A lot of people have been asking, both among the Marketing team and elsewhere, about how to move forward with Insight. Unfortunately, we've missed the June 15th milestone that was to serve as our trigger for reconsidering our game plan:

http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/logistics/2010-April/000519.html

Our plan is divided roughly into development, then staging, then production -- the way most infrastructure projects happen in Fedora. However, we still have pieces of the codebase that are changing during what is supposed to be our staging period. We've had an instance up for development for some time without our participants building the skills needed to understand and administer the instance. Without active participation from Fedora community members, this system can't be sustained regardless of platform.

Participants in Fedora are frustrated because our tools and skills are not moving us forward at the rate needed to sustain this project. There are other parts of Fedora considering separate content needs on different platforms, like mailing list wrappers using Drupal. We need to take a more holistic view that includes those project-wide challenges as well, where we collaborate with the Fedora people working on them, not just our own team from Marketing. And we need to consider whether we have enough docs, tutorials, examples, and other resources to help us contribute effectively to Insight.

In Fedora we talk about "fail faster" as a worthy goal -- to understand when we're doing the wrong thing, stop doing that, and then move on to something more productive. Our problem right now is that we are not recognizing that failure and regrouping. And moreover, we don't have a clear system owner for the future, which is why I'm writing this email. Given the unique and specific workflow in Fedora, it's worthwhile for us to look at some alternatives, and compare and contrast them with what we're doing now.

Based on the above, I'm hereby proposing that we temporarily halt staging and development on the Zikula instance so we can address some of these concerns.