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Foresight 20/20 Recap: Re-organizing the wiki

One of Sunday’s sessions / hackfests, was a discussion on how to re-organize the wiki. As many wiki’s become over time, the Foresight wiki has many pages which are now out of date, especially due to the transition to Foresight 2.0.

One of the comments that was shared by Stef on Saturday as it related to documentation during the community session (more on that in another recap post), was the goal of each tool. Paraphrasing Stef, what I took away was:

  • Foresight website: Permanent and official source of news and Foresight information
  • IRC: Live help (especially to quick and easy questions)
  • Foresight forums: More detailed help that can’t be done quickly in IRC, and user documentation such as tips and tricks and user generated help
  • Foresight wiki: Knowledge base

Foresight uses Confluence for it’s wiki, which is quite powerful, but very different from MediaWiki, which many users are familiar with. Confluence uses the term “spaces” to divide different sections of the wiki. The landing page for the Foresight wiki lists the different spaces on the left, most recently edited pages on the upper right, and pages you follow (customizable by you) on the lower right hand side.

Today the landing page lists every space available. We agreed to display six spaces permanently on the landing page:

  • Common Questions (FAQ)
  • Using Foresight
  • Get Involved
  • Community
  • Development
  • Foresight 1.x

Common Questions

Common Questions will be the home to the FAQ, and other user generated information such as tips and tricks that migrates from the Forums to the wiki. The goal is to have a meeting / hackfest once a month to go through content that should migrate.

Using Foresight

Home to the User Guide, and other permanent documentation for users about using Foresight on a day to day basis.

Get Involved

One of the major changes to the wiki. Today there are spaces dedicated to Development, Docs, QA, etc. There is a lot of overlap that each of those spaces has information for the user, as well as how to join a specific sub-team. We will consolidate this information for the sub-teams in Get Involved, and the other spaces become reference material / knowledge base without cluttering it up between these two areas.

A second, important feature of Get Involved, is to document a list of tasks or ways to get involved. Derrick (aka Devnet) shared some great information in Saturday’s Community discussion around this. It’s easy to have users join a team, but to truly have them involved, you have to share with them the goals and tasks of what needs to be done.

Community

Here is the knowledge base for what the Foresight Community is about. Different than the Get Involved section, this space lists Community news and events, such as upcoming conferences, Focus meeting notes and upcoming meetings, and how to become an official Foresight member and developer.

Development

This space is for developer documentation, including how to set up a build environment, creating packages, or migrating to the QA environment. This space shares the Foresight roadmap.

Foresight 1.x

One of the most in-depth discussions was regarding what to do with all the content that is now considered out of date that relates to Foresight 1.x. We don’t want to just delete that content, both for users or developers, as a large part of our user base is probably still running Foresight 1.x. Here we will be migrating all the wiki content that relates to Foresight 1.x, and archive it. At some point in the (far) future we will have to make a decision on long we keep it, but for now it’s important to have this information available to users, but it does need to be separate from Foresight 2.0.

Other changes to the wiki include:

  • Making other spaces that exist not display on the landing page, such as the Newsletter space
  • Maintenance including removing dead links
  • Deleting or consolidating information on older pages. (Our favorite example page of this is the Howto Save Energy page. We all got a good chuckle.)
  • Applying tags to as many pages as possible to make it easy for users to find content.
  • Updating older pages and creating pages that we need.

One thing I need to find is the Firefox searchlet devnet was talking about, to make it easy to search for content as well.

For a list of the full meeting notes (including pages marked for updating, deleting or creating), you can view the JIRA issue here. Thanks to everyone who attended the session, it was a great discussion with concrete next steps. Now it’s time to make it happen!

Foresight 20/20 Conference Recap

The Foresight 20/20 conference wrapped up today in Raleigh, North Carolina.

With 29 registered conference attendees, I would estimate 25 or 26 showed up over the course of two days, which is fantastic attendance. Conferences like these are not only great at building relationships as you finally meet people face to face you’ve spoken to forever in IRC, but also add an energy that only comes from being in the same room with your fellow project members.

Friday night was fairly informal as people arrived, all with different flight times. Most of the out of towners, including myself, had dinner at a Thai restaurant, then headed to the Flying Saucer in downtown Raleigh, just down the road from North Carolina State University. The Flying Saucer is a huge bar with a nice outdoor patio, and stocks over 100 different kinds of beer. You name it they probably have it (except for Pabst Blue Ribbon, which Ryan did try to order at one point). They also have a club you can join with a kiosk that helps you go on a journey of trying all the beers, with varying prizes the more you drink over time.

Saturday was the first day of the conference, and was kicked off by Ken VanDine giving his “State of the Vision” (his title!) address on the current state of Foresight, how we’re different, and where we’re headed. This was one of the few sessions actually recorded on a camcorder, so we’ll need to find a volunteer to edit and post the video. This was followed by Ken and Antonio sharing their goals for Foresight’s roadmap.

Saturday was the fairly structured day, with tracks including Community building, Development Process, Marketing, and QA Process. Each session was assigned a task in JIRA, and the meeting notes are available in JIRA. Over the next week, it’s my goal to write a post about each session, and recap what was discussed by project members.

Saturday evening we headed out for dinner as a large group, and back to the Flying Saucer for more beer.

Sunday was our unconference day, similar to a Barcamp. We kicked off the day with session recaps from Michael (Development Process), Paul Scott-Wilson (QA Process) and Kevin (Marketing). From there we quickly brainstormed what hackfests and sessions we’d like to see throughout the day, wrote them on a whiteboard and then each attendee put a tick mark next to the sessions he or she was interested in attending.

Over the course of the next week or so, it’s my goal to blog about the majority of the sessions and hackfests on Saturday and Sunday. These will include an overview of the session, goals, and action items to keep moving Foresight forward that were discussed. As mentioned above, each session was captured as an action item in JIRA, and I will link to the JIRA issue, and provide a recap.

Thanks again to everyone who came, the first Foresight 20/20 Conference was a blast, and I look forward to many more.

GNOME Do Final Project Report

GNOME Do’s final project report has been released. GNOME Do was originally started as an academic project by a few students at the University of Pennsylvania.

I would like to direct you to page 13, where Foresight and Shuttle both receive mentions:

Our most recent release was 0.4.2., released on April 15, 2008. GNOME Do now has packages in every major GNU/Linux distribution, and is even installed by default in Foresight Linux and a few others. Shuttle, a boutique PC retailer, is now selling a line of loc-cost Linux PCs that have GNOME Do running on them by default.

Thank you to David and Douglass for all their hard work, and the mention!

Foresight 20/20 – Join the Flickr Group!

There is a Foresight Flickr group I created a while back, for screenshots and conferences. If you have a Flickr account, or want to follow along as the conference progresses, you can find the group here: http://www.flickr.com/groups/foresightlinux/.

pscott has spent a chunk of the day getting Foresight to run on his Asus EeePC – he’s booting Foresight from an external USB hard drive, and had to compile a custom madwifi driver to get wireless to work. It runs well – fairly snappy, and according to him, comparable to the Xandros OS it ships with.

p1010749

Foresight 20/20

My flight got in late last night, and Ken was kind enough to pick me up from the airport, where I met pscott and doniphon face to face for the first time.

After a snafu at the hotel (long story for a different time), we are hanging out at the rPath offices. Walk in to their office and you know exactly where you are, this is on the wall:

dsc02207

I’ve met tons of people today so far, including devnet, stef, elliot, Og, Up2, mkj and more.

pscott and I are hanging in an extra office while the others have to work, waiting for some other folks flights to get in.

dsc02208

You should have come to the Foresight 20/20 conference, you’d get one of these:

dsc02209

I’ll try to keep up with photos and blog posts throughout the weekend.

(Sorry about the blurry photos, it’s the camera, I swear!)

T61 Lock-ups

My new T61 laptop is freezing, typically after 5-10 minutes of inactivity, but every once in a while I’m using it. It seems as if I’m actively using it, it won’t freeze up, but soon as I stop, within 5-10 minutes it just hard locks. I’ve used my T61 up to two hours without lock-ups, set it aside, and bam, frozen.

I’ve browsed through the /var/logs/messages file a number of times, but I don’t see anything in the file – just the reboot messages. I spent 3 hours last night running Memtest86, and my memory passed all the tests. I also re-formatted and re-installed Foresight a second time. I can’t figure it out.

I would really hate to have to re-install Vista to see if it happens there too before calling Lenovo’s warranty service.

Anyone have any ideas?