[TOS] Un-bottlenecking TOS from Mel

[Mel Chua]

As you may have gathered from my previous email to TOS, I'm hosed - the 
education stuff for Red Hat has grown far too large for one person (even 
a Mel) to handle alone.

What this means is that my "outward-facing" edu activity is going to 
drop for a bit while I take care of housekeeping in here (getting 
finances in order, making sure ) so if I'm not on IRC much, or flying 
around to visit schools, or sending out as many emails or replying to 
them more slowly, that's why. It looks like other voices are picking up 
on IRC and the list, though, so I'm not worried. :) I gotta take care of 
the finance stuff so y'all can keep doing the awesome fun stuff, so 
that's what I'm going to do, for as long as it takes, and... I'll 
re-emerge after that to join folks in the happy teaching festivities.

If you need something you might normally have gotten from me, here are 
people good to ping for stuff you might normally ping me for - I'm in 
constant contact with these folks, too:

* For anything financially-related, you can also ping Max Spevack 
(spevack on IRC, mspevack at redhat.com email) - although Max is even more 
loaded down than I am with finance stuff for many things beyond TOS, so 
unless kittens will die *and* you can't find me, please just wait for me 
on this.

* For anything POSSE related you would have poked me on for a "what's 
Red Hat up to?" perspective, you can also ping Sebastian Dziallas 
(sdziallas on IRC, though emailing sdz at fedoraproject.org is probably 
better due to class scheduling) - he's going to be working for Red Hat 
doing POSSE stuff all summer and is just as up-to-speed as I am on the 
entire program and future plans for it. Past instructors and alumni also 
hang out on this list and in-channel and can (and have!) answered lots 
of questions about POSSE in the past... don't feel like you have to 
block on me or Sebastian to talk to anyone about POSSE, please! (But we 
do appreciate being kept in the loop, and this mailing list being cc'd 
on POSSE convos too.)

* For anything Textbook-related, Karsten Wade has been the go-to person 
for ages and I've just been redirecting everyone who asks me about the 
textbook to him anyway. :) (quaid on IRC, kwade at redhat.com on email.)

* For anything infrastructure-related, you definitely want to be talking 
to (Seneca Prof) Chris Tyler (ctyler on IRC), since he's the guy who 
runs all our infra and there aren't any Red Hatters with root on the 
machines as far as I know. :) If for some reason you need a Red Hatter 
with sysadmin expertise for something TOS-infra-related, ping Karsten or 
Ian Weller (ianweller on IRC, iweller at redhat.com on email may be better, 
again due to class scheduling) - I know exactly *nothing* about being a 
decent sysadmin[0] so I deflect all those questions to Chris and these 
guys and the #fedora-admin IRC channel anyhow.

* POSSE alumni with quick "I'm looking for <this sort of resource> for 
my students" questions or "who can my students email their 
getting-started-in-FOSS questions to?" - hit up Ryan Rix (rrix on IRC, 
rrix at redhat.com on email, email probably better due to class schedules) 
whose Red Hat internship is to act as a "help desk" for those sort of 
questions. He's a Fedora and KDE guy and can also help you figure your 
way around any FOSS project in the style of 
http://blog.melchua.com/2010/10/08/possesa-fri-5-minutes-of-improvisation/.

* If you're not in North America and are looking for a Red Hatter closer 
to your time zone to talk to about education, Harish Pillay (harish on 
IRC, hpillay at redhat.com on email) is in Singapore and possibly easier to 
get hold of.

Note that the fact that they're Red Hat folks is mostly incidental - the 
Red Hatness doesn't give you any magical special powers in TOS, nor does 
membership from any other institution, since this is a neutral spot and 
we're going to keep it that way - I've just heard some folks referring 
to TOS as "the Red Hat thing," which isn't true, and wanted to make sure 
we weren't making people feel crowded out.

Anyhoo - hopefully this makes things more bus/raptor-proof... I've been 
nervous for a while that if I were hit by a raptor or eaten by a bus, 
TOS would fall apart - and that points to *my* failure to follow the 
open source way on the Red Hat education work I've been doing, so this 
is me trying to consciously change that. I haven't been good at radical 
transparency (it's easy to slide when you're "too busy doing stuff to 
talk about it!") and for that, I apologize to the community.

Comments and advice, concerns, questions, and so forth welcome, as 
always. I always learn a ton from being here. :)

--Mel

[0] Seriously. I struggle to figure out CUPS and still don't understand 
SELinux at all and couldn't configure a firewall to save my life. I hope 
to take RHCE classes this summer to fix that.