[fedora-india] DVD distribution and their impact

[sankarshan]

On Tue, Nov 24, 2015 at 12:36 PM, Siddhesh Poyarekar
<siddhesh.poyarekar at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 24 November 2015 at 09:45, sankarshan <foss.mailinglists at gmail.com> wrote:
>> All these locations receive the DVD and thus roughly 2000 individuals
>> (not all new/unique) receive F23 media. What happens next?
>
> I personally consider DVDs to be smarter stickers, buttons or flyers,
> i.e. promotional media that has digital content.  In that context, the
> impact of DVDs is similar to impact of stickers: they help improve
> brand awareness at conferences and meetups.  There is the other aspect
> of enabling individuals who may otherwise not have the bandwidth to
> download the distirbution and try it themselves.  The freemedia
> program tries to reach out to such people, but like you, I am not very
> convinced about its utility in attracting long term users or
> contributors.

The "smarter stickers" aspect is something which I find interesting.
My question was to try and arrive at the 'what is the outcome we seek
when we distribute DVDs?'

I'm not too sure that even 'more people will install and use Fedora'
is being met with the production and distribution of DVDs. The absence
of any conversation from recipient of the DVDs is obviously not the
only evidence of absence.

> That said, there seems to be quite a bit of interest in DVDs (from
> conference attendees and consequently, ambassadors) regardless of our
> apprehensions and that says something even though we don't quite know
> what.

This is the part I'd like to understand. There is interest. We ship
DVDs, but what happens after that? Do we see more users? Do we see
some of these users (perhaps students) figure out how to use the
installed environment to do some work with it? Do we know of a group
of recipients who have demonstrated an interest to go beyond their
usual routine and demand how to use Fedora to contribute to something
in upstream(s).

> I don't think DVD production is that big a cost that we need to put so
> much thought into potentially replacing it with something else.  If
> there's an alternative that needs evaluation (like a device that
> allows people to plug USB sticks in and copy a bootable distribution
> copy, that sounds like a nice engineering project), we should bring it
> up first, try it and then decide if DVD production is putting cost
> pressure on that alternative.

The reason I start the discussion implying that we should stop
producing and distributing DVDs is not because I want to strongly
advocate that path. The reason is whether by continuing to produce and
distribute DVDs we become complacent and not seek to measure the
benefit or, think about the actual impact which needs to happen. My
opinion is that this "cheap grace" [1] is what is an impediment to
thinking around paths which create more contributors within and
without the Fedora project space. My contention is that we have enough
models around us to think about how we can experiment to achieve those
outcomes. My observation is that it is required to do so. If you have
been participating in the Fedora project for a while, you'll notice
the lack of news from LATAM, APAC, Africa etc - large blocks of
nations which seem uniquely poised to derive benefit from
contributions, but there's substantially less structure in the
activity around the project.


[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cost_of_Discipleship>


-- 
sankarshan mukhopadhyay
<https://twitter.com/#!/sankarshan>