As an outcome of last week's FESCo meeting, I filed a ticket with the Fedora Project Board to discuss the Fedora Plasma proposal and related general questions. Because the board trac instance is private, important discussion was happening out of view. We've agreed to put it _into_ view -- going forward, comments on this ticket will be CC'd to this list. But we also didn't want to lose the conversation so far, so I'm posting it here (in entirety). --------------------------------------------------------------------------- At the FESCo meeting today, we agreed on two items for the board based on the Fedora Plasma proposal put forth by the KDE SIG (See board ticket https://fedorahosted.org/fesco/ticket/1265 and advisory-board list post https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/advisory-board/2014-March/012449.html). First, we're suggesting that the board consider Fedora Plasma as a possibility for Fedora 22. (FESCo will establish milestones based on that, and a KDE spin — possibly under another name — will remain release-blocking for F21 and have a place on the download page.) Are you okay with a Fedora Plasma Product in F22? Second, what non-technical criteria should constrain whether we even see fit to bring more product proposals to the Board in the future? --------------------------------------------------------------------------- comment:1 Changed 6 days ago by mattdm FESCo IRC meeting log if you want to dig through it :) http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2014-03-26/fesco.2014-03-26-18.00.log.html#l-233 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- comment:2 Changed 6 days ago by jwboyer For the sake of sanity, I would suggest we as a Board evaluate the questions in the reverse order they are listed here. If we're going to approve or reject another Product for F22, it would be good to do so using the non-technical criteria we establish, not just doing it one off and then trying to figure those criteria out. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- comment:3 Changed 26 hours ago by inode0 Cc kevin, notting, toshio, ausil, pjones, tmraz, mitr, sgallagh added; fesco@… removed --------------------------------------------------------------------------- comment:4 follow-ups: ↓ 10 ↓ 11 Changed 25 hours ago by jwboyer Taking a quick crack as this. We need to figure out what exactly we want from Fedora.next and a Products based approach, and also what we don't want. Fedora.next is being created to redefine exactly what Fedora "is", and to help spread it to areas where we have not had a lot of market adoption. Things like cloud and server are clearly examples of the latter. The Workstation product is an example of the former. So we're going for both clarity/focus, and new initiatives. We also want to be able to scale our processes and resources to meet these goals and future initiatives. With that in mind, we can perhaps focus on some of the things we don't want. I think we don't want to make things confusing for users. We don't want to push into markets that are poorly suited to Fedora. We don't want to completely eliminate or exclude any existing set of users, but we can't be everything to everyone. We need to be careful of our ability to scale, which will hopefully improve but may not be immediately ready to support numerous items. In my opinion, the basis for the non-technical criteria for product promotion are fairly simple. New Products should not overlap or conflict with an existing Product Products that conflict/overlap can be evaluated as replacements for existing products Addresses a new, relevant, and broad usecase or userbase that Fedora is not currently serving The usecase should be something the Board sees as being a long term investment The Product should be coherent with all of Fedora's foundations I'll elaborate on these a bit. We don't want conflicting or overlapping Products as that introduces confusion and wastes resources. From a marketing perspective, we should be presenting clear choices for people in terms of what Product solves which usecase/userbase. If we want to reassess a current Product and replace it with a new proposal, that's fine but we shouldn't present conflicting ones. New proposals should solve a need that Fedora isn't currently solving. Examples (not necessarily good or feasible at this time) could be mobile OS, supercomputing, media center, gaming consoles. If there is an existing product that could meet these needs without completely reworking itself, then we should look at adapting that instead of creating a new Product. Products are long term investments. They require significantly more process and resources than simple spins. They are intended to be the "face of Fedora" and should neither be rushed or short-lived. We wouldn't want to create a Product for every brief trend in computing that shows up. E.g. Fedora Netbook might fall into the "use a spin, not a product" category. I think the last bullet is fairly self-explanatory. Anyway, those are my initial thoughts on the broader question. Would love some further feedback. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- comment:5 Changed 24 hours ago by mjg59 My initial reaction was that adopting further products would inevitably weaken the strong brand that Fedora.next allows us to attach to our deliverables, but I'm now starting to think that I'm thinking about this the wrong way. What do we mean when we say "Fedora"? There's the media we give out, and there's the community that produces the contents of that media. These don't have to be the same thing. It seems reasonable to wrap the current set of three products under the "Fedora" banner, but to permit the community to work within the project to create their own branding and associated products. Rather than thinking of Plasma as a product, consider the creation of a Fedora KDE brand that could produce a range of Plasma-derived products (for instance, a Plasma desktop aimed at educational or scientific environments and a Plasma Active image aimed at mobile devices) without having to worry about whether they overlapped with the "stock" Fedora products. This would avoid the situation where arguments about overlapping use cases and cohesive marketing overshadow the real work that people are willing to put into improving the whole Fedora project because doing so gives them an opportunity to ship code that they're interested in. In this fantastical future, it would be up to individual brands to decide their own marketing focus and, as such, how to arrange their products in a way that made sense for their brand. I'd imagine that Fedora itself would probably keep pretty close to the existing three products model, and perhaps oversight of those would remain with our current governance model. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- comment:6 Changed 24 hours ago by jwboyer I don't immediately see how your brand proposal and my thoughts on Product promotion conflict at all. I also don't see how it is more than the existing Spin mechanisms we have in place with perhaps a bit more marketing thought put behind them. Creating a brand around a Spin seems like it wouldn't conflict with the main Products that Fedora is promoting on it's primary sites. However, if such a spin/brand were to become wildly useful and better suited for Fedora overall, we'd still want to have some process for evaluating which of those should possibly be a main Product (perhaps by replacing an existing Product). If I've missed something, please elaborate? --------------------------------------------------------------------------- comment:7 follow-up: ↓ 8 Changed 23 hours ago by mjg59 Right now spins are kind of pushed off as an afterthought. They're mostly lumped together under a single tab on the download site. There's no link between related spins - Fedora KDE appears under "Desktops" , Fedora Scientific-KDE under "Spins". It's not surprising that people feel like spins are an afterthought, and in that case it's natural for people to feel that they need to be more than a spin to seem like a real part of the product. Providing a more structured way for communities to brand and promote their spins would remove much of that stigma. And, right now, that's the only reason we're being asked about new products. Nobody has, as yet, suggested a new product that fits nicely into the Fedora brand. I'm not convinced that they will. It may be that worrying about criteria for product eligibility is trying to solve the wrong problem, and we should instead ensure that the various Fedora communities are empowered to promote themselves more meaningfully. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- comment:8 in reply to: ↑ 7 Changed 22 hours ago by jwboyer Replying to mjg59: Right now spins are kind of pushed off as an afterthought. They're mostly lumped together under a single tab on the download site. There's no link between related spins - Fedora KDE appears under "Desktops" , Fedora Scientific-KDE under "Spins". Yes. It's not surprising that people feel like spins are an afterthought, and in that case it's natural for people to feel that they need to be more than a spin to seem like a real part of the product. Providing a more structured way for communities to brand and promote their spins would remove much of that stigma. Yes. And, right now, that's the only reason we're being asked about new products. Nobody has, as yet, suggested a new product that fits nicely into the Fedora brand. I'm not convinced that they will. It may be that worrying about criteria for product eligibility is trying to solve the wrong problem, and we should instead ensure that the various Fedora communities are empowered to promote themselves more meaningfully. So, yes to the last part. As to the "solve the wrong problem" part, I'm not convinced an answer of "you asked us to come up with Product criteria so we instead did this other thing instead" is really the complete approach here. I'm not saying branding isn't a good idea (in fact I believe that was one of the things the Board said we needed to do after approving the Products in the previous ticket), but it doesn't answer the question we've been asked. More specifically, we've been asked to evaluate the Plasma Product proposal for F22. If we're going to say yes or no to it, we probably need reasons why. We probably need those reasons even if we say "hey, you should make your own Brand instead" because they didn't ask for more Branding. They asked to be made a Product. Since we seem to be in strenuous agreement on the Branding aspects, could you comment on the proposed criteria? --------------------------------------------------------------------------- comment:9 Changed 21 hours ago by mjg59 I think your proposed criteria are sensible, and that the Plasma proposal fails to meet them. The reason why I'm interested in this other discussion is that I think it's more helpful to return with proposed alternative ways forward rather than merely answering a question in a way that may discourage future contributions. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- comment:10 in reply to: ↑ 4 Changed 21 hours ago by inode0 Replying to jwboyer: In my opinion, the basis for the non-technical criteria for product promotion are fairly simple. New Products should not overlap or conflict with an existing Product Products that conflict/overlap can be evaluated as replacements for existing products Addresses a new, relevant, and broad usecase or userbase that Fedora is not currently serving The usecase should be something the Board sees as being a long term investment The Product should be coherent with all of Fedora's foundations I think points 2-4 are fine, I don't agree with point 1 though. Every product overlaps in some way with other products and this is just a rathole to try to define how much and what sort of overlap is unacceptable. Anything that egregiously fails on point 1 will almost surely also fail on point 2 anyway. I can imagine being alright with a product having substantial overlap if there is a clearly different use case or target audience in mind that isn't being served by the existing product. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- comment:11 in reply to: ↑ 4 Changed 14 hours ago by gholms Replying to jwboyer: In my opinion, the basis for the non-technical criteria for product promotion are fairly simple. New Products should not overlap or conflict with an existing Product Products that conflict/overlap can be evaluated as replacements for existing products Addresses a new, relevant, and broad usecase or userbase that Fedora is not currently serving The usecase should be something the Board sees as being a long term investment The Product should be coherent with all of Fedora's foundations Strike the first one from the list and I'll completely agree. As the saying goes, "Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail." A certain level of redundancy in the tools in play is both inevitable and a distraction from the redundancy that does make a difference: that of use cases. If this was instead a "Mobile" product, for instance, its distinctiveness from the "Desktop" product would be quite clear even if both of those products were capable of running regular desktops. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- comment:12 follow-up: ↓ 13 Changed 5 hours ago by pjones Can we phrase the overlap criterion in terms of goals and audience rather than features and maybe even use cases? It seems like it's written with the intent of implying "we shouldn't have two different cloud Products" and maybe being read closer to "we shouldn't have two Products with ZOMG-amazing-mail-client". --------------------------------------------------------------------------- comment:13 in reply to: ↑ 12 ; follow-up: ↓ 14 Changed 5 hours ago by jwboyer Replying to pjones: Can we phrase the overlap criterion in terms of goals and audience rather than features and maybe even use cases? It seems like it's written with the intent of implying "we shouldn't have two different cloud Products" and maybe being read closer to "we shouldn't have two Products with ZOMG-amazing-mail-client". ... maybe? Something more like: New Products should not aim to solve the same goals or reach the same users as existing Products That rephrase does map more closely to what I was intending. Given everyone seems to want to drop that criteria entirely, I wonder if that makes it more palatable? --------------------------------------------------------------------------- comment:14 in reply to: ↑ 13 ; follow-up: ↓ 15 Changed 4 hours ago by inode0 Replying to jwboyer: ... maybe? Something more like: New Products should not aim to solve the same goals or reach the same users as existing Products That rephrase does map more closely to what I was intending. Given everyone seems to want to drop that criteria entirely, I wonder if that makes it more palatable? That is actually what I thought it really meant but I don't see it as saying anything that isn't still captured in the second point Addresses a new, relevant, and broad usecase or userbase that Fedora is not currently serving What is the difference? --------------------------------------------------------------------------- comment:15 in reply to: ↑ 14 Changed 4 hours ago by jwboyer Replying to inode0: Replying to jwboyer: ... maybe? Something more like: New Products should not aim to solve the same goals or reach the same users as existing Products That rephrase does map more closely to what I was intending. Given everyone seems to want to drop that criteria entirely, I wonder if that makes it more palatable? That is actually what I thought it really meant but I don't see it as saying anything that isn't still captured in the second point Addresses a new, relevant, and broad usecase or userbase that Fedora is not currently serving What is the difference? Heh, good point. Apparently I REALLY wanted to get that point across or something. Peter, does the second bullet cover what you were thinking of as well? --------------------------------------------------------------------------- comment:16 Changed 4 hours ago by pjones I guess so, yeah. -- Matthew Miller -- Fedora Project -- <mattdm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> "Tepid change for the somewhat better!" _______________________________________________ advisory-board mailing list advisory-board@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/advisory-board
