Here’s a quick and easy way to help Fedora Hubs! Our Outreachy intern, Suzanne Hillman, has put together a survey about Fedora contributors’ usage of social media to help us prioritize potential future integration with various social media platforms with Fedora Hubs. If you’d like your social media hangouts of choice to be considered for integration, please take the survey! Take the survey now!
Where our story began… You may first want to check out the first part of this blog post, Helping new users get on IRC. We’ll wait for you here. 🙂 A simpler way to choose a nick (Relevant ticket: https://pagure.io/fedora-hubs/issue/283) So Sayan kindly reviewed the ticket with the irc registration mockups in it and had some points of feedback about the nick selection process (original mockup shown below:) Critical Feedback on Original Mockup The layout of a grid of nicks to choose from invited the user to click on all of them, even if that wasn’t in their best interest. It drove their attention to a multiplicity of choices rather than focused them towards one they could use to move forward. If the user clicked even on just one nick, they would have to wait for us to check if it was available. If they clicked on multiple, it could take a long time to get through the dialog. They might give up and not register. (We want them to join and chat, though!) To make it clear which nick they wanted to register, we had the user click on a “Register” button next to every available nick. This meant, …
Hubs and Chat Integration Basics Hubs uses Freenode IRC for its chat feature. I talked quite a bit about the basics of how we think this could work (see “Fedora Hubs and Meetbot: A Recursive Tale” for all of the details.) One case that we have to account for is users who are new Fedora contributors who don’t already have an IRC nick or even experience with IRC. A tricky thing is that we have to get them identified with NickServ, and continue to identify them with Nickserv seamlessly and automatically, after netsplits and other events that would cause them to lose their authentication to Nickserv, without their needing to be necessarily aware that the identification process was going on. Nickserv auth is kind of an implementation detail of IRC that I don’t think users, particularly those new to and unfamiliar with IRC, need to be concerned with. Nickserv? “Nickserv? What’s Nickserv?” you ask. Well. Different IRC networks have a nickserv or something similar to it. On IRC, people chat using the same nickname and come to be known by their nickname. For example, I’ve been mizmo on freenode IRC for well over a decade and am known by that …
Hubs and Chat Integration Basics One of the planned features of Fedora Hubs that I am most excited about is chat integration with Fedora development chat rooms. As a mentor and onboarder of designers and other creatives into the Fedora project, I’ve witnessed IRC causing a lot of unnecessary pain and delay in the onboarding experience. The idea we have for Hubs is to integrate Fedora’s IRC channels into the Hubs web UI, requiring no IRC client installation and configuration on the part of users in order to be able to participate. The model is meant to be something like this: By default, any given hub won’t have an IRC chat window. And whether or not a chat window appears on the hub is configurable by the hub admin (they can choose to not display the chat widget.) However, the hub admin may map their hub to a specific channel – whatever is appropriate for their team / project / self – and the chat widget on their hub will give visitors the possibility to interact with that team via chat, right in the web interface. Early mockups depict this feature looking something like this, for inclusion on a team …
What’s going on with Hubs? So a little update for those not following closely to get you up to date: We have a big milestone we’re working towards – a working version of Fedora Hubs in time for Flock. It won’t have all of the bells and whistles of the mockups that we’ve presented, but it will be usable and hopefully demonstrate the potential of the app as well and enable more development. We have a number of fantastic interns coming on board (including Devyani) who will be helping us work on Fedora Hubs this summer. pingou is going to be leading development on fedora-hubs. I’m clearly back from an extended leave this past winter and cranking back on mockups again. 🙂 ryanlerch has upgraded hubs to fedora-bootstrap so it has a fresh look and feel (which you’ll see reflected in mockups moving forward.) Overall, we’ve gotten more momentum than ever before with a clear goal and timeline, so you’ll hopefully be seeing a lot more of these juicy updates more frequently! (“Wait, what is Fedora Hubs?” you ask. This older blog post has a good summary.) Okay, so let’s move on and talk about Hubs and Badges, particularly in …
The dream is real – we are cranking away, actively building this very cool, open source, socially-oriented collaboration platform for Fedora. Myself and Meghan Richardson, the Fedora Engineering Team’s UX intern for this summer, have been cranking out UI mockups over the past month or so (Meghan way more than me at this point. 🙂 ) We also had another brainstorming session. We ran the Fedora Hubs Hackfest, a prequel to the Fedora Release Engineering FAD a couple of weeks ago. After a lot of issues with the video, full video of the hackfest is now finally available (the reason for the delay in my posting this 🙂 ). Let’s talk about what went down during this hackfest and where we are today with Fedora Hubs: What is Fedora Hubs, Exactly? (Skip directly to this part of the video) We talked about two elevator pitches for explaining it: It’s an ‘intranet’ page for the Fedora Project. You work on all these different projects in Fedora, and it’s a single place you can get information on all of them as a contributor. It’s a social network for Fedora contributors. One place to go to keep up with everything across the project …
So today we had a pretty successful brainstorm about enabling new contributors in Fedora! Thank you to everyone who responded my call for volunteers yesterday – we were at max capacity within an hour or two of the post! 🙂 It just goes to show this is a topic a lot of folks are passionate about! Here is a quick run-down of how it went down: Video Conference Dance We tried to use OpenTokRTC but had some technical issues (we were hitting an upper limit and people were getting booted, and some folks could see/hear some but not others. So we moved onto the backup plan – BlueJeans – and that worked decently. Roleplay Exercise: Pretend You’re A Newbie! Watch this part of the session starting here! For about the first 30 minutes, we brainstormed using a technique called Understanding Chain to roleplay as if we were new contributors trying to get started in Fedora and noting all of the issues we would run into. We started thinking about how would we even begin to contribute, and then we started thinking about what barriers we might run up against as we continued on. Each idea / thought / concept got …
You (probably don’t, but) may remember an idea I posted about a while back when we were just starting to plan out how to reconfigure Fedora’s websites for Fedora.next. I called the idea “Fedora Hubs.” Some Backstory The point behind the idea was to provide a space specifically for Fedora contributors that was separate from the user space, and to make it easier for folks who are non-packager contributors to Fedora to collaborate by providing them explicit tools to do that. Tools for folks working in docs, marketing, design, ambassadors, etc., to help enable those teams and also make it easier for them to bring new contributors on-board. (I’ve onboarded 3 or 4 people in the past 3 months and it still ain’t easy! It’s easy for contributors to forget how convoluted it can be since we all did it once and likely a long time ago.) Well, anyway, that hubs idea blog post was actually almost a year ago, and while we have a new Fedora project website, we still don’t have a super-solid plan for building out the Fedora hub site, which is meant to be a central place for Fedora contributors to work together: The elevator pitch …
So a couple of weeks ago we talked about a proposal for the new Fedora website that Ryan Lerch, Matthew Miller, and myself came up with. The feedback we’ve gotten thus far has been overwhelmingly positive, so I’ve put some time into coming up with less vague and hand-wavy ideas as to what a particular sub hub on the Fedora ‘Community Hub’ might look like. Remember, this thing we talked about: We’re talking about what one of those individual little hubs might look like. The theoretical examples above are very Fedora team-centric; I would like us to follow a model a little more flexible than that in the spirit of Reddit. E.g., it should be easy to break out a new subhub for a specific topic, or a cross-team collaboration / project, etc. So the sub-hubs won’t necessarily be along team lines. A Sub-hub for the Design Team Okay, okay, not that kind of sub. (I have a sandwich graphic too, just waiting for its opportunity. 🙂 ) I understand pretty deeply how the Fedora design team works, the workflows and processes we’re involved with, so I figured it’d make the most sense to mock up a subhub for that …
(I’d like to apologize upfront, in that I meant to post this about a month or so ago. You might be aware that the Red Hat Summit is coming up in 2 weeks, and I’ve had a few odds and ends to take care of for that event that cut to the front of the line on my task list because of their imminent deadlines!) So, Fedora.next is shaking Fedora up a bit – enough that our current fedoraproject.org website is going to need a bit of a gut reno to appropriately reflect the new world of Fedora! A few weeks back, Ryan Lerch and I had an informal brainstorming session about how to account for Fedora.next with fedoraproject.org. We came up with what we thought was a pretty workable concept, and met with Matthew Miller a few days later to see what he thought. Here’s the whiteboard of what we came up with: Whoah, what’s going on here? Okay, let’s walk through this. The Proposal There’s several website components to this proposal. We’ll go through each one-by-one. We have some thumbnail mockups of each site to give you a vague idea of the kind of thing we’re thinking of …
