The State of Fedora: 2015 Edition (Fedora Magazine)

[Posted August 13, 2015 by jake]

Fedora Magazine reports on Fedora project leader Matthew Miller's keynote at Flock, which is the Fedora contributor conference. He outlined the state of the distribution using some graphs and statistics and said "we’re doing very well as a project and it’s thanks to all of you". The use of Internet Relay Chat (IRC) by the project was another topic: "Fedorans do like to work together. Last year there were 1,066 IRC meetings (official meetings, not just being in IRC talking), and 765 IRC meetings in 2015 alone. 'This shows how vibrant we are, but also is buried in IRC. There’s a lot of Fedora activity you don’t see on the Fedora Web site… I want to look at ways to make that more visible,' says Miller. There are efforts to make the activity more visible, says Miller. 'If I want to interact with the project, is somebody there? Yes, but we have millions of dead pages on the wiki… we need to make this more visible.' IRC is 'definitely a measure of engagement' but it’s also a high barrier of entry, says Miller. 'Wow that’s complicated. Wow, that’s still around?' is a common response from new contributors to IRC. The technology, and 'culture' can be confusing."

The State of Fedora: 2015 Edition (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Aug 13, 2015 22:29 UTC (Thu) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (20 responses)

> 'Wow that’s complicated. Wow, that’s still around?' is a common response from new contributors to IRC. The technology, and 'culture' can be confusing.

I'm using IRC, Lync, Skype and Hangouts, all on a regular basis. As far as _text_ messaging is concerned IRC is not missing much and not that much more complicated. In fact the way IRC supports chat rooms is probably better than the others.

The "culture" is whatever the users of the moment make of the tool of the day and it can come and go; a non-issue.

On the other hand, for "real", efficient and interactive meetings, where typing is obviously too slow and too prone to misunderstandings, I use all of these but IRC. Simply because turning on audio or video is only a few clicks away in any of these except IRC.

What prevents connecting IRC with something like... WebRTC for instance? Just the usual lacks of interest/maturity/manpower/hardware? Or something more fundamental like... hard-core IRC fundamentalists in their jammies wishing to hide forever behind their slow keyboard?

The State of Fedora: 2015 Edition (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Aug 13, 2015 22:42 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (6 responses)

IRC doesn't save history.

The State of Fedora: 2015 Edition (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Aug 13, 2015 22:58 UTC (Thu) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (3 responses)

Mmmm..., I'm not sure what you meant here, can you elaborate?

For sure my IRC client saves history. It's also easy to find archives of many popular IRC channels (and they generally don't make easy reads).

Were you referring to messaging someone who's offline? In that case I haven't been impressed by my other examples either.

If someone's offline I would just send an email anyway, which is BTW what Lync does automatically. As you can tell I feel like *real-time* communication is rather where IRC is lacking.

The State of Fedora: 2015 Edition (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Aug 13, 2015 23:25 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

> Were you referring to messaging someone who's offline? In that case I haven't been impressed by my other examples either.
Yes. And synchronization between clients - if I log in and chat from a tablet or a phone, I still should be able to find this conversation from my laptop.

Ditto for joining a group conversation - I should be able to see the previous history of this conversation.

The State of Fedora: 2015 Edition (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Aug 14, 2015 2:14 UTC (Fri) by moy (guest, #98256) [Link] (1 responses)

irccloud.com takes care of sync between devices

The State of Fedora: 2015 Edition (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Aug 14, 2015 2:32 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Yeah, a client depending on a third-party centrally hosted service can easily sync the history. Duh.

The State of Fedora: 2015 Edition (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Aug 14, 2015 3:36 UTC (Fri) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link]

All of this Fedora meeting history is saved, for what it's worth. See http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/.

The State of Fedora: 2015 Edition (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Aug 15, 2015 0:10 UTC (Sat) by NightMonkey (subscriber, #23051) [Link]

That's what ZNC is great for. Just sayin'.

The State of Fedora: 2015 Edition (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Aug 14, 2015 10:00 UTC (Fri) by mageta (subscriber, #89696) [Link] (2 responses)

> What prevents connecting IRC with something like... WebRTC for instance? Just the usual lacks of interest/maturity/manpower/hardware? Or something more fundamental like... hard-core IRC fundamentalists in their jammies wishing to hide forever behind their slow keyboard?

Why do you feel the need to get all condescending and demeaning here? Could it be that fedora just hasn't felt the need for it - and if so, what so wrong about it? I take no part in any of the projects involved, but find it strange that just because they have a working method, that happens to be not as up-to-date/better™ as other people wish it to be, people would immediately feel the need to call them immaturity and fundamentalists. Is that really necessary?

The State of Fedora: 2015 Edition (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Aug 14, 2015 12:39 UTC (Fri) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

Sorry I should have put some smiley somewhere near "fundamentalists".

I wasn't and I'm still not seriously assuming that "fedora" (whatever that means) can think that their meetings and/or members are so special that they can "innovate" and get rid of tens of thousands of years (if not hundreds of thousands) of learnings in basic human interactions.

The State of Fedora: 2015 Edition (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Aug 14, 2015 12:47 UTC (Fri) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

> > ... interest/maturity/manpower/hardware...

In this sentence I was referring to technical immaturity (not people!). As an example see comment below about RedHat webinars.

BTW getting a bunch of highly technical people onto audio/video conferencing *could* help solve in the long run the bufferbloat issues which are plaguing these tools.

The State of Fedora: 2015 Edition (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Aug 14, 2015 11:34 UTC (Fri) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link] (9 responses)

IRC has one of the worst experiences. It has all kinds of workarounds with "Services", "NickServ", "LogBot", etc.

If you want to follow the group discussions, IRC is rather cumbersome.

The State of Fedora: 2015 Edition (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Aug 14, 2015 12:27 UTC (Fri) by johannbg (guest, #65743) [Link] (7 responses)

voice/video have their own set of problems at least that was the experience way back in the day's when I attended some of those types of meetings associated with the project.

Red Hat will probably force implement upon the community the same broken infrastructure they use for their webinars ( which did last time I checked did not work out of the box with Fedora stock instalments )

The State of Fedora: 2015 Edition (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Aug 14, 2015 21:37 UTC (Fri) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link] (6 responses)

Red Hat will probably force implement upon the community the same broken infrastructure they use for their webinars ( which did last time I checked did not work out of the box with Fedora stock instalments )

Of course, Red Hat will do no such thing.

But, okay, at least we have a an actionable prediction. Let's come back here in a year, and if I'm wrong, I'll eat my hat. Not literally, because felt is very filling, but in spirit.

Right now, for Council meetings, we're using Google Hangouts On Air, which I'm not thrilled with, but we couldn't find an open source solution which:

Scales to 8-12 active participants
Has a live stream for many more non-active participants (we want the meetings in the open)
Automatically produces a recording
Bonus: hosts that recording (although we're also converting to webm and will show on the upcoming Fedora community-announcements blog)

We tried a WebRTC thing (sorry; I honestly don't remember which right now), but it fell apart with more than a few people. Jitsi looks promising, but no one stepped up to evaluate it. Google Hangouts does all of this, and took no effort to set up. So, there we are. I'm not opposed to effort overall, but we really wanted the high-bandwidth conversations (with, again, recordings) soon rather than in the glorious future (too much of ideal Fedora already lives there). If someone wants to help us get going with an open source solution that fills the needs, we'll be all over that. (And, for that matter, I'll help push it inside Red Hat too if we can demonstrate it working.)

The State of Fedora: 2015 Edition (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Aug 14, 2015 23:00 UTC (Fri) by johannbg (guest, #65743) [Link] (5 responses)

Hangout's are limited to 10 active participants and has it's own set of ( bandwith ) issues last time I checked and used it.

With irc meetings everyone participate on equal ground and the share number of successful irc meetings being held within the project isn't a failure it's a success thus the council should lead by example not by limiting the number of active participants in which it creates a division between contributors with the same end result as has happened with the working groups but with something that works and everyone can participate and engage on equal ground in.

The voice and video simply is not there yet, no more than it was all those years ago ( if I can recall correctly was limited to audio only at that time ) but if your end goal is to continue to reduce the number of participants in the project by all means continue leading the project on your path of fragmentation and division and implement solution that do just that.

By the way high-bandwidth conversations wont yield more or better result that has happened now and if Google cant reliably deliver voice and video chat solutions to the world, Fedora most certainly cannot ( it does not have the infrastructure and bandwith to do so and never will ) regardless if that solution is open or closed so I think you can just immediately take that option of the table so the community is stuck with either using the same crap that Red Hat has and uses for it's customers or something implemented by larger corporation like Google Hangouts.

The State of Fedora: 2015 Edition (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Aug 14, 2015 23:15 UTC (Fri) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

> ... and if Google cant reliably deliver voice and video chat solutions to the world, Fedora most certainly cannot ( it does not have the infrastructure and bandwith to do so and never will ) regardless if that solution is open or closed so ...

Just for the record: Skype delivered ages ago what is still pretty much the benchmark today, and they were a fairly small company at the time. Granted: that wasn't and isn't "mass conferencing".

The State of Fedora: 2015 Edition (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Aug 15, 2015 2:46 UTC (Sat) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (3 responses)

Google actually delivers pretty reliable video-conferencing, and they use hangouts internally for this purpose. But it requires that you have a good enough Internet connection and that you have enough server resources managing the conference. Google is happy to sell you enough capacity, they just limit how much they give away for free.

The State of Fedora: 2015 Edition (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Aug 15, 2015 7:24 UTC (Sat) by johannbg (guest, #65743) [Link] (2 responses)

Google does not deliver unlimited number of active participant ( paid or not, no one does ) on it's hangout and that was on 100mb, from both participants, which was not enough to deliver lag free hangout ( so much for reliability ) but let's say goggle delivers and the problem resided in the browser FF or the OS ( Fedora ) or the ISP was mutilating the packages ( this was not black fiber ), you are still having a problems ( scalability/performance/reliability/bandwidth ) which you do not have with IRC.

This already has been tried and tested back in the day, and the project is *still* faced with the same problems,even communication problems ( strong accent, language barriers etc ) and the problem with the board is and always has been one or all of these things it's members, their mindset and Red Hat.

It has never been about not being able to deliver those "high-bandwidth" conversations about "defining" Fedora and it's "target user base" in "technicolour" to the community and in doing so wont solve what needs to be solved in the community.

The State of Fedora: 2015 Edition (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Aug 15, 2015 7:28 UTC (Sat) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (1 responses)

Please don't get me wrong, I am very much in favor of text communication when there are a lot of people involved. I've just seen hangouts scale well beyond the "10 person limit" that's been talked about here. That's the limit for the free-to-nonprofits account, not a technical limit. That's the only point I was making.

The State of Fedora: 2015 Edition (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Aug 15, 2015 14:54 UTC (Sat) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link]

Please don't get me wrong, I am very much in favor of text communication when there are a lot of people involved. I've just seen hangouts scale well beyond the "10 person limit" that's been talked about here. That's the limit for the free-to-nonprofits account, not a technical limit. That's the only point I was making.

And to be clear from my side, I'm in favor too. The Fedora Council is using video conferencing for just one meeting a month, and those meetings are a specific type: someone from some aspect of the project (QA, marketing, globalization, etc) giving a presentation (with slides). We also have a working meeting in IRC once a month, to make sure nothing is getting dropped, and two other IRC meetings which are entirely open floor. These are all 17:00 UTC on Monday, in #fedora-meeting on Freenode (and meeting summaries and logs are all available.

All of this wasn't really the main point of my talk, anyway, but hey, we work with the pull-quotes we get. :) I brought this up mostly because I think few people realize the (crazy?) amount of effort that the Fedora community puts into collaboration and communication, and I wanted to show it off, and also, I want us collectively to work on making that more visible in general in the future. The video aspect is maybe part of that, and I hope my 5tFTW posts help, and a planned contributor-news blog (Fedora Planet is too unfocused; Fedora Magazine is aimed at users). And we also have a more grandiose plan in progress — Fedora Hubs.

The State of Fedora: 2015 Edition (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Aug 14, 2015 13:27 UTC (Fri) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

Those 'workarounds' also means that it's mature and fairly complete. Ugliness can be a virtue. In this case I certainly believe it is.

I worked in a few companies that tried to depend on 'instant messaging' clients like Jabber or Microsoft communicator for things and it's pretty ugly and terrible compared to IRC. Lots of time is wasted on bad communication. It all just made communication very inefficient.

However people have seemed to be waking up from this approach and web-based collaboration tools seem to be picking up steam in a big way. Hope somebody creates good open source solutions.