In the most ideal situations, project management can be a challenge. In a fast-moving, community-driven, highly-visible project like Fedora, it can be near-madness. Although the Docs group tries to keep to the schedule when producing guides, the unfortunate reality is that guides rarely meet the scheduled milestones. I’m a firm believer in the idea that if the schedule is never met, it’s the schedule that’s wrong, not the contributors.

With that in mind, it was proposed in this week’s Docs meeting that the branching of guides be 4 weeks prior to the final release date, instead of shortly after the Alpha release. This buys guide writers more time to incorporate the changes a new release brings. Unfortunately, it puts an extra crunch on translators since they then only have four weeks to update translations if guides are to ship in concert with the OS.

The reality is that it doesn’t change much, I expect. Since the reality is that the guides don’t come in on time, it does little harm to have the schedule reflect that fact. I hope. I posted a message to the Docs and Translation teams earlier this week requesting comment. Modified schedule proposals are available at http://bcotton.fedorapeople.org/docs_schedule/.