Re: Gathering community feedback...

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http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora
Go down to support options. Under forum it links you to fedoraforum.org.  It has for years now.  I think I first joined Fedoraforums.org back when FC4 or FC5 was out.

The volunteers running that forum are very knowledgeable people. Some of the best documentation your going to find on Fedora can be found there. For example how to deal with Nvidia drivers. That is THE authority I've found on that topic. The FAQ they have is well written and works.  I would not change that if I were you as they have done a much better job than official channels at Fedora have with solving many tricky issues that come with the use of Fedora. Being outside Fedora they can also espouse topics that are iffy for Fedora such as propitiatory formats. This gives Fedora a certain distance from solutions that are necessary for real life usage but also carry potential litigation if RedHat officially endorses the solution. 

No it's not generally an infrastructure issue. I'd almost forgotten I'd joined this list. I believe I joined it because I was asked to do some MySQL tuning for y'all but nobody ever got back to me on the details. Since I was a member of a few contributor groups such as Docs I just never unsubscribed. I've since unsubscribed all the other Fedora lists I belonged to. For some reason forgot this one but saw the title of the post and immediately jumped on it.

The phrasing dictate that Jesse Keating uses I think succinctly expresses how most Fedora users feel about the project. Fedora built by far the best distro by FC3. There was no comparison. However Fedora has no interest in user feedback. They will give us what they want, when they want how they want. I and many others are greatly disappointed by the direction Fedora has taken over the last several releases but especially the last few.  As such we moved on to other distros. Ceased contributing and am slowly ceasing support for other Fedora users as we become farther removed from Fedora. 

While the purpose of the Fedora project is to test and explore ideas for RHE, the lack of touch with the community is harming that purpose as well.  I've personally been the causation of several sales of RHE over the years. Yeah it's small fry but there are thousands of professional admins like me out there and that's RHE's bread and butter.  We are the folks that sign the POs and or make the recommendations to the people who sign those POs to buy or not to buy RHE.  For me the decision used to be simple. RHE for the servers and Fedora for the desktops for large installations. Fedora for both servers and desktops for small business unless I couldn't shake them of their Microsoft dependency for desktops.

Not such an easy decision any more. Fedora is not an option for the desktop. Changes in the support cycles make it too short lived a distro to use for deployment on any scale. The GDM change is a serious pain as well and several other less annoying changes or failures to adopt standard practice for other distros leave Fedora a poor desktop option today. RHE is still a first class distro for severs but how long until the very things that have annoyed me enough to ditch Fedora as a desktop distro will show up in RHE?

So the next time I take a contract to deploy Linux on a site I'm going to lean towards other solutions. When the RHE versions currently installed on many servers reach end of life there might be a whole different distro being deployed on those servers/workstations.  What people use at home is what they generally take to work. That's how NT managed to supplant Novell. Never was NT the equal of Novell.  It was however something people could easily pirate and get a network up and running at home with. They then gained some level of expertise and a whole lot of familiarity and even though NT was a horrible server platform that's what people used.  Redhat's personal distro then later Fedora did the same thing. I introduced hundreds of people to Linux using Fedora. Many of them then later used Fedora at work. They'd email me asking how to set up this or that sever and I'd walk them through it or bragging about how they did this or that with Fedora a mere year or two after they were total Linux noobs and I set them up with their first Fedora install over IM, email and or phone.  Fedora is the LAST distro I'd put on a noobs machine today. It is decidedly unfriendly toward new users.

So when I get those emails today, it's people using Ubuntu or SUSE or CentOS not Fedora. So the lack of touch with the community DOES have an impact on RedHat's business model.

Y'all are welcome to kick me off the list. I'll be leaving it anyway at the end of this thread because I no longer use Fedora, thus no real incentive to contribute any more. I'm no longer active on the Fedoraforum.org website not that I was an especially active contributor there. The staff there are quite knowledgeable and very active so most of the time they answered a question long before I saw it.  Y'all really should lend more support to that website by actually visiting it and seeing what real life users of your project are experiencing/asking/happy & upset about.  


On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 12:08 PM, Stephen John Smoogen <smooge@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 00:51, Draciron Smith <draciron@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 1. Fedora users feel like they have NO mechanism for feedback.
>
> The mailing lists are a maze and designed for contributors not for mere
> users.
>
> The prescribed mechanism on the Fedora website is   http://fedoraforum.org/

Well maybe we need to change that. Fedora Forum is run by an outside
organization of volunteers.

> This website is clearly avoided like the plague by all contributors.  If
> ANYBODY who had any say in the Fedora project visited things like the VERY
> VERY VERY unpopular changes to the GDM would be instantly reversed.  In fact
> many like myself for the first time no longer have Fedora running on any of
> my machines for the first time since Fedora came into existence. Since about
> 97 I've had at least 1 machine usually most or all running Redhat and later
> Fedora. It's been my main distro for years. The GDM issue was the last
> straw. Feedback on fedora forums on all the Linux forums I've visited has
> been extremely negative and I've seen quite a few people do the same thing I
> have and switch to another distro.

That is the way of things. New people come in and old people leave. It
is not an infrastructure item to deal with it other than make those
transitions as easy as possible.

> 2. Why does the Fedora project TELL people to go to a forum to give feedback

Link please. I don't see where it is told that feedback is to be given
there.. just that one can best find help there. Two different things.

> then never visit the place much less listen to feedback offered? It is
> clearly stated at the Fedora forums that contributors never visit there
> because so many arrive on their shores with the false hope of actually
> giving feedback.
>
>
>
> 2011/3/2 "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" <johannbg@xxxxxxxxx>
>>
>> As Brian mentioned in [1],[2] as in the CWG wanted to get a constructive
>> feedback on COC and COCE proposed drafts from the whole community on the
>> FAB list highlights one issue that the project is facing as in we don't
>> have a good way of gathering community feedback on topics.
>>
>> This issue is probably know but for some reason not being worked upon?
>> ( Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong )
>>
>> Anyway to point out the obvious encase nobody was aware of this issue.
>> ( we have been without one for now about 15 release cycles so something
>> is amiss )
>>
>> He posts the proposed drafts to a single mailing list which..
>>
>> a)
>> Has a limited number of users subscribed to it
>>
>> b)
>> Requires all members of the community to be subscribed to that
>> particular list.
>>
>> c)
>> Mailing list provide the ability to see and reply to others people feed
>> back resulting in so called *noise* as in people reassuring their
>> feedback encase the message/meaning did get through and etc.. rather
>> then constructive discussion.
>>
>> That results in an end result that is far from being effective and
>> reaching the whole community.
>>
>> Coming up with a rough solution to gather the feedback is a no brainer
>>
>> First we need a common dominator that applies to all community members
>> and that one is obvious FAS account.
>>
>> Next we need a web server with a DB backend, hooked up to FAS with an
>> simple web page that the community member logs into that displays to him
>> what he needs to provide his feedback and two text boxes one for the
>> feedback and another one for any question he might have with regards to
>> the proposal/draft itself.
>>
>> With the above in place all that is needed is to request the feedback
>> via our public channels like a mail to the announce or something similar.
>>
>> Now the tricky part is coming up with a simple yet scalable to the total
>> number of community members solution, to work through all that feedback
>> I got couple of ideas up my sleeves for that but instead of reinventing
>> the wheel I propose that existing survey tools like [1],[2] be looked at
>> first to see how they have solved the problem we are facing.
>>
>> JBG
>>
>> 1.
>>
>> http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/advisory-board/2011-March/010525.html
>> 2.
>>
>> http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/advisory-board/2011-March/010526.html
>> 3. http://www.limesurvey.org/
>> 4. http://www.doodle.com
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>
>
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>



--
Stephen J Smoogen.
"The core skill of innovators is error recovery, not failure avoidance."
Randy Nelson, President of Pixar University.
"Let us be kind, one to another, for most of us are fighting a hard
battle." -- Ian MacLaren
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