Mind Maps: The Fedora Project
Recently, I’ve been plagued with trying to come up with an organizational model for the Utah Open Source Foundation and it’s relationship to the Utah Open Source Conference. This is in addition to the new Non-Profit structure we’re building.
To that end, I created a very shabby hierarchical structure which I passed around a week ago at the Core Team after conference dinner. It went over okay, but people had a lot of questions about how the structure was organized and what not.
Organizing My Thoughts is Hard!
I didn’t know what exactly to do. As it is, I’ve never been an integral part of an organization before like this one. Nor have I ever created organizational charts that were very well done. I don’t think that’s going to change anytime soon. But, something amazing did happen in the span between last Friday and today, that was VYM, or View Your Mind.
When a “Mind Map” was first suggested to me by my buddy Doran Barton, I thought “well, I’ll look into that later”. However, the more I kept trying to cram jobs into places they didn’t go, the more I got frustrated that there wasn’t a good application to accommodate the structure I was trying to build.
VYM is an application that helps get your thoughts out onto a structure. It lets you move it around quickly and easily and even associate pictures and notes where applicable. The problem for me was understanding how to use VYM in an environment I already knew and UTOS was not the right place!
The Fedora Project “Mind Map”
It turns out that a lot of people always wonder how the Fedora Project is structured, where the pieces go and who, what, where and how the project is put together. Because I could at least see all the pieces, I decided that would be a good place to start. While it’s not complete by any means, I present to you the Fedora Project VYM “Mind Map”. From VYM, one can create pdf, png and other output sources, so I created a pdf as well
Contribute!
I’d like to see the Fedora Community take this up and add many pieces to it as it grows and builds into something more than I could make. It’s fairly simple to add pieces as well. You can create separate maps which can be integrated into the larger map. Or, since the format is a zip file (essentially) with an xml definition file, I believe patches could work.
Cheers,
Herlo
In: Fedora, Passion, Tech, Tools · Tagged with: Fedora, structure, utos, UTOSC
on November 21, 2008 at 1:07 pm
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You made me smile…. both the Board and FESCo are neither listed in your mapping. I like that….a lot. You’ve de-emphasized the explicit oversight elements of the project structure. I like how your mind works.
-jef
on November 22, 2008 at 12:29 am
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Hey Clint, you might want to check out “labyrinth” as well, which is a very easy and powerful mindmapper for GNOME. It stores its data as XML for easy conversion to/from other data stores. I don’t think development is moving as fast with labyrinth, but IIRC it’s a simple enough app that someone could “cut teeth” on one of its features. If you like KDE, I believe kdissert is used by a lot of folks too.
on November 25, 2008 at 5:22 am
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[...] Mind Maps: The Fedora Project [...]
on November 25, 2008 at 7:55 am
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[...] creating the Fedora Project Mind Map, I was better able to understand how UTOS was currently structured. I was able to put together [...]
on September 16, 2009 at 10:10 am
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[...] not the first to write about mind mapping in Fedora. Clint Savage talked about some work he did last year mapping out the structure of the Fedora Project which I hope to borrow [...]
on September 17, 2009 at 3:59 am
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[...] not the first to write about mind mapping in Fedora. Clint Savage talked about some work he did last year mapping out the structure of the Fedora Project which I hope to borrow [...]