Wrapping up the Fedora Websites and Apps Community Initiative: Part II

This is the second post in a series covering details about the journey of the Fedora Websites and Apps Community Initiative, those who were involved in making it a grand success, and what lies ahead down the road for the team. If you have not already, read the previous post before delving into this one.

Off track and back on again

We started off with having recorded meetings on video conferencing platforms like Jitsi Meet. Around August 2021 we decided against to accommodate more fruitful and open discussions. Eventually, we developed rules and regulations for in-call discipline to ensure that everyone in the meeting got equal representation.

Months passed by with us slowly moving into rewriting our first application, Meetbot Logs, and our first website, Fedora Easyfix. That is when one of our founding members, Nasir Hussain, had to leave for a while. For a fast-moving and quickly evolving team that takes on multiple projects at once, this also was unfortunately the time when many disagreements among the ambitious members plagued the team’s progress. Development stalled for some weeks before we were again helped by Justin W. Flory (J.W.F.) and Marie Nordin.

Adding interns

Back on track now — around October 2021 — we started looking for interns to mentor under our wings for the Outreachy 2021 winter cohort. We looked at the existing projects that we maintain and the new projects we wanted to prototype and develop. Vipul Siddharth helped me and Onuralp Sezer to create a mentored projects proposal. Soon after, Francois Andrieu joined me and Michael Scherer joined Onuralp Sezer to mentor the Outreachy applicants.

To ensure that we are well equipped to lead the Council objective, Ramya Parimi, Justin W. Flory, Matthew Miller, Marie Nordin, and I started having a Fedora Websites and Apps Objective Leads meeting every couple of weeks. We made a lot of progress with a two-track approach to development and planning with the help of one of the Fedora Websites veterans, Rick Elrod. Gregory Lee Bartholomew and Graham White joined us then from the (now, defunct) Fedora Program Management team.

Departures and additions

The time of December 2021 was yet again a time for setbacks. Life became increasingly busy and our council objective co-lead Ramya Parimi announced she was stepping down. This dealt a great impact on me as with Ramya Parimi and Sayak Sarkar looking into the planning and documentation side of things. Before that, I could spend most of my time doing what I liked to do — developing and maintaining the codebase of our projects with the team. To this date, I like to think that we have not yet recovered from that loss and I do look forward to her return to the community as well as the team. Also, the development of Fedora Easyfix, which I was doing for a long time under Pierre-Yves Chibon’s guidance and Masha Leonova’s assistance, had to be abandoned due to the lack of interest within the community in using the project. Thankfully, we had some things going well at around the same time – which included Graham White stepping up as the new Council objective co-lead and the project led by Onuralp Sezer for making the Fedora Project organization chart as an interactive website.

With the vast amount of knowledge around program management that Graham White brought to the table, he also became a part of the Fedora Websites and Apps Objective Co-Leads team and joined the efforts for revamping our Fedora Websites and Apps Team. By around February 2022, we had Pawel Zelawski bringing in a wave of positive change by helping lead the efforts of revamping our main websites. With him, a variety of stakeholders like Ankur Sinha, Timothee Ravier, Peter Boy, Allan Day, Luna Jernberg, Kevin Fenzi, and many more joined us in the Fedora Websites and Apps Stakeholders Team – helping us understand what our renewed websites offering Fedora Linux really need. This is also right around the time when the community efforts around building our Fedora Linux websites slowly started off and the team got two Outreachy interns, Subhangi Choudhary, and Ojong Enow, getting mentored and working on extending my rewrite of Mote called Fragment and Onuralp Sezer’s project about interactive Fedora Project organization chart called Fedora Graphs.

This will be followed by the “Wrapping up the Fedora Websites and Apps Community Initiative: Part III” post.

This article was originally posted on Fedora Commblog on 11 May 2023.