Going to Red Hat Summit 2008 / FUDConF10 Boston

A lot of you will have noticed: Apart from

• a (hopefully helpful) mail here and there
  
• a bit of work on the packages I maintain
  
• the testing -> stable moves for EPEL4 and EPEL5
  

I'm making myself quite rare in the Fedora Project, as I'm quite unhappy about a whole lot of things in Fedora the Project (or mainly its organization with all those committees and all the bureaucracy; not about the contributors to Fedora or Fedora the distribution -- the latter of course like every other Linux Distribution had and has some things I dislike, but in the end it's not that bad). That's likely nothing new to most of you, as I mentioned that now and then already here in my blog or via mail on the lists. It would be a whole lot better to try to work towards improving the things I'm unhappy with, but I don't have the energy at the moment to do that. I tried a bit over the past 14 months, but it feels like it were hard and time-consuming discussions that didn't change much in the end -- so I suppose Fedora isn't the right place anymore for me to invest a great deal of my spare time (like I did in the past four years); thus I reduced my involvement and stopped trying to fix the things I dislike.

But life is funny game sometimes and it seems I at least for a few days get closer to Fedora and it's contributors again. Why you ask? Well, I'll visit the Red Hat Summit 2008. My travel back to Germany is scheduled for Sunday afternoon after the Summit ended -- thus I'll have enough time to join the FUDConF10 Boston Hackfest sessions on Saturday after the Summit. Note that I'm not going "just for fun" to the Summit -- Wednesday to Friday is a business trip for me and I have to do some work there. I was just the lucky one at work that was chosen for the trip, as it didn't really fit into my colleagues schedule... Well, it was not only luck -- I suppose it helped a bit that I'm quite familiar with what's Red Hat doing anyway ;-)

And yeah, I'm quite happy to go to the Summit and FUDCon -- especially as this gives me the opportunity to see a lot of Fedora people in real life that I normally got in contact only with via IRC or mail in the past years. Maybe I should feel a bit worried, as I suppose I didn't make much friends over the past year in Fedora... I suppose I'm the "always complaining and bad-painting everything 'old men' that might have been a bit important in the old Fedora days but now just disturbs the work" for some people.

But well, should I use the opportunity and try to work towards changing some of the "things I really dislike in Fedora" at FUDCon? There are a whole lot of Fedora people there in one spot, so it might be a bit easier to get complicated things discussed and maybe even improved/realized. Maybe I should try, but I'm not sure if it's worth the trouble. I'm also unsure if it's only me that feels that a lot of things are far from good and really need improvements; I only know from some discussions in real life or via mail that there are at least some people that just like I think "from the spare time contributors standpoint a whole lot of things got worse in Fedora the project (not the distribution!) since the Core and Extras merge".

So what should I do? Just try to be a ordinary visitor at FUDCon? Or try to do a small survey among Fedora contributors in preparation for FUDCon to get a impression how people feel and where they think Fedora needs to improve? I suppose I could be the right one for such a small survey, as I disliked a whole lot of things ;-)