Karsten and I task-swapped last week - he's been driving Fedora Insight like a storm, and I took the Summer Coding SIG... and stared at my screen for days. When I don't understand the global picture, I have a hard time diving into the tactics that need to be executed, and instead freeze up and babble aimlessly - I finally realize that the next step was to draw out the global picture, and whipped up the video below in a 30-minute whiteboard frenzy this morning.

What we're trying to do is a generalization - think Google Summer of Code with the "Google" replaced by "any funding organization," and "Code" replaced by any deliverable important to an open source project. What's the underlying model here? How could, say, the Uncle Pennybags Summer of Test Plans build on this framework?

Karsten later told me this is called a "swim lane chart" - apparently I reinvented the wheel, thinking that I'd come up with the idea of sorting flowcharts into columns by role. ;-)

Now, I'll put out the disclaimer that this comes from my brain aggregating everything I've seen and heard on Summer of Code and similar programs, and that there may be bugs or missing bits in the workflow I'm describing. Part of the reason I'm throwing this video out there is to get an idea of where I'm wrong. I'm sure I'm wrong in many, many places - if a patch needs to be made, please say so!

If this sounds about right, we should Inkscape up the flow chart and type out the narration and put that document up... somewhere. Any takers, or ideas where the upstream ought to be? I'm putting it in the Summer Coding SIG by default, but am happy to migrate it somewhere if there's a better upstream to be found.