 We're at two minutes past the hour, so we should probably get started. I wanted to introduce Akash. He is our speaker, and he's going to talk about the Fedora website and apps revamp. So everybody give a hand to Akash. Right. So let's check if it's working. Can you folks hear me? Perfect. Thanks. Right. Morning, folks. Two folks who know me. Nice to meet you. Nice to see you in person again after so many years. A bunch of folks I met during Fostum, a bunch of folks in the CPE face-to-face, and for the folks who don't know me, I'm Akash Deep Dhar. I work in the Red Hat community platform engineering team as a software engineer. That's my day job. Apart from that, I take part in things like mentorship, documentation, packaging. A bunch of stuff I do is about making sure that Fedora Workstation becomes a platform of choice for video gaming and stuff. Nice to meet you, folks, too. Right. Today, I'm going to talk about Fedora website and apps revamp community objective. That was how it was called back in the day. Nowadays it's called community initiatives. It's a place where you become a part of Fedora Council. You select yourself a task, a goal that you would want to achieve in a given time and then you pick your own team. You check if the things that you want to achieve with that community objective doesn't really bring Fedora forward as a community. This is the story about that and the things that we learned during the way while we were revamping not just the websites and applications. Like, sure, that was the goal, but what we really wanted to do was revamp the team while we were at it. So here's the story. It started off at December 2020 where we were like four enthusiasts who were working on Fedora mode. If you don't know, it's a meatpot logging application. We used to have, or we still have, ISE meetings, meetings on matrix that needs logging for folks to look back to, check to the records. And that's what we used to make use of for logging them. So we started off with that because the app was falling apart. It was in a sorted state. And the team of four was myself. Justin, Ramya Paremi and Nasir Hussain. We decided that we'd start working with that and we slowly started to increase that remit of websites and applications that we would take care of because we totally could do a lot more than just that. Initially, time the team was called DevOps Sig, but we quickly thought to not increase our remit that much because, well, that would include almost every application that's maintained in the infrastructure, and maybe that would be a bit too much. Jumping in the deep end when you don't know how to swim, not something that we would necessarily want to do. We were assisted by Marine Orden who helped us bring all those ideas together so that it does not sound as crazy as we made it sound like initially. And it looked a lot more achievable, a lot more quantifiable, and then it became a council objective when we proposed it to the council. Right, so we did start very humbly with a bunch of crazy ideas, a bunch of wide-eyed, crazy, starry-eyed people. But when we got our ideas formalized, we wanted to make sure that we really have a team, some calculatable, quantifiable goals to accomplish when we can say that, yeah, we are indeed making some progress. Otherwise, we can just go on and on about revamping our websites while not doing anything at all. So we drafted our mission and vision statement, the long-distance thing, the 10K feet view of our goals. And one of the things that really helped us to get action items from those was the logic model. And it was really helpful because it was actually allowing us to move left from the goals, from something that we would want to end up doing after 18 months or 24 months back to something that you'd want to do right now. If it's code, if it's documentation, if it's making sure that you're able to onboard people onto the team as effectively as possible, it was allowing you to connect those goals to things that you could start off right away. And well, we were helped with Ben Cotton to make sure that we choose really realistic goals and not something that's way beyond our means with both respect to the time as well as the efforts. And finally, this proposal was met by the Frider Council with a universal approval. All plus ones, no zeros or no minus ones whatsoever. And then we really got up to starting doing things which were much more than one application that we started off with. That was federal meat pot logs. Right, so the very first thing that we did was to create a team because how much of a dent would a team of four people would end up making, right? We needed more folks and we needed more folks fast. The existing team that we had was only a team of one person. So you can imagine how bad that would end up being if that one person was to disappear or one person was to become really busy. And we were having a Fedor Linux 39 coming out at that point in time, but our websites are not updated according to that. So we really wanted to make sure that we have more points of failure and not just one. And then we started looking into the appropriate tools, web technologies, workflows, the design things that we would want to take into account while making our websites and applications. And this was around a time in June 2021 that I joined Red Hat as an associate software engineer in the community platform engineering team. Moving on to August where we started writing down the rules and regulations because we really wanted to make sure that we are progressing towards a certain goal and we are not deviating ourselves with ideas that might just come in and that might look all shiny and we might want to pursue it. But this was around a time when we had a bunch of disagreements. A lot of disagreements, a lot of dissatisfaction within the team because well, admittedly everyone was really, really enthusiastic about what they want to do and it's almost like the purpose for everyone to do with the objective was a good one. Albeit the way of achieving that goal was a lot different. And this time again, we were helped by Justin and Marie. Unfortunately, this was again the time when Naseer had to leave the efforts for a while. And moving on when we actually got back on track on October 2021, we acquired interns because we wanted to really make sure that we not only keep our instructions to ourselves but well, maybe we could onboard some interns, teach them about stuff and who knows, we can have them as long-term Fedora project contributors stand the line. So, me and Franchoa Andrew was one of the contributors who worked on the Fedora Meet Part Logs project, pushing it to the completion while the Fedora websites, the general offerings websites, the place where people download ISO images from, let's just say, were mentored by Honorabh Sesar and Michael Shero. We continued on conducting regular planning meetings for the co-leads to make sure that we are really up to the task for leading the entire team, which was getting significantly bigger. At this point, it was no longer a team of four, we had already become a team of over 20 people. At around December 2021, Ramya Parimi, who was a co-lead with me in the objective, decided to step down and the Fedora Easy Fix project, a website where people could take a look at good first issues, you know, to just get started with contributing to the community, it had to be abandoned because there was a lack of interest in the community to use that website. Again, not a good time for the community objective and this was again helped by Graham White who stepped right in as a co-lead and he used the project management skills that he had to guide the project forward, guide the community forward into revamping our websites and applications. The interactive organization chart, the one that we, Marine Norden designed back in the day, which encompassed everything from Council to Fesco to all, Little Six, was made interactive by Honorabh Sesar at around this point. By February 2022, the revamp efforts for the websites was started off, it was proposed by Pavel Zelowski. Regular discussions with the stakeholders, which includes folks from the Different Six, as well as the ones from the Infra team, marketing, you name it, were conducted from then on. We also acquired a couple of interns, namely Subhangi Chaudhary and Ujong from Outreachee and their first two rewrite meatbot logs and their fedorographs were enhanced just because we had more people on the board. Now that we had things really chocked out, the path really planned for us, we walked on that path to make some progress. So my focus, which was previously on engineering because well, I used, I love writing code, but I decided that, you know, it's just me that I'm addressing and some more people who would work along with me. I would much rather write documentation to help people do the stuff that I do whenever I'm not around, let's just say. So my focus shifted on to writing documentation for both development of the code base as well as the workflow as to how teams should operate, how meetings should be run, stuff like that. We also continued to having active presence in events like Nestled Fedora. In Fedora Linux release parties, we conducted a bunch of workshops, Ashlyn, Nox, and Onorabsaizer again to thank for that. And we really used that time to convert a bunch of Fedora Linux users into Fedora project contributors because we used the time to tell them about the stuff that we have been up to and how they can be a part of it. Then this was again the time when the internships were headed towards completion. By June 2022, multiple outcomes of the objective and outputs were completed. It was again the time where we were checking things of left, right, and center because, well, we were making some good progress. The first mockup was for the renewed websites for the Fedora workstation, which arguably is our primary offering, was designed by Maureen Duffy. She's over there. So the talks about the discourse about the Fedora badges, the fact that we would want to use something that's already there, that we are using for discussions, and to use that for Fedora badges front end was started by Matthew. Onorabsaizer was elected as the mindset representative for the team. So moving on to August 2022, where we had the first in-person representation for the team in the Fedora Hatch Pune 2022, I met with a bunch of people from not just within the community, but also within Red Hat, who were not necessarily a part of the Fedora project community at that point in time, but just because they worked on web technologies, they were really interested to get their hands on to building something that they would find interesting with people that are not necessarily their colleagues, you know, just community people and have fun while doing so. The Fedora website's 3.0 manifesto was designed by me and shared both within the community as well as within Red Hat. The design walk-up for the Fedora IoT website was created by Emma, and the rewrite for the Fedora Meetbot Logs 2.0 application was finally completed at around that time. By September 2022, the team enthusiasm was again reignited by the advent of Fedora websites 3.0. This is where we decided that, not only redesign our websites, but the navigation, the look and feel, using a newer set of technologies rather than just bringing along the old ones that was based on frozen flask, and Nuxt.js was selected for the websites, while View.js was selected for the web applications that were under a remit. The discussions for the long-term maintenance for the Fedora badges was started, and the third design walk-up, that is, for the flock to Fedora websites, was created by Ashlyn. Moving on to October 2022, the development efforts for the websites were joined by a bunch of new contributors. A lot of those really stayed back for a long time that I really appreciate. Folks like Nico Dunck, Jefferson Oliveira, and Deepesh Nair. The design efforts were joined by Madeline Peck, Jess Cheethus, and Don de Marais. Effective collaboration was done, and it was not just the websites team by themselves, but they also started collaborating with people from Fedora infrastructure, Fedora design, Fedora marketing to better collaborate as to what should be there in the content of those websites and how it should be deployed, stuff like that. The progress along with the development for the Fedora badges, we really need to understand if the Fedora badges was something that the community really wants to revive, or they could simply use it in the state that it was in. So we started collecting testimonials from the community. By December 2022, Sandro and Errol Skin, they volunteered to look after the Fedora badges project in the state that it is in. The technologically feasibility investigation, basically we're just investigating what kind of technologies that we can make use of to revamp the Fedora badges web application was done by me at around that time. The investigation was joined by Mikal and Lenka, who are over here from the community platform engineering team. And the work on the Fedora websites 3.0 project was at that point in time, it was in full swing. The mock-ups that were made were actually implemented in the code base, and in the final phase of the community objective, when the badges technological investigations completed, we started writing code for it, and this was around the time when the code base for the Fedora websites 3.0 stack, say the components or the tools we made use of was nearly completed. This was again around the time when Fedora Linux 38 came out, and I think that we decided that it would be for the best to not just bring out our new websites in front of the community with the release of Fedora Linux 38, but also to call this council objective as a success. I visited the council face-to-face representing this community initiative in Frankfurt in February, 2023, and by April, 2023, we got back to community survey results as to understanding how well we have been doing our job in the community as a team which takes care of our websites and our applications. Matthew Miller and Ben Cotton proposed a closure of the objective at around that time, but I was still thinking that maybe we could use some more time to connect the infrastructure elements, maybe make the community folks a lot more welcoming to the infrastructure tools because it's still something that requires intervention from dedicated teams. The Fedora Badges 2.0 and the remaining websites were elected as future scope because, well, if we try to make things perfect in the very first attempt, we're only going to fail at it because attaining perfection is an elusive goal. And finally, we decided that, you know what? Let's call this thing as a success and everything else can be done down the line. And that is where we were able to call this thing as a closure and it's probably one of the most recent community initiatives from the Fedora Council. Right, so, sure, that was the story about how we started the, well, the rocky path that we took, the changes of the remit that we went underwent and the kind of results that we ended up having, but what did we end up achieving? What were our achievements? So in order to retain contributors that we onboarded because, well, onboarding is easy, but in order to make sure that the folks that you have onboarded, they stay around for a while and they communicate actively, they contribute, we really needed to make sure that they were recognized for their efforts. And one of the first things that we did was to have a badge dedicated for folks working in the team. And it's called Rock the Web. We award it to anyone who participates in the team and we do plan on creating more badges dedicated to particular websites or particular applications like, let's just say that it's the badges website that's being reworked on. So chances are that if people are to participate in that, they might be awarded with that badge. The next thing that we worked on was to give some tangible swags and we have planned that. It's still something that we are having in process, but we really want to make sure that people understand that, yeah, we really, really appreciate their time, their effort that they have spent within the team, making our websites and our applications much better than how they were before. The next thing was about the ability. We wanted to make sure that people not only jump on the team just because they wanna do something, but they also have what it takes to update these legacy websites and applications or if they don't have what it takes, we should provide them with a platform where they not only do stuff, but they learn stuff about it. They learn the technologies, they learn about the workflows that's required and the team had been and it continues to maintain a bunch of projects in its current state. A bunch of projects that we started, we thought we would be maintaining, but just because it became too big of a deal for us to do that or maybe we had another team that was taking care of it, we decided to step it down from our remit and probably pass it over to some other teams. And then finally, there were certain projects that we could not maintain because of the lack of the community interest in that project. So we decided that, you know what, we just simply deprecate them and of course the deprecation happened only after we were able to get the community approval that yeah, if it's something that people could really make use of. Finally, we really wanted to make sure that the information about maintaining these projects, because mind you, the ones who are maintaining it right now, they might not be maintaining it forever. They might start doing something else, some months down the line, some years down the line. So there should be some documentation that people can follow and do the exact same thing as others did. We did document that as well. Then comes the regularity and responsibility. It's about achieving that the Fedor Linux websites are updated regularly as soon as the new updates come out. So we wanted to make sure that the team had what it takes. The technology was up to the mark for that to happen. And the responsibility means we had to really make sure that we were sizing it only up until the kind that we had the capability for and nothing more than that. Then the knowledge of maintaining these websites and developing them as well as the interest to not only create these websites, but also to onboard the newcomers so that they can find something that they would want to really work for very easily. And finally mentoring them to make sure that they really stay back and they feel really welcome in the community as well as us participating in a mindset community so that we not only represent ourselves, but we also get to understand what others have to say about us. Right, I'm gonna take a couple more minutes for the lessons. And I'm going to be really quick because every lesson is just a couple of words. So we made sure that we start small and connect goals to the work that we wanted to do first and to remain regular because trust me, if you don't have that momentum, things are gonna fall apart and you can't do it alone so you would have to recruit members, lots of them. Then finally expect disagreements, debates, accidents, it's normal, it's fine, don't freak out and document everything so that you get to come back to things later and it's not all alien stuff for you. And finally, recognize stuff, recognize people's efforts, their time and communicate often whenever you are taking decisions. That's about it. Here are the links that you can follow to know more about the team. While the objective is complete, the team still stays and takes care of the websites and applications so you are by all means welcome to be a part of it. Here are the places where our documentation, our chat platform, our repositories as well as our discussions are done. Thank you so much. Right, so do you folks have any questions? Hold on, hold on. So you are saying that you are using Next.js for the websites? Yeah. Are you doing anything to make sure that the non-interactive parts of the website continue to work without JS enabled on the browser? Yeah, we are. So we are in the process of minifying the JavaScript parts as much as it's possible to a point that a bunch of things minus, well, the things that require to interact with the server to get the ISOs, what's that thing called? The integrity checks, you know? So the hash keys are the only parts that require JS right now, but everything else works totally without JS at this point. We really made sure of that. Oh, well, a lot of people don't. Yeah. No, it was one of the design ideas, by the way, because we really wanted to make sure that this is not just accessible to normal browsers, but also those which are, well, outdated. How are you integrating with other teams? So it goes by the need-by-need basis. Certain times we, of course, started off with the teams that we really needed to integrate with. So if it's coming to deployments, so we really had to communicate with federal infrastructure, but we really did not want to limit that interaction on the basis of what we wanted to do with them. We wanted to learn how we can do much better at providing them something that's easy to deploy rather than just giving them a docker file, you know? And that's how we were also attaining that information to do a bit more towards that time. Also, when it comes to design as well, I think a bunch of folks from the design team, they became a very integral part of the websites and apps team as well. So they were regular parts of the meetings, regular stakeholders who would actually help us decide things that would make sense, you know? Yeah, I mean, I was one of those stakeholders. And I felt, so very clearly I felt included. There was no point at which I did not have an opportunity to express my needs or to listen and get more feedback. But there was a complication around participating in the regular cadence. And that's something that I would love to see maybe an opportunity from the perspective of running another team to look at how we can maybe create an integration point. Do you note it? Yeah, one of the things that has happened very recently is we started dividing our meetings to two parts, something that's a lot more accessible to folks who live on the eastern part of the world, let's just say, earlier time zones, versus the ones that's a bit late. Say, we really want to make sure that there's a common time that's suited for everyone, but as time zones are difficult, yeah, it can happen. Thank you so much. Do we have the time for it? I just had a very fast question. On the slides, you had three languages. Could you explain that? Oh, yeah, so the first one, the one that's in the larger type phase is English. The second one is Bengali. Third one is Hindi. And the fourth one is Irish. So really wanted to not just pay homage to the mother tongues that I have, but also to the beautiful country that I'm in right now. So yeah, that's the rationale behind those. So you coming in? Yeah, definitely. Cool, thank you so much.