I’ve been remiss in recapping SCALE – I really need to blog more.

In addition to all the great things I saw in the Linux community at SCALE, the best part is the face to face communication you get, especially within your own community, namely Foresight.

Spending time with Ken, Kevin and Stu, usually after the show while grabbing a beer, we had time to talk all things Foresight. Our discussions ranged from:

  • Alpha 3 blockers and next steps
  • Inclusion or exclusion of proprietary codecs. This was a pretty interesting conversation that ranged from helping a user make it “just work” to what it would take to code an application similar to Automatix for Ubuntu to help users get the codecs they need. Anyone up for coding an app?
  • Using JIRA as more than a bug tracker. There are so many features in JIRA, if we as Foresight developers can continue to add tasks to JIRA in addition to bugs, we can build a roadmap right from JIRA. Foresight continues to be a very IRC-centric community, and we don’t use the mailing lists often enough. Capturing workflows in JIRA will help both developers and users understand next steps in the development of Foresight.
  • Lots of great conversation with Kevin about the next steps for the Marketing team. From the new website development etank is rocking out on, to flyers we can pass out at upcoming shows, we talked about lots of ideas to share Foresight with new users. (And Kevin rocks more for filing these tasks in JIRA!)
  • Lots of Conary talk. Not only did Ken host a BoF session on Conary Sunday night, but I learned a ton of new things about how powerful Conary really is. I think Stu even learned something new too. 🙂

The best part of these in person discussions is how fired up and excited you get. The ideas are free flowing, and you really come back jazzed to get even more involved and make a difference. Foresight is still a relatively young project, and with so much to do, anyone can jump in and start helping on any number of tasks from web design or development, packaging, documentation writing or marketing. I continue to work on the Foresight Love project modeled after GNOME Love, and will add tasks that are easy for a new contributor to jump in and help with. I need to add some links to that page to within the wiki, and make it more specific. More to come soon.