Lots of people talk about documentation as “that thing you do when you’re finished building something.” But in an open source project, where you’re trying to attract people to help you build or make, that’s an unworkable approach. It’s something you do to make sure that people with skill and energy, who want to help you, have what they need to get started. You want to ensure they can learn the required bits without you having to hold every individual hand, because if you do that, you can’t work on the project yourself. By writing everything down somewhere, you give people the opportunity to self-serve when it comes to learning the basics.

Sometimes acronyms are obfuscatory, but sometimes they help. The “standard operating procedure,” or SOP, is an acronym we do use quite a bit on some of our teams, because it’s a great shorthand for saying, “the stuff you need to know to accomplish a task with minimal or zero help.” An up-to-date SOP document makes it possible for anyone to carry out mechanical steps, observe and report the results, and take follow-up actions if needed. Our Infrastructure team has one of the most comprehensive collections of SOPs in the Fedora Project. But other groups are starting to catch up, like Release Engineering and QA. (Some teams don’t categorize their SOPs like this, which is fine — the point is not what they’re called, but that people can find the procedures and follow them.)

It’s tempting to think that some processes are so important or fiddly that we can’t turn them into SOPs. But I believe those are precisely the ones we should be investing in documenting. It boils down to these simple ideas, which I believe are intrinsic to the open source way:

• The more we believe our work can’t be reproduced by someone else, the harder it is to get anyone to help with it.
• By extension, the more we believe our work can’t be reproduced by someone else, the less likely we will solve the “eaten by raptors” problem*.

People like Mel Chua have written (and practiced!) exhaustively on combating this problem, and often the solution is as simple as “teach someone now, and make it the student’s job to document while learning.” Paradoxically, teaching someone with a lower level of general skill can be more helpful than teaching someone who needs less tutelage. Doing so can expose the specific prerequisites, which otherwise might be just hazy notions (“the practitioner needs to have a high skill level in ___”).

Ideally, anyone in Fedora ought to be able to be absent at any point in our release cycle without unduly affecting any of our release processes. The more we make it possible for any contributor to follow a process like judging against criteria, producing media and art, spinning release candidates, and so forth, the closer we get to that goal. The result is a more sustainable Fedora Project.

*The “eaten by raptors” problem, simply put, is that having institutional knowledge locked up with a small number of people represents substantial risk in a project. This is especially true when the number is one, or if the project is an open source effort. To mitigate the risk that your project will suffer if any member is eaten by velociraptors, eliminate knowledge silos wherever possible.

I was also extremely pleased to see Jared’s incredible performance at the conference — although delayed first by bad weather and then by airline mechanical problems, he finally made it to the FUDCon, stepped off the plane and onto the podium (so to speak), and delivered his first keynote, in Spanish no less! I always regretted not being able to visit the previous FUDCon events in LATAM, so I’m glad to see Jared showing our commitment to the LATAM community, an essential part of our global Fedora family. In LATAM we have a very robust set of local communities, and like every part of Fedora, each brings its own culture and enthusiasm to free software through Fedora.

In Fedora, we’ve taken a number of steps to allow those local communities to flourish, including helping them set up community sites that support their audience in a local language. Although our websites and other services do offer a great degree of internationalization (i18n) to support other languages, not every service is equal in this respect. And in many cases, local audiences want to exchange information that unfortunately doesn’t mesh well with US law. Since Red Hat, which shoulders the vast majority of our project risks in legal terms, has to live by that law, enabling community sites helps contributors provide appropriate information for their regions without accidentally creating more risk. (Mairin Duffy has been writing about upgrades to our website that will help community members find local resources more easily, in fact.)

As more and more local communities develop, though, we should remember that we’re one united Fedora Project, as opposed to many disconnected groups. The essential component of the Fedora Project we can’t do without, regardless of where we are in the world, and just like every other open source project, is communication. If communication doesn’t happen regularly, it’s very easy for any team or local community to feel they’re not being heard. And we want people not only to be heard, but also to hear. We maintain a huge set of communication services — our official lists, blogs on the Planet, and bot-facilitated public IRC meetings held openly and transparently.

Whether it’s planning a FUDCon event, sorting out code issues, or figuring out how to on-ramp new contributors, let’s make sure we’re using those channels, and using them together.

Both Max and I are very excited to see Jared set up his own agenda for leading Fedora, which I know he will be thinking about during and after his travel to FUDCon Santiago tomorrow and then FISL 11. Being down in LATAM will give Jared a great opportunity to find out how our Fedora community operates there, meet some of the active contributors involved, and ask what they need to be even more successful in the future.

In just a few minutes, I’m heading out to locate the remaining Fedora tablecloths for our Ambassadors to use. The always dependable Joerg Simon talked to the rest of the Ambassadors steering committee and other Ambassadors, and sent me a list of destinations. Two of the cloths are already in circulation in the USA. Two more will be heading to the LATAM region with Jared — they’ll be going to Ambassadors around the region for use at upcoming shows. The others I’m mailing to APAC and EMEA.

I set up a meeting for Jared to meet Red Hat’s CEO Jim Whitehurst, and we’ll have lunch with some of the Community Architecture team and Red Hat VP of Open Source Affairs Michael Tiemann. I’m also trying to pick up Jared’s laptop early today so I can get Fedora 13 onto it — we won’t have a lot of time tomorrow, since we also have meetings scheduled with the Brand team, the Legal team, and the Corporate Communications team. Somewhere in there we’re also going to get a new photo (head shot) of Jared. I plan to stand around holding his bag for him while this happens, now that I’m being demoted to his caddy.

So it’s going to be a busy couple of days. After I drop Jared at the airport tomorrow evening, I’ll be driving home and back online more consistently on Wednesday. For the next few weeks I’ll be operating as sort of a backup for Jared, since we’re not sure what his connectivity will be like in Santiago and Porto Alegre. Paradoxically, his robust travel schedule in the first few weeks is likely to help us with the transition of workload, and I’m working on a schedule of release-related tasks for his use as well.

OK, now I’m off to find some swag!

I don’t have much to add here on my blog, since I said everything I wanted to in those posts — especially the first — regarding Jared’s qualifications, experience, trustworthiness, and general awesomeness. In short, I believe deeply that I am putting the project leadership in incredibly good hands.

For the next couple of months, I’ll spend the lion’s share of my time ensuring Jared has a smooth runway, as he starts what I hope will be a fulfilling career at Red Hat. After that I will be taking more of an operational management role at Red Hat, in the Linux department. It’s part administrative, part technical, part troubleshooting in the organizational sense, and heck, probably part whatever it is that I can best do to contribute to Red Hat’s success and continuing leadership in open source.

I’ll still maintain a presence in Fedora and probably be involved as an individual contributor wherever I can help best with fewer hours. I don’t think departing FPLs ever truly leave Fedora — it’s just part of who we are, so to depart completely would be like cutting off a limb.

As I said elsewhere, my heartfelt thanks goes out to the community and everyone who’s given me their confidence, help, and support over the last two and a half years. I’m truly humbled by your trust and hope I’ve managed to earn it wherever I could.

This year the Summit returns to Boston, only in the beautiful Seaport World Trade Center — a different venue than the 2008 Summit in Boston, which was at the Hynes Convention Center. The Seaport WTC looks gorgeous and it’s right by the water. I’m bringing my camera and lenses, and I hope to take some swell pix while I’m there (and maybe learn a little something from the better photographers there). I grew up boating with my folks, and I still love hanging out by the water whenever I can.

I may be a bit slower on email than usual, due to the many demands of the show. (I promise it’s that, and not the lure of the sea!) But I’ll have plenty of news to pass on when I return, including my trip report for the Summit show itself. I hear this may be the largest Summit event yet, but regardless, it’s going to be a great week.

Thursday I packed up and headed to SELF v2.0. A short flight from Reagan National landed me in Greenville, which incidentally has one of the most pleasant access roads I’ve seen. The organizers had arranged the conference at the Marriott in Spartanburg which was relatively new and very nice accommodations. Of course most of the staff was busy rushing around making sure everything was ready for the conference on Thursday, but I ran into David Nalley, Dave Yates, Amber Graner, and others who were responsible for making SELF happen. That evening not all the Fedora folks had arrived, but I did get to have dinner with Robyn Bergeron of Fedora Marketing {fame,infamy} and Steven Dake, who works on corosync and high-availability stuff for Red Hat. Turns out Steve is a cigar guy and was kind enough to offer me one, which I gladly accepted. It was a relaxing, cool evening, and the SELF organizers came out and joined us eventually as conversation went into the wee hours.

The next day most of the Fedora folks gathered in a conference room to plan and then work on cleaning up various areas on the wiki, particularly the Docs Project contributor and process pages. They’ve gone wild and unweeded for a while and this was a good chance for us to make a fresh start. Ohio LinuxFest core team member Beth Lynn Eicher was on hand as well, and her fresh eyes really helped us find places where we needed to do some serious revamping. Ian Weller and Eric Christensen drove us to write several texts, and we even came up with an idea for a team contact template that will be available soon. We’ll be swapping in the new content and sweeping out the old shortly as well. It was nice to be able to have this “bonus meeting” in addition to the planned activities for Saturday and Sunday. Friday evening there was a nice speakers’ dinner planned by the SELF staff, after which I skipped the party so I could have a nice long jaw with Max Spevack, and so I could be sure to rise early.

On Saturday I spent the morning getting ready for my talk at 10:00 on the Fedora Project and what our four foundations mean in theory and practice. My talk’s available for download under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license, and when the video is available from SELF I’ll post a notice here. My room was pretty full, so I was pleased, especially since it didn’t seem that most people had made it out of bed for an 8:00 start time. I think I gave a solid talk, although I think it wasn’t as humorous as some of the talks I saw or heard about during the day. Reminder to myself: it’s OK not to be so serious when presenting! Meanwhile, our erstwhile Fedora Ambassadors held down an awesome booth:

I saw some other interesting talks such as Ian Weller’s presentation on “datanommer,” Doug Vann’s on Drupal, and Daniel Chen’s on how to help unbreak Linux audio (the answer is not turning off PulseAudio, by the way).

But one of the highlights for me was getting to see a talk by Wietse Venema from IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center. Dr. Venema is famous in one of my previous fields of endeavor for a seminal textbook, which I brought and had him sign. He was a nice guy, and he even joined us at the lunch table later.

And I was gifted with a remarkably great-smelling bag of chocolate cappuccino from Klaatu of Hacker Public Radio (among other outlets), to which I hope everyone is listening. In the afternoon along with all the other Fedora folks I attended Max’s excellent keynote. I had the privilege of doing the keynote last year and it was nice to see another well-known Fedora personality tapped for this year’s closing remarks. I think Max really took advantage of the keynote to talk about open source issues in general, and how it could be leveraged by people in their business, making the talk about more than simply Fedora. It was incredibly enjoyable and Max spoke passionately, as he always does.

I have a great photo that happened to catch Max at a moment when his face has a look that’s completely out of context to the presentation, which I’m saving for a caption contest later on. A couple amazing things happened after the keynote. First, Ben Williams, one of our Fedora Ambassadors, won not only a brand-new Nexus One phone by random drawing, but also a raffle for a decked-out Pogo Linux workstation, the winning ticket for which he purchased at the last minute after already having bought five others. What a stroke of luck! Just as amusing was this prize, won by Jon “maddog” Hall — good to see he might have the chance to be important in software one day:

We stayed around to attend maddog’s BoF session on Project Caua. Then while everyone else was prepared to start partying, a few of us including Max and Michael DeHaan slipped off to a marvelous Thai restaurant, where I had a duck panang that was just about perfect and we all had a good time trolling, and being trolled by, our boisterous waiter. We returned to the hall to catch the end of nerdcore rap group Dual Core’s set, and have a brew or two. Once again, it was important not to stay up too late because Sunday was starting at 8:00 again.

Or maybe that was 9:00? Well, that’s when the first real session of DrupalCamp began anyway. I was only able to attend a couple talks which were very much introductory. Since I’d already read about, installed and played around with Drupal they weren’t too helpful for me personally, and the advanced talks were beyond my experience. But I got to meet a few people who were doing Drupal and make some contacts that might come in handy in the future for Fedora teamwork.

The Fedora crew gathered (at the Krispy Kreme where yr. humble narrator stoically refused all manner of tasty fat pills) to sketch out the battle plan for the Fedora Activity Day coming up that afternoon. This FAD, because it was attended by people with a wide variety of skill levels, started with an incredibly fun session where we debunked Fedora myths and exposed Fedora truths (think “dependency hell/yum is slow” or “just disable SELinux”). One of my favorite parts of that hour was when Dan Walsh piped up to say that, from his developer POV, anyone filing a bug against his work was making a substantial contribution that he very much appreciated.

I had to slip off after the first hour because I was giving a two-hour PyGTK talk for beginners. Although it was difficult to cater to the expectations of a variety of skill levels in the audience, the talk seemed to go over well. A few of the more advanced folks were likely a bit bored in the beginning of the talk, and a few of the people with no experience were probably lost near the end, but I think most everyone got something useful out of the talk as a number of people told me afterward. It was a lot of fun presenting on something semi-technical and I expect that the eventual video will be more useful, since people can fast forward through the boring parts, or review the easy stuff while trying things on their own systems. One of the parts I most enjoyed about giving the talk was pointing out that FOSS is global, and that even new developers should keep internationalization and localization in mind when programming so they maximize their audience and their impact.

When I returned to the FAD, the numbers had shrunk somewhat as attendees departed the SELF conference via car or plane for home. But there were still about a dozen people around, and we continued to talk about current projects and ways to get involved in them. One young man named Adam seemed particularly interested in our Infrastructure team and Python web programming (which he does for a living) and I encouraged him to come by a meeting on IRC when he gets a chance.

Finally it was time to bid everyone goodbye. Max, Ian, and Eric and his friend Tim had departed already. I had a few conversations with FAD attendees on the way out, including a very constructive one about Fedora’s freedom principles and the way they apply to things like Adobe’s Flash software. I ran into some of the SELF organizers and again thanked them for their superhuman efforts at making the conference a great success. Then I met up with a couple associates attending SELF at the hotel pub and had a nice quiet dinner to unwind, after which we joined Robyn and Steve on the patio for some great conversation about programming, geek history, chess, music, and life in general. It was a superb way to end the weekend and a fabulous conference.

Monday morning I woke up at about five in the morning to catch my flight home, and took the rest of the day as my substitute weekend. This coming weekend I’ll work on getting the rest of my photos uploaded from the conference, or at least those that were worth a hoot. I want to thank all the Fedora friends who helped make SELF such a great conference, including our Ambassadors who manned the booth, those who signed up to help improve free software, people who shared their thoughts about where we’re doing great and where we could do better, and of course the SELF staff for their many tireless efforts. I’m looking forward to SELF 3.0 already!

But did you know we're also holding a Fedora Activity Day on Sunday? Both Yr. Humble Narrator and Max Spevack will be there talking about Fedora myths and truths. Our wiki czar, Ian Weller, will be giving a talk on gardening the wiki as well. It's an easy way to help keep Fedora information fresh and plentiful for everyone. Many other fine Fedora friends will be there too, and we plan to cover some keen technical topics like remixing Fedora into Live USB form.

Remember that our activity is free and open to everyone — just like the Fedora community. Hope to see you at SELF 2010!

I actually have family plans through the weekend starting tomorrow, and I wanted to give the community a heads-up. I hope no matter where you are, holiday or not, you have a wonderful weekend and are enjoying the new release of Fedora. (Go download a copy and pass it on!)

RHCEs take a challenging, practical test to ensure they have a high degree of capability and performance. If you want to do well on that test (or any other for that matter), you practice. RHCEs know as they practice their skills on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform, they can develop new skills in emerging technologies on Fedora for use now and in the future. I suspect a lot of RHCEs use RHEL at work and Fedora on their desktop or at home in part for that reason. But more than just developing skills, the Fedora community allows anyone — not just an RHCE — to work with some of the brightest people in free and open source software, and contribute to what they use.

Our community Infrastructure team, for example, has quite a number of RHCE-certified people involved as you might expect. This team that puts exceptional IT service management principles to work every day, providing services for the Fedora community. They also develop frameworks and applications we use, and moreover, they provide them as 100% free and open source software. Anyone can not only use that software, but modify it for their own use and redistribute it as well. There are may other areas in Fedora in which we have RHCEs scattered throughout teams as well.

In each case of the previous RHCE winners from Fedora, someone who's discovered the value of Fedora has also stepped up to bring some knowledge and skill back into the community. Sandro, for instance, a long-time Fedora Ambassador, is heading up the team that will bring the Fedora Users and Developers Conference to Zurich this fall. I'm proud to add Sandro to this growing list of honored community members. Congratulations, sir!