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Sometimes we all need to escape the city…even if it is freezing outside. Pictures are from a recent weekend girls snowshoeing getaway up at Mt. Cardigan. (The top photo somewhat reminds me of this Radiohead album.)
This blog was initially meant as a travel journal, but now that I am “staying in one place” it’s time to shift gears if there is any hope of me actually updating. A la Brendan and Jackie you can start expecting a lot more photos.
The thing I have to watch out for is not burn-out: it’s burn-in. It’s not running out of energy or running too hard that’s my greatest nemesis; I learned to deal with burn-out the hard way during 7 years of high school and college, and as awful as it was to flame and wreck that way, it was wonderful to have that problem. My biggest danger is not having places to put the energy I’ve got. I can’t down-spin the massive do stuff! do stuff! flywheel of enthusiasm quickly or well – or really, at all – and so I pace like a caged tiger when I’m home.
Common symptoms:
The lack of running-around time due to the first probably also has something to do with the second. Comparing my usual caloric intake to what I eat when I’m in Glenview, I’m not actually eating more than usual, though we do eat a lot more meat and far richer and more “nice” food than I’m used to. Geez, I remember when going out to eat was such a rare occasion that getting fast food burgers was a special treat; today we went out for brunch and dinner, and I couldn’t finish dinner.
So. What can I do to deal with this? I WANT TO CRUSH THINGS! I want to totally pwn things! I want to do things!
Answer: well then, do things! That stuff, you know, that you wanted to do, but never had the time for? Do it now, and push yourself through it. Work through the nights if you need uninterrupted quiet-time; that’s the usual tactic for being at home. All right. So, this week…
That should be pretty good for now ’till Friday, yeah?
Tomorrow’s agenda, things I should do every day this week:
And then the other stuff…
If I have time, I’ll update the scholarly societies, but let’s keep the list more manageable for now. It is vacation, after all. Oh, this feels so much better.
And when I’m good and tired from Doing Stuff, then I’ll be able to rest.
I’d heard this part of the Kahlil Gibran quote on children before:
You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
But I’d never seen the rest of it until tonight.
Your children are not your children…
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
Yeah, I’m thinking about the settling-down and getting-married and having-children thing again (and yeah, it’s getting old; it’s been old for me for years now). This is somewhat inevitable during any trip involving family, because it’s one of those things that’s constantly asked about and after a while it starts to get to you. I’ve always needed to have good answers for why I show no signs of going down that path anytime soon. Marginally acceptable answers (none untrue):
Actual answers:
I know I sound like a total jerk when I even write this, but… argh. Sometimes I’m just frustrated and I’d like to say it. And I know it doesn’t have to be this way, but it still feels like a giant trap, because there are all these cultural expectations that come with being a wife, and then being a mom, and I have a hard enough time keeping my own stance under just the expectations of being a girl. (To some extent, I will be a girl until/unless I marry.) The ruts of history are so strongly grooved and deeply sloped that once I click into any portion of that track, I’m afraid I won’t be strong and steady enough on my feet to keep from being swept down into the rest of it. And I don’t think that track goes where I want to go. My mom got married when she was almost exactly a year older than I am today; I’m still young enough that “the rest of my life” is a very long time indeed, at least to me. I admire and envy my friends who are my age and married or engaged or in happy long-term relationships; they have something wonderful that I still don’t understand.
The scary thing is that my family (especially my mom’s side) is actually pretty liberal and westernized as far as these things go – I know there are a lot of girls who have it way, way worse. (I mean, I went to school. I can read. I’m writing this. That’s pretty good already.) Maybe I’m hiding from an invisible shadow that isn’t really there – it’s hard to tell sometimes. Invisible or not, I think I need to deal with this before I really start the dating thing; I don’t want to drag anyone else into carrying that baggage with me. Where I’m from, relationships are between families, not individuals. (What if I end up liking someone who doesn’t come from that sort of cultural mentality? That… will be interesting, to say the least.) I have to work on my relationship with my family before I can even think about adding another individual to that mix. And like I said, I don’t want that fight right now. I have a lot of other things to do.
Sometimes I think these are all mostly excuses to maintain the paralysis against the pressure until I find someone I like. (Hi, my name is Very Westernized. How are you?) I’ll figure out how to deal with all the rest then. I should apologize in advance to any hypothetical future relationships of mine because whoever loves me will continuously have to put up with a lot of shit. (I will, of course, return the favor. That’s what it means to love someone.)
In other news, I got a haircut today – there’s a good cheap place in the next town that cousin Mark was going to, and my impulsiveness and cheapness won out over the more rationally prudent conflict-avoidance part of my brain. So the shagginess is gone and my hair is now fantastically short, the way I like it (easier to care for). And I did pay for it; I came home and went straight to hug my mom in a pre-emptive mollification move because I knew she wouldn’t be pleased. I got away with two relatively short lectures and having to wear earrings and a necklace and a nice blouse (hers, as usual) for dinner. But I’m the one waking up with this haircut for the next couple of months, and I like it. So that’s okay.
Spent the evening with IMSA (high school) friends: Shreyas, who’s a physics PhD student at Cornell (and home for winter break) and Sharon (my high school roommate) and her boyfriend Michael. After the requisite gentle ribbing over me still not having a boyfriend (it’s been a running joke since we were teenagers – technically, the betting pool is still on), we stuffed ourselves silly with Olive Garden breadsticks (and yes, food too) and went back to Sharon and Michael’s place to play Rock Band – Beatles edition, of course. Sharon and Shreyas were the two who got me into Beatles music back in high school; I am nowhere near as big a fan as they are, but due to the sheer repetition of John/Paul/George/Ringo songs being played and sung in my vicinity during the entirety of my high school career, they’re the only band whose songs I know all the lyrics to. And the music is good. And the company was wonderful. Before dinner:
“Positive integer?”
“4.”
“Negative pi.”
“See, we can’t even say ‘pick a number.’”
“Well, I’m picking a menu item modulo 3, and I’m not going to do floor.”
Mid-dinner:
“It depends on whether I pass my quals. If I pass them, 3-4 years. If I don’t, then…”
“What’s the expected value of your graduation?”
“The expected… oh, 3 years.”
“So you’ll probably pass, then.”
“Yeah.”
I got advice from the guys on grad school, which can be summarized as follows: (1) What social life? (2) TAing will give you war stories, and (3) Make sure you have something that isn’t school in order to stay sane. After dinner, we duct-taped the last Rock Band mic from the ceiling so that Sharon and Shreyas could simultaneously play guitar and sing. It’s been a long time since I heard them harmonize like that – I used to love to hear them sing as we walked back to the dorms after class, or when Sharon and I would stand outside Shreyas’s window and listen to him and his roommate Adam play guitar. My contribution for the evening was to squeak up from “medium” to a reasonably decent showing on the highest level in bass and the second-highest level in drums (my Rock Band gaming philosophy: if I’m not madly scrambling to figure out what notes to hit, it isn’t hard enough).
And when I sprawled back on the couch after Rock Band, Shreyas elbowed me. “Hey Mel, you’re tired? Sharon, look – she’s tired!” “No, really?” “The little girl who could never sleep!” “Ah, I still don’t.” “How is this possible?” “Chocolate martini. I’m a lightweight.”
“You know what’s funny?” Sharon said. “We’ve known each other for almost 10 years.” And so we have. 3 years of high school, 4 years of college (at 3 different schools), and now 2.5 years after college. The length of our friendship is almost exactly the same as the length of my social life, and this is not entirely a coincidence.
Huh. I feel old tonight.
Oi. One of the side effects of winter is that you have way too much time to go through archives and end up rediscovering wiki song parodies and other random things that aren’t worth the effort to actually keep track of, but are good for a grin when you stumble across them again (if only to laugh at how silly they seem now).
And sometimes you go “hey, I learned stuff!”
It occurs to me that were I given a budget of things like Dollars and People-Work-Hours, I wouldn’t know what to do with it at first – the only thing I’ve ever really had to budget was my time. –February 3, 2009
Well, I’m still kind of “what would I do with this?” on that, but I’ve learned both how nice it is to only have to keep track of your own resources (it’s a downright freakin’ luxury, is what it is) and that this “budget” thing is probably something worth learning because the tradeoff in effectiveness-magnitude can sometimes be worth the pain of attention to detail, and I’d like that option. (And then I’d like to… not choose it. Yep. Teach other people how to do it so I don’t have to. Hey, if it works for team-running and wiki-gardening…) Also, I think I’ve been able to learn so quickly at work in the past 7 months because I’d gotten ready to learn it – and I was hungry for it.
And then there are some things I still haven’t learned yet:
I don’t know how to be tired, and I don’t know how to be still, or lonely, or sad. I know how to be excited; I know how to be quiet and suck in reams of information, I know how to make my own happiness and curiosity wherever I may happen to be thrown down. I know how to keep my pen moving across a page. –December 27, 2008
In the past 9 years or so, I’ve learned how to lean a lot more on other people, but I’m still ready to bear my own weight at any time, and keep my center of gravity above my own two feet. I have the ability to intellectually analyze something, conclude it’s fine to take a leap that will bring dependencies with it, and then instruct my muscles to fling me out over that chasm of risk, but that’s still relatively rare, because it’s hard and by no means is it anywhere near spontaneous.
I’m starting to hit some of my pre-programmed “if ever I am in this hypothetical future scenario, what reaction would I want to have?” points nowadays, and the amount of mental simulation-running and prethinking that’s been stored up during idle moments are being put to good use. It doesn’t make the pathways any easier to walk, but it does give me a series of markers strung out through the grass. I need to make sure that I always have the space to do that kind of thinking, lest I get overenthused now and tap the well dry now that I have things to pump my energy into. (And yeah, that’s what I do with my free time – axe-sharpening, axe-sharpening, axe-sharpening.)
And glory, so much abundance now.
My socks have holes in them; my sneakers are close to having holes in them, my primary diet in the house consists of cheap noodles, frozen vegetables, and soy sauce, tupperware and reused plastic forks/spoons are not uncommon dining implements for me, and George Sass has dubbed the neighborhood of my domicile “sketch-tastic.” I sleep on couches, under pillows because there’s no extra blanket, on a sleeping bag in the middle of a wonky futon… and on an actual bed once during the past month. I realize that someday I will look back on this time of my life with overromanticized fondness because I will have, at that point, forgotten what it’s like to actually live on Very Little Money. Right now, though, it’s life, and a happy life at that. –June 3, 2008
My cousin Mark gave me a collapsing laundry hamper for Christmas; I feel so spoiled right now. Also, I do not know how I am getting it back to Boston on a plane, but I’ll figure it out. My family is giving very practical gifts this Christmas; my little brother got his choice of shaving razors – which can become pretty expensive, actually, if you want to go for the fancy electric kind.
Hari reminded me of a concept I’ve run across periodically but never consciously and systematically tried to deploy – linking learning to emotion. I usually think of it the other way around (not necessarily just “learning makes me happy,” but also the Once and Future King quote that “the best thing for being sad is to learn something”), but… baligtad naman, the inverse works as well.
I rediscovered my list of goals from right before I was about to graduate college and… well, I’m not going to go into a diff between January and the present right now, I’m just going to sit back and grin. (I still haven’t gone backpacking, though. I don’t know how to go camping. Andrew! Liz! Help me fix this one!)
And then a snippet from college I felt compelled, for some reason, to write down.
I remember sitting at dinner – in a borrowed blouse, because I didn’t have any nice clothes – with the Board and the Council and some administrators and a couple other students and some faculty, and watching them present a resolution… I think it was that one of the Board members was retiring, and this was his last meeting, and they’d decided to officially name him a Friend of Olin College as a thank-you as he left.
It was one of those super-formally worded things, with a lot of “whereas-es,” – the kind that, when you read ‘em, you roll your eyes and groan and wonder why these people can’t just write in normal English – and they called him up, and read it, and after every “whereas,” there was a wave of laughter and a nonzero amount of less-than-dry eyes. And I remember thinking wow, is this the sort of thing these statements mean? That behind each of these formal statements, there are… people? And that night, there was a little subtle shift in how I saw the world.
Merry Christmas; it’s been a while since my brain went into random-ramble-spew mode like this.
Tomorrow morning, I will figure out the things I need to do, and think about doing them, and maybe start doing them again. Tonight I’m just… chilling out. Mm.
Linking to Wikipedia articles and blog posts from other people is one of my favorite side effects of the design of the web. It’s not just that it lets me learn new things myself – it also saves me lots of time explaining things to other people. Good documentation is a form of scripting, except it’s for your brain - it’s semi-automated information delivery. It’s what allows us to move from the “sage on the stage” model of learning (where content delivery is tied to a person delivering it) to being able to spend more time exploring new things, new syntheses of ideas, and so forth because you’re not spending all your effort getting the base data that’s now become a commodity.
When ideas are modular and redistributable, they’re easier to tweak, make, maintain, and generate, because an ecosystem created to be made of tiny bits is easier to add tiny bits to than an ecosystem created to be One Giant Thing. (Rephrased: modular systems make it easy to make modules.) And that gives you a lower barrier of entry into that ecosystem, whether those ideas are about software or music or metallurgy. And the lower the barrier of entry, the more likely people are to get into it while being able to do other things at the same time.
Think of it this way: people can do software as a hobby now. With open source, they can then bring that richness of their other world into the community of practice of software development and the things that support it. Can people do immunology research as a hobby right now? Chip design? Hearing aid manufacturing? (Why do you think there isn’t much of a DIY culture around it, anyway?)
It’s like there’s a barrier. The Hobby Barrier. The cost has to drop – not just the equipment and materials cost, but the time cost and the social risk. This does not dumb things down. It doesn’t make the art you’re teaching need any less effort to master – it just makes it easier to work really, really hard and get there.
Andrew and I had this conversation over 4 years ago.
Me: “The question shouldn’t be ‘How do we make more engineers?’ It should be ‘How do we get more people to do engineering?’ How do we get people that aren’t necessarily engineers to do engineering things?”
Andrew: “It ought to be ‘How do we get engineers to enjoy engineering?”
Me: “Not just engineers, but everybody.”
Huh, I should put this in my grad school application (it’s from the same blog post as the bit above, but reworded to reflect the way my thinking’s changed on how to teach things since).
October 2005, age 19: Give a man a leatherman. Tell him there are these things called fishing poles and nets, that he knows the stream better than you do, and can he help you figure out a way to pull this fishing thing off for his village.
December 2009, age 23: Tell the village that there are these things called fishing poles and nets; offer them any tools you can collectively find, and offer to introduce them to people from nearby villages who’ve made their own variants of fishing poles and nets before. Ask them to teach you about the river, because they know the river better than you do. Write down their stories so you can carry their words with you to share when you go back home. And stay in touch.
So, about this post title: for all practical intents and purposes, I’m still incredibly Anglo-centric. I speak fluent English, fluent English, and fluent English. (And sometimes not even fluent English, as those who’ve heard me attempt coherence at 5am can readily attest.) The reason I can call myself a language geek is because that term doesn’t necessarily say anything about my skill with languages, just the enthusiasm with which I attack them. That’s the first step, though.
Languages… are cool. I never thought I’d say this. Languages are cool, and I love learning them. I pick up snatches here and there as I can, trying to occasionally read the backlog of an IRC channel in Chinese, trying to respond in (broken) Spanish to a Latin American contributor’s question, figuring out how to set up my computer so 我可以写在中文 (I can write in Chinese – albeit with really ugly fonts right now) oder tippen der Deutsch Eszett (type (not sure if I picked the right word for that) the German ß – which I still copy-paste each time – umlauts too, because I haven’t figured out how to type them yet) o escribir con acento español (or write with Spanish accents – again, copy-paste for the ñ), and reading, reading, reading – lurking in IRC channels, reading wiki pages, looking through mailing list archives of languages that fascinate me.
Most of what I’m doing now is playing. Actually, all of it’s playing; I’m just getting myself used to the strange letters, shapes, sounds, and sentence structures. When little things catch my curiosity, I look them up, and don’t stress about remembering them. It’s not like there’s an exam at the end of term. When you have a richer world to be exposed to, the rules make much more sense in retrospect; I found a Tagalog grammar-book while browsing through a bookstore and went oh, that’s why they say that, and now I’ve forgotten what it is I’d seen – but that’s all right; I know where the bookstore is, where the book is, what it’s called, and that I can reach out and learn it when I need to.
I’m surrounded by puzzles, and I’m slowly accumulating tools that let me solve them; while sitting in the children’s section of the library (waiting for Melanie to get books on Ancient China for her research paper) I sat and figured out what “Strauße stecken bei Gefahr den Kopf in den Sand” meant – no dictionary, no grammar book, nothing except the rest of the entirely-in-German children’s book and lots of guessing. “Kopf” meant “head,” I knew; “in den sand” was almost certainly “in the sand.” What would you do with your head in the sand? “Stecken” sounded like “sticking,” you could stick your head in the sand, okay.
I knew the letter ß was pronounced “ss,” so what thing that sounded like a “strausse” – wait, astrausse…. ostrausse… ostrich! Ostriches stick their head in the sand – right, they do! (Oh, look, a picture of an ostrich nearby. Win!) And “bei Gefahr?” Ostriches, I remembered, put their head in the sand when they’re afraid of danger. So I guessed “bei Gefahr” meant something like “when they are scared” – maybe “Gefahr” –> “fahr” –> fear? Close enough. As best as I can tell going to the dictionaries later, “Strauße stecken bei Gefahr den Kopf in den Sand” roughly translates to “Ostriches stick (when in danger) their heads in the sand.” Silly? Yes. Slow? Absolutely. Managed to get the understanding that I wanted from the resources I had on hand? Oh yeah.
Languages are about communication; communication is about communities. Can I participate in a community that speaks that language? That’s my gauge. For English, the answer is “yes, unless it’s over a conference call with unfamiliar voices, or in a big room with many speakers that you can’t keep up with lipreading, unless there’s a text backchannel, which makes everything okay.” For Mandarin, I can get by at dinners where I don’t have to keep up with the conversation, with some polite phrases and enough vocabulary and grammar to ask about various dishes (with a lot of pointing) and compliment the chef. For ASL, it’s “yes, if there’s auditory augmentation and I don’t have to sign back.” It’s getting better over time – now I can read a Chinese IRC channel while asking kaio questions about colloquialisms on the side; a few years ago I wouldn’t even have been able to do that, and I can kind of understand American movies my dad gets Chinese DVDs for, because the English audio I’m able to hear plus the Chinese subtitles I’m able to read somehow combine to give me just enough information to snap some segments of the plot into focus.
Here’s what I’m doing: I’m getting ready for the opportunity to learn ridiculously fast. And at some point, the little snatches of learning I’ve picked up for a given language (”where I am”) and a sudden reason for wanting to be able to speak it better (”where I want to be”) and the opportunity to make that knowledge jump (”a way to get there”) will coincide. The more I learn and the more I get myself to want to learn, the more opportunities will pop up, because I’ll be able to use more things to learn the things I want to learn; I’ll be able to meet more resources at their level, and so they’ll turn into resources instead of “well, what’s that thing over there?”
And then… click. Things will (with a lot of hard work) fall into place; when I sit down and actually focus on studying that language, I’ll be able to make sense of the pieces I already know. The foundation’s a lot easier to build when you’ve got a bunch of bricks already lying nearby and have seen a lot of walls before. At some point, I’ll be able to say “look, if I had two weeks where I did nothing else but study Spanish, I could probably give a preplanned and rehearsed technical presentation in it,” or “if I audited Italian IV at a local college next semester, I could probably read Calvino in the original as my class project,” and on occasion, when those sorts of opportunities come up, I’ll be able to say “…so what the heck, I’ll do it!” And I will.
No, I probably can’t self-study German or Spanish or Tagalog or anything else effectively in isolation, but I’m starting to be less surprised by their translations when they’re typed. My Mandarin is atrocious from lack of use, but the sounds of the language ceased to be foreign to me 2 years ago (my family speaks Fookien, not Mandarin, so Mandarin used to sound really weird) and I could understand snatches of what the Chinese delegates in Singapore were saying. I haven’t spoken Japanese to anyone since high school, but I can map the subtitles to syllables in the anime my cousin Melanie is starting to get into. I can barely sign ASL sentence fragments back at people, but I can sort of understand what they are saying – at least enough to be able to explain a little of the structure of the language to my hearing friends who haven’t seen sign language before. It gets better. It always gets better.
I love languages. They help me reach the people I want to connect to. They help me make my world a little bigger. And they’re fun to play with. And they’re also great places for learning-metaness – I mean, have you ever looked at all the different approaches language-teaching materials take to the exact same verb conjugation in the same language? By looking at the difference between how the methods teach, you can see their assumptions of the ways people learn – and that in itself is fascinating to tinker with and dissect, too.
Time to go back and study.
Was is das? Das ist ein Buch. Was is dies? Dies ist auch ein Buch. Ist das auch ein Buch? Nein, es ist ein Fehler-Meldung. Er ist lang… ich mag rpmlint nicht! –Mel’s First Adventures In German
As part of our preparations for the Fedora 13 cycle, the Marketing team is (still) learning how to answer the all-important question:
“So, what do you folks do, anyway?”
A way to understand the things we’re doing is to think of Marketing as working in 3 stages, roughly corresponding to (the time leading up to) Alpha, (the time leading up to) Beta, and (the time leading up to) GA day. That sounds incredibly boring, so cue the dancing penguins…
Alpha: focus on tools. (For F13, that’s pre-March 2nd, 2010.)
The dancing penguins sing: “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” –Abraham Lincoln
The dancing penguins sing: “We need a better lyricist / a lyricist, oh, oh, oh”
We’re beginning the release cycle by concentrating on infrastructure, tools, resources, and knowledge that will make it easier for us to produce our release deliverables. The most visible-outside-the-Marketing-team projects from this part of the cycle are the tools – working with other teams on getting limesurvey (with Infrastructure, for marketing research) and zikula (with Docs, News, Websites, Infrastructure, and Design, for publishing marketing materials on Fedora Insight) up and running in production, and developing fedora-tour.
Design drafts for the fedora-tour interface – it’s only been a few weeks since Ryan and Ankur started, and they’re doing a fantastic job of both getting lots of good work done rapidly and being transparent about the work they’re doing so others can jump in to help. Come to think of it, the second probably helps the first…
Somewhat more behind-the-scenes, we’re writing up SOPs (how-to instructions) for our deliverables, planning our first Marketing FAD, working with John Poelstra on our F13 schedule (this is the start of our 3rd release cycle with a schedule at all!), reviewing our Join process and new-member queue, updating our wiki page (thanks to Tatica for the new logo and banner!), looking back and learning from how the F12 cycle went, and much, much more. It’s not that this is our static to-do list – it’s more like “we’re improvising in this general direction, and this is what we’re working on at this particular point in time,” so anyone who’s interested is more than welcome to jump in.
Beta: focus on deliverables. (For F13, that’s March 3rd – April 6, 2010.)
This is our time to focus on deliverables, deliverables, and deliverables. One deliverable at a time, with lots of collaborative work-sprint sessions scheduled on IRC. Our list this time:
Well, okay. Technically, we’re going to do the talking points and release slogan before March 3rd, as soon as the features list comes out. And the screenshots library won’t be finished until right before release so we can get the newest screenshots in, meaning the one-page release notes’ screenshots will also be replaced by new images right at the last minute. But the bulk of deliverables work will be done during this time, working closely with the Desktop team (particularly for feature profiles), and taking advantage of our spiffy new toolset from Alpha to push deliverables out on Fedora Insight as they come along.
Fedora Insight, under construction. As you can see, we have… a lot of work left to do before launch. But! This is where F13 release deliverables will come out once they’re made.
Also in this time period: working with Ambassadors to brief both Ambassadors and the press, which probably includes such thing as “writing a press release” as part of gearing up for the next phase. Marketing research will almost certainly be running in parallel with this timeframe if limesurvey is up; we want to be closer to both users and developers this cycle. Deliverables, however, are going to be our primary focus, and the first real test of our SOPs. We hope to set an example of how other teams can work through the same set of instructions to make marketing deliverables for their own projects (Spins, etc.) and I’m guessing we’ll be working out a lot of bugs in those instructions as we go along. Whee!
The first Marketing FAD will also happen during this period – deliverables work will still be continuing over this time (for instance, I’ll still be sectioning out some hours on Tuesday afternoon for our usual IRC meeting and sprinting on whatever deliverable we’re working on that week) but the FAD itself will concentrate on Making Things – perhaps the Handbook, or any of those other projects we keep thinking would be a great idea, but have never quite cleared the time to sit down and finish. (But hey, that’s what a FAD is for!)
GA: Focus on PR and new contributors. (For F13, that’s April 7 – May 11, 2010.)
Since we’ll be loading our deliverable work between Alpha and Beta, we should be able to breathe easy during this time. Hypothetically. In any case, we shouldn’t be running down the hallways yelling “AAAAH! DELIVERABLES NOT YET DONE!!!” (Which is amusing, but not… optimal.) Anyway, what the deliverables frontloading means is that we can concentrate on 2 things – the first, and obvious one, is Public Relations (PR) – working with Ambassadors on getting stuff out to journalists and monitoring the press we’re getting. Things like Kara Schiltz’s Classroom on how to monitor PR for a release are going to be extremely helpful for this.
The second thing is something we haven’t gotten much of a chance to do before, which is to go into outreach mode as a team to specifically focus on helping other groups within Fedora with their Marketing and PR. This is in contrast to the single month between Alpha and Beta that we’re spending in Deliverables Mode – that month will be extremely Desktop focused because we need to have one really good example done, this period is “okay, we’ve done it, we know how to do it, let’s go do it everywhere!” For instance, if a SIG wants one-page release notes for their spin, we should be able to use our F13 one-page release notes and the SOP as examples to help them make their own. Or if a team wants to present its setup at an upcoming conference, we can help them figure out press targets and talking points, again using our own Desktop-focused work as an example. Cool. Want to see something even cooler?
The really interesting part of going into Outreach Mode – and the one I’m most excited about because I have no idea what it will look like – is being able to help other teams with capacity-building. This needs to start with a lot of watching and listening and asking other teams what they need, but here’s the general idea: One of the big opportunities we frequently miss in Fedora is the chance to help new contributors get started – we get to help a lot of awesome new folks start, but we miss many, many more. Why? Because new contributors want to come when it’s exciting. And when it’s exciting is when we’re really, really busy – around release day. Generally, new people come in when the teams they’re trying to join don’t have much bandwidth to on-board them, but when you’re new, you want to know right away how to get started helping – you want immediate feedback that this is a community you want to stay in and contribute to.
And that’s the gap I’d like to try and bridge. I’m willing to bet that if we were more conscious about reaching out to help new Fedora contributors get started via the press we’re already going to be doing, we’d have a lot more people to help us out for the next release cycle. We do a lot of this outreach already – Ambassadors do it constantly at events, we all welcome new people on mailing lists and IRC – but but we could use more capacity to work on growing capacity, because in Fedoraland, contributions are our currency. This is the “sustainability” part.
Open source marketing is the community-driven process responsible for enabling users to identify, anticipate, and satisfy their own requirements sustainably. — “what’s open source marketing?” definition draft
We could do things here like working on the Join processes for different teams, publicizing (on Fedora Insight, etc) good starter opportunities for new contributors to help with… maybe working with the Classroom group, where they’d set up training opportunities for different skills each team needs, and we could get new folks and point them there… Again, I’m thinking out loud here – we don’t know what this will look like, it’s very vague and fuzzy right now, and we need to do a lot of listening and working with other Fedora teams to figure this out together, and be on top of our game so we can have the ability to do this, but I wanted to give a heads-up on where we’re looking for that far horizon. And boy, am I looking forward to seeing what it’ll look like when we get there.
So that’s the gameplan.
In summary
Traceback: this came from a long IRC braindump which came from a topic at the last Marketing meeting which came from discussions on the marketing list which came from… well, I lose the traceback at that point, but you get the point; momentum builds momentum, and sometimes cool things come out.
Thoughts? Questions? Feedback? Clarifications? Tomatoes?
Grape tomatoes / Tomates miniatura / Tomates en grappe / Cocktailtomaten, auch Kirschtomaten oder Cherrytomaten, photo CC-BY-SA by Softeis via Wikimedia Commons – please throw if needed.
And yes, the obligatory call for participation – you, too, can join us!
