appreciation Week recently came to an end, we finished our biggest undertaking since we held our in-person 2018 team sprint. Now, we wanted to figure out what undertakings we wanted to explore next. The hope is to have one code / metrics ticket and one non-code ticket.

Non-code: Virtual Fedora Docs contribute-athon

Based off of fedora-commops#159 and this Discourse thread.

We want to move forward with our plans to organize a virtual Fedora Docs contribute-athon focused on the quick-docs. These quick docs are topic-based documentation for doing specific tasks or things in Fedora. We want to engage active user communities as much as possible, to give experienced users a chance to share some of their knowledge into official project documentation. The subtle goal here is to try and have better documentation to help user’s needs, and one of the best people to ask what user’s needs are is to get the people who are answering questions and helping users solve problems in support groups.

Next steps for this include coming up with a structure and looking at on-boarding resources. Most of the planning for this will likely focus on lowering the barrier to contribution as low as possible.

@x3mboy volunteered to help lead on this task, with support of the CommOps team.

Code: Run a word-cloud bot on Twitter

Based off of fedora-commops#186.

An older CommOps project, wordcloudbot, takes Fedora meeting minutes, generates a word cloud from most-used words in a meeting, and automatically posts the results to a Twitter account. It would be cool to get this working again and set up on the @fedoracommunity Twitter account.

Next steps likely include a revisit to the original code (some modernization might be needed), testing it out with existing Fedora meetings locally, and then getting it running on a server so the tweets happen automatically.

We’ll begin exploring this at the next CommOps meeting. Maybe @siddharthvipul, Sumantro, or Anna could help get this added to GCI 2018.

Finding a way forward: WordPress fedmsg metrics

Based off of fedora-commops#108.

@dhanesh95 raised this topic in the meeting. This is currently our oldest ticket. @kevin left helpful feedback two months ago that needs more consideration before we move forward. For Fedora 30, we didn’t think we could accomplish this completely, but we agreed to narrow our options and make a commitment to a single option by the end of the release cycle.

Personally, the OpenShift idea mentioned by @kevin in the ticket was interesting to me.

We’ll also revisit this one at the next meeting.

Any feedback?

We wanted to post this thread on Discourse to get feedback from other team members who couldn’t make the meeting as well as anyone else in the wider Fedora community. This is what we are thinking of working on for the next six to seven months until May 2019, when Fedora 30 releases.

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Number one on my docs wish list is a comprehensive guide to managing a Silverblue workstation. It’s so radically different from any other Linux workstation out there that I find myself doing a lot of mental gear-shifting. Things like:

  1. How do I install Kubernetes? Minikube or something else? OpenShift? Minishift?
  2. How do I build a flatpak from an application source or binary RPM?
  3. Transitioning from docker / docker-compose to podman / buildah / skopeo / Kubernetes
  4. Troubleshooting rpm-ostree
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Just a few thoughts…

Next steps for this include coming up with a structure and looking at
on-boarding resources. Most of the planning for this will likely focus on
lowering the barrier to contribution as low as possible.

The barrier to entry is already incredibly low, if you’re a non-code
contributor there really is no barrier to entry. It all depends on the user’s
skillset and what they wish to contribute.

Code: Run a word-cloud bot on Twitter

Based off of
fedora-commops#186.

An older CommOps project, wordcloudbot,
takes Fedora meeting minutes, generates a word cloud from most-used words
in a meeting, and automatically posts the results to a Twitter account. It
would be cool to get this working again and set up on the
@fedoracommunity Twitter account.

I know I’ve already replied with something similar on Pagure, but I really
think it’d be better to use a FLOSS platform such as Diaspora, GNU Social or
Mastodon rather than Twitter. This is Fedora, after all. :smiling_face:

We wanted to post this thread on Discourse to get feedback from other team
members who couldn’t make the meeting as well as anyone else in the wider
Fedora community. This is what we are thinking of working on for the next
six to seven months until May 2019, when Fedora 30 releases.

If the goal was to reach out to the wider community, it may be useful to x-
post this to one of the mailing lists.

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This list is fantastic! Thanks for sharing it. Could you also post it in this thread too? I’m hoping we can collect helpful feedback like this over there:

I disagree personally – in the Fedora Docs chat channel and mailing list, I’ve seen hopeful contributors who struggle to understand how to submit a contribution to the docs, how to work with AsciiDoc, ask how to embed images, etc. These kinds of things make it more difficult for someone to contribute and raises the barrier for contribution. For example, if someone is a pro at using Inkscape on Fedora, they may have a difficult time understanding how to share their knowledge in the official Fedora Docs site.

These are things CommOps was specifically founded with in mind. It’s one of the core functions in our own docs:

Work with sub-projects and teams to improve on-boarding methods and practices

The barrier may feel low to you and me, but we should also be considerate of people with different skill sets and backgrounds than you and me. :slightly_smiling_face: We cannot know without asking other people. My view is influenced by what I have seen from others contributing to Fedora Docs since the 2018 Docs FAD.

True, this would be nice. Could you help integrate Mastodon support into the existing wordcloudbot project? I believe it only supports Twitter for now, and I don’t have the bandwidth to work on major new functionality. Help in this area is definitely welcome. :slightly_smiling_face:

Good idea. I’ll share this on the Mindshare list.

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I disagree personally – in the Fedora Docs chat channel and mailing list,
I’ve seen hopeful contributors who struggle to understand how to submit a
contribution to the docs, how to work with AsciiDoc, ask how to embed
images, etc. These kinds of things make it more difficult for someone to
contribute and raises the barrier for contribution. For example, if someone
is a pro at using Inkscape on Fedora, they may have a difficult time
understanding how to share their knowledge in the official Fedora Docs
site.

If that is the issue, trouble with AsciiDoc, perhaps either a different format
(for example, Markdown) would be better, or simply better documentation of
AsciiDoc.

I don’t imagine Inkscape would be very different on Debian (it is not), so I
don’t understand how information on the use of Inkscape in Fedora would be
useful. I’m sure that the Inkscape project would love to have better
documentation upstreamed, however.

These are things CommOps was specifically founded with in mind. It’s one of
the core functions in our own
docs:

Work with sub-projects and teams to improve on-boarding methods and practices

Of course! :smiling_face:

The barrier may feel low to you and me, but we should also be considerate of
people with different skill sets and backgrounds than you and me.
:slightly_smiling_face: We cannot know without asking other people. My view
is influenced by what I have seen from others contributing to Fedora Docs
since the 2018 Docs
FAD.

I completely agree, however the barrier is already incredibly low, and I’d be
happy to point anyone interested in helping out any of the various forms of
documentation around Fedora. I’m always happy to help new folks.

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Right! These are ideas of things we can do to help lower the barrier. I’m hoping we can brainstorm ideas around this over the next couple of weeks.

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Hi Justin,

I like the Quick Docs idea, we need to implement it. Maybe we could start it off during FLOCK? I’m not quite sure about the word-cloud bot on Twitter. What would be the purpose? What’s its use?

Cheers,
Silvia/Lailah

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I still like this idea too. Unfortunately, I ran out of bandwidth to lead the effort on this task. It could be a good idea to organize a session to try launching this at Flock, especially now that Quick Docs is gaining momentum (even if it’s at a slow pace). Maybe @bt0dotninja or @FranciscoD have some thoughts here.

It’s a fun idea, but I’m not sure what the impact would be. I think it’s more of a novelty. Now looking back in hindsight, perhaps there are better ways for us to prioritize our time.

If someone is interested in helping with this, I think we should do some info-gathering to figure out what need this does fill, and whether it would be useful for a specific use case.

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Unfortunately, my bandwidth is lame right now. So I can’t help there.
About FLOCK and Quick Docs, I don’t know if I’ll be able to attend.

I agree with this.

Regards and sorry for the extremely late reply

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