The topic of our multiple task listings came up in the meeting. No, wait, that sounds like it just happened by itself; I raised the issue in the context of our contributor deficiency. In an only partially Swiftian moment, I suggested that we cull our task list, wiping clean any tasks that we can't get done with the people and resources we currently have. After a little further thought, I propose that we get rid of things on the list in the following order. This is just a proposal, and I'd be happy if people cared enough to argue about it one way or another. I'm prioritizing the list only so people can easily respond to any level they find objectionable. 1. Any unstarted task targeted for FC-5 or before which has no owner. 2. Any unstarted task for which we have no contributor who knows how to complete the task, regardless of ownership. 3. Any started task which has no current owner. 4. Any started task for which no updates have happened in >6 months, regardless of ownership. I know some people will find this very upsetting, and that's probably good. Maybe the idea sucks. But on the other hand, maybe a list full of tasks that aren't clearly going somewhere cause confusion and consternation to new contributors. If the task list we're working from doesn't have jobs with a clear "howto," we're not likely to get anyone to magically take those jobs over. The Docs Project is only going to thrive with the active participation of people who may not have the technical mastery to take care of multidisciplinary tasks. Therefore, we need to reduce the number of those tasks and skew the list more toward tasks that newcomers can do. Any task that requires ownership and for which there is not already an easy "howto" document for working on it, needs to have one. We can move forward and encourage what I somewhat frivolously called a culture of success in Sunday's meeting. But to do that, we have to be willing to pump out some bilgewater. Why do we want to track a huge number of tasks that no one is volunteering to do? Is that really a worthwhile pursuit, or is it creating unnecessary drag? Speaking of which, I would also like to move for using Bugzilla for task tracking, since (1) it's already there, (2) it has several components in place in the "Fedora Docs" product we can use for any tasks that come up, and (3) the rest of the project is using it. (If the task tracker changes for the rest of the project, any migration can include our tasks as well.) This may be a separate thread, though. If anyone wants to spin it off, please feel free. I have done a minimum of second-guessing and re-editing myself above, so that I get this out of my Drafts folder immediately. If anything above comes off as offensive or mean-spirited, I heartily apologize, since I did not mean it to be so. -- Paul W. Frields, RHCE http://paul.frields.org/ gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233 5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717 Fedora Project: http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/ irc.freenode.net: stickster @ #fedora-docs, #fedora-devel, #fredlug
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