4:18 a.m.
Hi all,
I warn you in advance that this is a very long email.
There's been a discussion on famsco-list for the last week and a half
now, and I volunteered to try to summarize some of that conversation, so
that we could move it to fedora-ambassadors-list.
The main topics of the discussion center around these three points:
* Purging of inactive Ambassadors
* Mentoring
* Raising the standard for membership
===
The thread was started by David Nalley, and his initial email brought up
the following:
The "probation" idea for Fedora Ambassadors is flawed, and can be
improved. Improving it will help raise the overall quality and
effectiveness of Fedora Ambassadors. In particular, David advocated for
the following:
1) Fixed term for probation should go away, and be replaced with a
specific set of tasks that need to be achieved.
2) If someone makes no progress in X amount of time, we purge them from
the system. If they are making progress, then give as much time as is
needed.
3) New Ambassadors should immediately be given a mentor -- a specific
name of an Ambassador in their region.
4) Current restrictions on getting resources as an Ambassador while on
probation should go away, and be replaced with "at your mentor's
discretion".
Max's note #1: This begins to lay out what looks like a more formal
sponsorship process for Ambassadors, which is similar to the sort of
thing that happens in the Fedora Package Maintainers community.
Max's note #2: As Fedora Ambassadors continues to grow, a sponsorship
process becomes more and more critical, and Package Maintainers has set
a good example and precedent.
===
Francesco Ugolini commented that we want to continue to ensure that
resources are managed regionally (which is consistent with David's
proposal), and that one important task will be to ensure that *whatever*
the requirements are on new people who want to join Ambassadors, it be
as clear, and as internationalized, as possible.
Max's note #3: In Ambassadors in particular, it's important for us to
try to simplify and clarify policy as much as possible. The number of
languages on our list and in our sub-project is very large, even
compared to other parts of Fedora (perhaps with the exception of
Localization).
===
Thomas Canniot expressed concerns with the mentorship idea. He was not
"against" it, but wanted more discussion and some "convincing".
Now I'm going to list the three points that Thomas made, as well as some
of the conversation that came after each of these points in the email
thread.
(1) There are two types of Ambassadors -- the already-active Ambassadors
around the world who don't need any mentorship, and the Ambassadors who
do need mentorship and guidance.
David Nalley responded to this point by saying that some of the older
Ambassadors didn't have anything like a mentor and had to figure out and
build the current structure by trial and error. Now that we have a
chance to be more efficient with training and mentorship, shouldn't we
take that opportunity?
David said that he'd categorize Ambassadors instead as "those who take
ownership of something" and "those who don't know that they *can* take
ownership of something", and that we want to move people from the second
group into the first group.
He also went on to say (and I'm adding in a bit of my own thoughts here
also) that one of the goals of the Ambassadors project needs to be
ensuring that new Ambassadors realize quickly that they play a crucial
role in Fedora, and that they have tremendous power to represent Fedora,
and that it is also very important that Ambassadors understand and
believe in the main principles of Fedora -- the four foundations, for
example, and what they mean.
(2) We don't need mentorship until the growth of Ambassadors slows down.
Max's note #4: I think the rate at which we are getting new Ambassadors
clearly demonstrates that mentorship is needed now, because QUALITY is
far more important than QUANTITY. I don't want to be signing up new
Ambassadors if only 1 in 10 is developing into true stars and leaders in
the Ambassadors community.
(3) Adding in mentorship and sponsorship suggests that we don't believe
people can reach the same level of success as some of the older
Ambassadors without help, and that is disappointing.
Max's note #5: Personally, I disagree with this. The ability to have a
mentor or a sponsor (who serves as a mentor) is a luxury, not a sign of
lack-of-confidence.
As David Nalley said: "The Ambassadors are representatives of the Fedora
Project; They are the spokespeople and the public face for Fedora. What
concerns me is that we essentially have these representatives that may
know precious little about Fedora and free software, and the penchant
for misrepresenting is high. I personally like our low barrier to entry.
At the same time I think that it is incumbent upon us (FAmSCo) to
provide the background education to the uninitiated if we are serious
about our responsibilities the Ambassadors project and plant to continue
having a low barrier to entry.
As has been noted previously in this email, the Package Maintainers team
provides an excellent example of this, as does the Art team.
===
Joerg Simon responded with an email promoting the virtues of mentoring,
with specific examples from his own time in Fedora, both the people who
helped to mentor him (Chitlesh & Gerold) as well as the people who he
has helped to mentor (Mirlan & Thibault). "Trust and Mentoring is the
Key!", says Joerg, and I agree with him.
David Nalley notes that we don't want to devalue what it means to be a
Fedora Ambassador by not having enough structure. Max adds that it is
not simply enough to say "I think Fedora is great!" but rather that
Ambassadors serve a specific, and crucial role in our community. We
give our Ambassadors tremendous amounts of freedom and trust to be the
public face of Fedora, and therefore there is a requirement to provide
some level of "quality control" and oversight.
In short, Fedora Ambassadors is not a social club.
===
A specific proposed action by Joerg is to clean up the FAS group for
Fedora Ambassadors.
David Nalley agreed, saying:
"This is an ideal time to do so - with the recent password reset I'd
guess that 30% or more of the people in the Ambassador fas group have
their fas account inactive due to failing to change their password. I'd
argue that we should give them 30 days (~April 6th iirc) and if their
account is still inactive in FAS we should jettison them. They clearly
aren't active if they haven't had to use their fedora account (or
missing the fedora email addy) over a period of 30 days. That's a better
indication IMO than any 'I'm here' message."
Susmit and Francesco both gave a +1 to this, as did Rodrigo, who went a
step further and said that in LATAM, he plans to have a personal
conversation with all people who want to be Ambassadors.
===
A specific proposal for a FAmSCo vote was suggested by David:
""That FAmSCo direct the Ambassador Membership Service to request from
Infrastructure a list of all users who are Ambassadors and whose account
has remained inactive for a period of greater than 30 days after a
password reset, and further that FAmSCo direct the Membership Service to
purge said users from the Ambassadors list"
Fedora Infrastructure ran a query for us, which showed that of the 772
Ambassadors in FAS, 300 were inactive based on the statement above.
Max's note #6: For me, this sets off major alarm bells, and goes back to
the idea of quantity versus quality. The Ambassadors numbers grow, but
they are inflated because most of the people are joining the group
because they want to basically join the Fedora Fan Club, and this is the
closest thing that we have to that, but the purpose of Ambassadors is
not to be a Fan Club.
Thomas Canniot agreed that this set off alarm bells for him to, and
conceded that some cleanup of the FAS group is clearly necessary.
Susmit notes that a mixture of automated and manual cleanup processes
would be the best, to prevent false positives or other mistakes that
could lead to hurting the feelings of an important community member.
Joerg states that he is in favor of cleaning up inactive accounts, and
coupling that with a higher barrier to entry for the Ambassadors
project. David agrees, and wonders why we are taking so long to make
what seems like an obviously right decision.
Francesco notes that a decision is made, but that another opportunity
for full discussion among Ambassadors is required, which is what this
email that I have been writing attempts to lay out and summarize.
===
David Nalley notes that Fedora Infrastructure might already be planning
some sort of action for people whose accounts remain inactive past a
password reset, because there is a potential security issue for having
dormant accounts, with various permissions, just sitting around.
Perhaps our problem of inactivity will be solved by a larger problem of
inactivity across Fedora that needs to be addressed.
Max's note #7: Solving the inactivity problem and the mentorship problem
are two different things!!!
===
Max's note #8: It seems to me that the actions on the table for FAmSCo
to ultimately deal with are:
(1) Dealing with inactive accounts, either within our sub-project itself
or within the whole of Fedora Infrastructure.
(2) Reforming our barriers-to-entry and sponsorship process to remove
time limits, but to require specific actions and a show of progress.
(3) Putting together a mentorship/sponsorship system similar to that of
Package Maintainers.
4:41 a.m.
(2) Reforming our barriers-to-entry and sponsorship process to remove
time
limits, but to require specific actions and a show of progress.
(3) Putting together a mentorship/sponsorship system similar to that of
Package Maintainers.
Agreed.
Although, I'm not sure that a specific set of actions is required. For
example, to enter packaging, everything relies on the sponsor, not on
a list of actions. If your sponsor thinks you're ready, even if you
didn't submit X packages and made Y reviews, then you can enter.
For Ambassadors too, I think the list should be only a guidance for
the mentor/sponsor to take his decision, but in the end, he should
decide if the new Ambassador is ready based on his impressions, not on
a TODO list.
I only have one concern though: how will the first mentors/sponsors
list be seeded ? Here is a quick proposal:
1. FAmSCo members are obviously active / able to sponsor a new Ambassador
2. FAmSCo members know the most proheminent regional leaders
3. FAmSCo members and those regional leaders know the most active
Ambassadors in their regions and whether they are able to be a
sponsor/mentor or not
4. Take all those people, from FAmSCo members to regional leaders and
the ones they will point, you have a list of potential
sponsors/mentors.
5. Ask all those people if they want to be a sponsor/mentor and give
those who want an "ambassador-sponsor" title (in FAS ?)
6. Let the group grow just like the Packaging sponsors group is
growing with its own set of quality measurement...
----------
Mathieu Bridon (bochecha)
4:49 a.m.
5. Ask all those people if they want to be a sponsor/mentor and give
those who want an "ambassador-sponsor" title (in FAS ?)
This is something i wouldn't mind doing for the UK region, but as a new
father with a 6month old, i can't dedicate as much time as i would
like. About the only thing i'm doing at the moment is the freemedia
stuff and helping out in the #fedora-ambassadors channel as much as i can.
Cheers
Paul
6:14 a.m.
On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 5:18 AM, Max Spevack <mspevack(a)redhat.com> wrote:
Hi all,
I warn you in advance that this is a very long email.
There's been a discussion on famsco-list for the last week and a half now,
and I volunteered to try to summarize some of that conversation, so that we
could move it to fedora-ambassadors-list.
The main topics of the discussion center around these three points:
* Purging of inactive Ambassadors
* Mentoring
* Raising the standard for membership
===
The thread was started by David Nalley, and his initial email brought up the
following:
The "probation" idea for Fedora Ambassadors is flawed, and can be improved.
Improving it will help raise the overall quality and effectiveness of
Fedora Ambassadors. In particular, David advocated for the following:
1) Fixed term for probation should go away, and be replaced with a specific
set of tasks that need to be achieved.
2) If someone makes no progress in X amount of time, we purge them from the
system. If they are making progress, then give as much time as is needed.
3) New Ambassadors should immediately be given a mentor -- a specific name
of an Ambassador in their region.
4) Current restrictions on getting resources as an Ambassador while on
probation should go away, and be replaced with "at your mentor's
discretion".
Max's note #1: This begins to lay out what looks like a more formal
sponsorship process for Ambassadors, which is similar to the sort of thing
that happens in the Fedora Package Maintainers community.
Max's note #2: As Fedora Ambassadors continues to grow, a sponsorship
process becomes more and more critical, and Package Maintainers has set a
good example and precedent.
===
Francesco Ugolini commented that we want to continue to ensure that
resources are managed regionally (which is consistent with David's
proposal), and that one important task will be to ensure that *whatever* the
requirements are on new people who want to join Ambassadors, it be as clear,
and as internationalized, as possible.
Max's note #3: In Ambassadors in particular, it's important for us to try to
simplify and clarify policy as much as possible. The number of languages on
our list and in our sub-project is very large, even compared to other parts
of Fedora (perhaps with the exception of Localization).
===
Thomas Canniot expressed concerns with the mentorship idea. He was not
"against" it, but wanted more discussion and some "convincing".
Now I'm going to list the three points that Thomas made, as well as some of
the conversation that came after each of these points in the email thread.
(1) There are two types of Ambassadors -- the already-active Ambassadors
around the world who don't need any mentorship, and the Ambassadors who do
need mentorship and guidance.
David Nalley responded to this point by saying that some of the older
Ambassadors didn't have anything like a mentor and had to figure out and
build the current structure by trial and error. Now that we have a chance
to be more efficient with training and mentorship, shouldn't we take that
opportunity?
David said that he'd categorize Ambassadors instead as "those who take
ownership of something" and "those who don't know that they *can* take
ownership of something", and that we want to move people from the second
group into the first group.
He also went on to say (and I'm adding in a bit of my own thoughts here
also) that one of the goals of the Ambassadors project needs to be ensuring
that new Ambassadors realize quickly that they play a crucial role in
Fedora, and that they have tremendous power to represent Fedora, and that it
is also very important that Ambassadors understand and believe in the main
principles of Fedora -- the four foundations, for example, and what they
mean.
(2) We don't need mentorship until the growth of Ambassadors slows down.
Max's note #4: I think the rate at which we are getting new Ambassadors
clearly demonstrates that mentorship is needed now, because QUALITY is far
more important than QUANTITY. I don't want to be signing up new Ambassadors
if only 1 in 10 is developing into true stars and leaders in the Ambassadors
community.
(3) Adding in mentorship and sponsorship suggests that we don't believe
people can reach the same level of success as some of the older Ambassadors
without help, and that is disappointing.
Max's note #5: Personally, I disagree with this. The ability to have a
mentor or a sponsor (who serves as a mentor) is a luxury, not a sign of
lack-of-confidence.
As David Nalley said: "The Ambassadors are representatives of the Fedora
Project; They are the spokespeople and the public face for Fedora. What
concerns me is that we essentially have these representatives that may know
precious little about Fedora and free software, and the penchant for
misrepresenting is high. I personally like our low barrier to entry. At the
same time I think that it is incumbent upon us (FAmSCo) to provide the
background education to the uninitiated if we are serious about our
responsibilities the Ambassadors project and plant to continue having a low
barrier to entry.
As has been noted previously in this email, the Package Maintainers team
provides an excellent example of this, as does the Art team.
===
Joerg Simon responded with an email promoting the virtues of mentoring, with
specific examples from his own time in Fedora, both the people who helped to
mentor him (Chitlesh & Gerold) as well as the people who he has helped to
mentor (Mirlan & Thibault). "Trust and Mentoring is the Key!", says
Joerg,
and I agree with him.
David Nalley notes that we don't want to devalue what it means to be a
Fedora Ambassador by not having enough structure. Max adds that it is not
simply enough to say "I think Fedora is great!" but rather that Ambassadors
serve a specific, and crucial role in our community. We give our
Ambassadors tremendous amounts of freedom and trust to be the public face of
Fedora, and therefore there is a requirement to provide some level of
"quality control" and oversight.
In short, Fedora Ambassadors is not a social club.
===
A specific proposed action by Joerg is to clean up the FAS group for Fedora
Ambassadors.
David Nalley agreed, saying:
"This is an ideal time to do so - with the recent password reset I'd guess
that 30% or more of the people in the Ambassador fas group have their fas
account inactive due to failing to change their password. I'd argue that we
should give them 30 days (~April 6th iirc) and if their account is still
inactive in FAS we should jettison them. They clearly aren't active if they
haven't had to use their fedora account (or missing the fedora email addy)
over a period of 30 days. That's a better indication IMO than any 'I'm
here'
message."
Susmit and Francesco both gave a +1 to this, as did Rodrigo, who went a step
further and said that in LATAM, he plans to have a personal conversation
with all people who want to be Ambassadors.
===
A specific proposal for a FAmSCo vote was suggested by David:
""That FAmSCo direct the Ambassador Membership Service to request from
Infrastructure a list of all users who are Ambassadors and whose account has
remained inactive for a period of greater than 30 days after a password
reset, and further that FAmSCo direct the Membership Service to purge said
users from the Ambassadors list"
Fedora Infrastructure ran a query for us, which showed that of the 772
Ambassadors in FAS, 300 were inactive based on the statement above.
Max's note #6: For me, this sets off major alarm bells, and goes back to the
idea of quantity versus quality. The Ambassadors numbers grow, but they are
inflated because most of the people are joining the group because they want
to basically join the Fedora Fan Club, and this is the closest thing that we
have to that, but the purpose of Ambassadors is not to be a Fan Club.
Thomas Canniot agreed that this set off alarm bells for him to, and conceded
that some cleanup of the FAS group is clearly necessary. Susmit notes that a
mixture of automated and manual cleanup processes would be the best, to
prevent false positives or other mistakes that could lead to hurting the
feelings of an important community member.
Joerg states that he is in favor of cleaning up inactive accounts, and
coupling that with a higher barrier to entry for the Ambassadors project.
David agrees, and wonders why we are taking so long to make what seems like
an obviously right decision.
Francesco notes that a decision is made, but that another opportunity for
full discussion among Ambassadors is required, which is what this email that
I have been writing attempts to lay out and summarize.
===
David Nalley notes that Fedora Infrastructure might already be planning some
sort of action for people whose accounts remain inactive past a password
reset, because there is a potential security issue for having dormant
accounts, with various permissions, just sitting around. Perhaps our problem
of inactivity will be solved by a larger problem of inactivity across Fedora
that needs to be addressed.
Max's note #7: Solving the inactivity problem and the mentorship problem are
two different things!!!
===
Max's note #8: It seems to me that the actions on the table for FAmSCo to
ultimately deal with are:
(1) Dealing with inactive accounts, either within our sub-project itself or
within the whole of Fedora Infrastructure.
(2) Reforming our barriers-to-entry and sponsorship process to remove time
limits, but to require specific actions and a show of progress.
(3) Putting together a mentorship/sponsorship system similar to that of
Package Maintainers.
--
Fedora-ambassadors-list mailing list
Fedora-ambassadors-list(a)redhat.com
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-ambassadors-list
Yet another warning that this is likely to be a long email.
In the course of our discussion on the FAmSCo list, Joerg has
convinced me of the logic behind raising the barrier to entry. (Note
that of the three issues that Max presented, this one only deals with
raising the barrier to entry.)
Essentially it comes down to who we place the initial burden on.
Mentoring is needed, but if the current virtually non-existent barrier
remains it means that our limited supply of mentors will be incredibly
taxed, and possibly with precious little gain.
In the course of that discussion a number of things were suggested as
prerequisites - a few of which are listed below (not all of them as
honestly the discussion is 38 pages worth of text at this point (sans
prior email quoting)
- has to be a Contributor to another Sub-Project inside Fedora where a
sponsor is needed
- is recommended by a Contributor to another Sub-Project inside Fedora
who will take mentorship for that person
- has contributed to Fedora on a event before
The idea being that this isn't a newbie group.
So lets first look at the definition of what a traditional ambassador is:
a diplomat of the highest rank; accredited as representative from one
country to another
In Fedora's case an Ambassador is a liaison to the general public and
the open source community and represents the public face of Fedora.
While charged with promoting Fedora, Ambassadors are more than PR
droids as inherent in bearing the title of Ambassador comes the
authority and expectation of getting things done and not just being a
mouthpiece.
Looking at the more traditional examples of Ambassadors we find them
to generally be experienced statesmen. They are the highest ranking
diplomat sent to foreign entities.
The problem that I perceive, and I believe others do as well is that
these representatives of the Fedora Project aren't living up to the
same level of quality that we expect of Fedora as a distribution, or
of the contributors in other portions of Fedora. We have high
standards for packagers, art people, etc, and yet we don't for the
representatives of the project?
I fully believe that a portion of the problem is our failure to
communicate the authority which the Ambassadors are given. Max quoted
me in saying that we have a large percentage of people who haven't yet
realized that they can take ownership of things in Fedora and I fully
believe this to be the case.
But more specifically, I perceive a problem in the following areas
with a good percentage of new Ambassadors:
1. Lack of knowledge and understanding of the Free/Libre Open Source
Software movement and it's philosophies and principles.
2. Lack of knowledge about the Fedora Project, it's goals,
foundational believes, structure, and organization.
Please don't misunderstand me, I am not trying to create an elitist
group or proposing that we remove existing Ambassadors because they
'aren't up to snuff'. What I am saying is that going forward we need
to be able to provide a minimally acceptable quality. Every other
subproject has work standards one must meet before being accepted. Why
should we not hold ourselves to that same standard?
I unfortunately fear that left unchecked our organization will devolve
into a social club.
Currently, the most arduous task for someone who wants to be n
Ambassador is that they acquire a FAS account. I can't imagine many
arguing that is enough to qualify them as the highest envoys in the
land.
9:38 a.m.
On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 7:14 AM, David Nalley <david(a)gnsa.us> wrote:
On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 5:18 AM, Max Spevack
<mspevack(a)redhat.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I warn you in advance that this is a very long email.
>
> There's been a discussion on famsco-list for the last week and a half now,
> and I volunteered to try to summarize some of that conversation, so that we
> could move it to fedora-ambassadors-list.
>
> The main topics of the discussion center around these three points:
>
> * Purging of inactive Ambassadors
> * Mentoring
> * Raising the standard for membership
>
> ===
>
> The thread was started by David Nalley, and his initial email brought up the
> following:
>
> The "probation" idea for Fedora Ambassadors is flawed, and can be
improved.
> Improving it will help raise the overall quality and effectiveness of
> Fedora Ambassadors. In particular, David advocated for the following:
>
> 1) Fixed term for probation should go away, and be replaced with a specific
> set of tasks that need to be achieved.
>
> 2) If someone makes no progress in X amount of time, we purge them from the
> system. If they are making progress, then give as much time as is needed.
>
> 3) New Ambassadors should immediately be given a mentor -- a specific name
> of an Ambassador in their region.
>
> 4) Current restrictions on getting resources as an Ambassador while on
> probation should go away, and be replaced with "at your mentor's
> discretion".
>
> Max's note #1: This begins to lay out what looks like a more formal
> sponsorship process for Ambassadors, which is similar to the sort of thing
> that happens in the Fedora Package Maintainers community.
>
> Max's note #2: As Fedora Ambassadors continues to grow, a sponsorship
> process becomes more and more critical, and Package Maintainers has set a
> good example and precedent.
>
> ===
>
> Francesco Ugolini commented that we want to continue to ensure that
> resources are managed regionally (which is consistent with David's
> proposal), and that one important task will be to ensure that *whatever* the
> requirements are on new people who want to join Ambassadors, it be as clear,
> and as internationalized, as possible.
>
> Max's note #3: In Ambassadors in particular, it's important for us to try to
> simplify and clarify policy as much as possible. The number of languages on
> our list and in our sub-project is very large, even compared to other parts
> of Fedora (perhaps with the exception of Localization).
>
> ===
>
> Thomas Canniot expressed concerns with the mentorship idea. He was not
> "against" it, but wanted more discussion and some "convincing".
>
> Now I'm going to list the three points that Thomas made, as well as some of
> the conversation that came after each of these points in the email thread.
>
> (1) There are two types of Ambassadors -- the already-active Ambassadors
> around the world who don't need any mentorship, and the Ambassadors who do
> need mentorship and guidance.
>
> David Nalley responded to this point by saying that some of the older
> Ambassadors didn't have anything like a mentor and had to figure out and
> build the current structure by trial and error. Now that we have a chance
> to be more efficient with training and mentorship, shouldn't we take that
> opportunity?
>
> David said that he'd categorize Ambassadors instead as "those who take
> ownership of something" and "those who don't know that they *can* take
> ownership of something", and that we want to move people from the second
> group into the first group.
>
> He also went on to say (and I'm adding in a bit of my own thoughts here
> also) that one of the goals of the Ambassadors project needs to be ensuring
> that new Ambassadors realize quickly that they play a crucial role in
> Fedora, and that they have tremendous power to represent Fedora, and that it
> is also very important that Ambassadors understand and believe in the main
> principles of Fedora -- the four foundations, for example, and what they
> mean.
>
> (2) We don't need mentorship until the growth of Ambassadors slows down.
>
> Max's note #4: I think the rate at which we are getting new Ambassadors
> clearly demonstrates that mentorship is needed now, because QUALITY is far
> more important than QUANTITY. I don't want to be signing up new Ambassadors
> if only 1 in 10 is developing into true stars and leaders in the Ambassadors
> community.
>
> (3) Adding in mentorship and sponsorship suggests that we don't believe
> people can reach the same level of success as some of the older Ambassadors
> without help, and that is disappointing.
>
> Max's note #5: Personally, I disagree with this. The ability to have a
> mentor or a sponsor (who serves as a mentor) is a luxury, not a sign of
> lack-of-confidence.
>
> As David Nalley said: "The Ambassadors are representatives of the Fedora
> Project; They are the spokespeople and the public face for Fedora. What
> concerns me is that we essentially have these representatives that may know
> precious little about Fedora and free software, and the penchant for
> misrepresenting is high. I personally like our low barrier to entry. At the
> same time I think that it is incumbent upon us (FAmSCo) to provide the
> background education to the uninitiated if we are serious about our
> responsibilities the Ambassadors project and plant to continue having a low
> barrier to entry.
>
> As has been noted previously in this email, the Package Maintainers team
> provides an excellent example of this, as does the Art team.
>
> ===
>
> Joerg Simon responded with an email promoting the virtues of mentoring, with
> specific examples from his own time in Fedora, both the people who helped to
> mentor him (Chitlesh & Gerold) as well as the people who he has helped to
> mentor (Mirlan & Thibault). "Trust and Mentoring is the Key!", says
Joerg,
> and I agree with him.
>
> David Nalley notes that we don't want to devalue what it means to be a
> Fedora Ambassador by not having enough structure. Max adds that it is not
> simply enough to say "I think Fedora is great!" but rather that
Ambassadors
> serve a specific, and crucial role in our community. We give our
> Ambassadors tremendous amounts of freedom and trust to be the public face of
> Fedora, and therefore there is a requirement to provide some level of
> "quality control" and oversight.
>
> In short, Fedora Ambassadors is not a social club.
>
> ===
>
> A specific proposed action by Joerg is to clean up the FAS group for Fedora
> Ambassadors.
>
> David Nalley agreed, saying:
>
> "This is an ideal time to do so - with the recent password reset I'd guess
> that 30% or more of the people in the Ambassador fas group have their fas
> account inactive due to failing to change their password. I'd argue that we
> should give them 30 days (~April 6th iirc) and if their account is still
> inactive in FAS we should jettison them. They clearly aren't active if they
> haven't had to use their fedora account (or missing the fedora email addy)
> over a period of 30 days. That's a better indication IMO than any 'I'm
here'
> message."
>
> Susmit and Francesco both gave a +1 to this, as did Rodrigo, who went a step
> further and said that in LATAM, he plans to have a personal conversation
> with all people who want to be Ambassadors.
>
> ===
>
> A specific proposal for a FAmSCo vote was suggested by David:
>
> ""That FAmSCo direct the Ambassador Membership Service to request from
> Infrastructure a list of all users who are Ambassadors and whose account has
> remained inactive for a period of greater than 30 days after a password
> reset, and further that FAmSCo direct the Membership Service to purge said
> users from the Ambassadors list"
>
> Fedora Infrastructure ran a query for us, which showed that of the 772
> Ambassadors in FAS, 300 were inactive based on the statement above.
>
> Max's note #6: For me, this sets off major alarm bells, and goes back to the
> idea of quantity versus quality. The Ambassadors numbers grow, but they are
> inflated because most of the people are joining the group because they want
> to basically join the Fedora Fan Club, and this is the closest thing that we
> have to that, but the purpose of Ambassadors is not to be a Fan Club.
>
> Thomas Canniot agreed that this set off alarm bells for him to, and conceded
> that some cleanup of the FAS group is clearly necessary. Susmit notes that a
> mixture of automated and manual cleanup processes would be the best, to
> prevent false positives or other mistakes that could lead to hurting the
> feelings of an important community member.
>
> Joerg states that he is in favor of cleaning up inactive accounts, and
> coupling that with a higher barrier to entry for the Ambassadors project.
> David agrees, and wonders why we are taking so long to make what seems like
> an obviously right decision.
>
> Francesco notes that a decision is made, but that another opportunity for
> full discussion among Ambassadors is required, which is what this email that
> I have been writing attempts to lay out and summarize.
>
> ===
>
> David Nalley notes that Fedora Infrastructure might already be planning some
> sort of action for people whose accounts remain inactive past a password
> reset, because there is a potential security issue for having dormant
> accounts, with various permissions, just sitting around. Perhaps our problem
> of inactivity will be solved by a larger problem of inactivity across Fedora
> that needs to be addressed.
>
> Max's note #7: Solving the inactivity problem and the mentorship problem are
> two different things!!!
>
> ===
>
> Max's note #8: It seems to me that the actions on the table for FAmSCo to
> ultimately deal with are:
>
> (1) Dealing with inactive accounts, either within our sub-project itself or
> within the whole of Fedora Infrastructure.
>
> (2) Reforming our barriers-to-entry and sponsorship process to remove time
> limits, but to require specific actions and a show of progress.
>
> (3) Putting together a mentorship/sponsorship system similar to that of
> Package Maintainers.
>
> --
> Fedora-ambassadors-list mailing list
> Fedora-ambassadors-list(a)redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-ambassadors-list
>
Yet another warning that this is likely to be a long email.
In the course of our discussion on the FAmSCo list, Joerg has
convinced me of the logic behind raising the barrier to entry. (Note
that of the three issues that Max presented, this one only deals with
raising the barrier to entry.)
Essentially it comes down to who we place the initial burden on.
Mentoring is needed, but if the current virtually non-existent barrier
remains it means that our limited supply of mentors will be incredibly
taxed, and possibly with precious little gain.
In the course of that discussion a number of things were suggested as
prerequisites - a few of which are listed below (not all of them as
honestly the discussion is 38 pages worth of text at this point (sans
prior email quoting)
- has to be a Contributor to another Sub-Project inside Fedora where a
sponsor is needed
- is recommended by a Contributor to another Sub-Project inside Fedora
who will take mentorship for that person
- has contributed to Fedora on a event before
The idea being that this isn't a newbie group.
So lets first look at the definition of what a traditional ambassador is:
a diplomat of the highest rank; accredited as representative from one
country to another
In Fedora's case an Ambassador is a liaison to the general public and
the open source community and represents the public face of Fedora.
While charged with promoting Fedora, Ambassadors are more than PR
droids as inherent in bearing the title of Ambassador comes the
authority and expectation of getting things done and not just being a
mouthpiece.
Looking at the more traditional examples of Ambassadors we find them
to generally be experienced statesmen. They are the highest ranking
diplomat sent to foreign entities.
The problem that I perceive, and I believe others do as well is that
these representatives of the Fedora Project aren't living up to the
same level of quality that we expect of Fedora as a distribution, or
of the contributors in other portions of Fedora. We have high
standards for packagers, art people, etc, and yet we don't for the
representatives of the project?
I fully believe that a portion of the problem is our failure to
communicate the authority which the Ambassadors are given. Max quoted
me in saying that we have a large percentage of people who haven't yet
realized that they can take ownership of things in Fedora and I fully
believe this to be the case.
But more specifically, I perceive a problem in the following areas
with a good percentage of new Ambassadors:
1. Lack of knowledge and understanding of the Free/Libre Open Source
Software movement and it's philosophies and principles.
2. Lack of knowledge about the Fedora Project, it's goals,
foundational believes, structure, and organization.
Please don't misunderstand me, I am not trying to create an elitist
group or proposing that we remove existing Ambassadors because they
'aren't up to snuff'. What I am saying is that going forward we need
to be able to provide a minimally acceptable quality. Every other
subproject has work standards one must meet before being accepted. Why
should we not hold ourselves to that same standard?
I unfortunately fear that left unchecked our organization will devolve
into a social club.
Currently, the most arduous task for someone who wants to be n
Ambassador is that they acquire a FAS account. I can't imagine many
arguing that is enough to qualify them as the highest envoys in the
land.
--
Fedora-ambassadors-list mailing list
Fedora-ambassadors-list(a)redhat.com
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-ambassadors-list
Great conversation and I personally agree now would be the time to
possibly purge the Ambassador group of those said "stale" accounts. I
also think part of the prerequisites should entail introduction to a
mentor prior to being accepted in. (Which is really what many of you
are also stating).
The problem that seems to occur at least from my stand point
currently, is that interested people perform all the needed steps in
becoming an Ambassador, I attempt to figure out if they are located in
my region, once the welcome email comes out (which some times is easy
and some times is not because their wiki profile does or doesn't state
where in the USA they are actually located), I shoot them a personal
"Welcome" email and state that if they need any assistance with
anything or mentoring to let me know, and more times than not I never
hear back from them. (Is this a sign that they know what they are
expected to do and dont need any assistance? Or am I, in simple blunt
terms, just getting blown off?)
I personally would really like to be in contact with potential
candidates of the Ambassadors located in my specific region, prior to
them being accepted. This way I can not only get to know them, but I
can also begin the mentor process if needed, even before they are
accepted.
As many have mentioned I am not trying to turn this into an "elitist"
group either but as David has mentioned Ambassadors do have a lot of
power, whether they realize it or not and should that be conveyed
through the acceptance process.
Just my 2 cents
--
Regards,
Brian Powell
http://fedoraproject.org
http://wnylug.org
3:53 a.m.
On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 8:08 PM, Brian Powell <bpowell01(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Great conversation and I personally agree now would be the time to
possibly purge the Ambassador group of those said "stale" accounts. I
also think part of the prerequisites should entail introduction to a
mentor prior to being accepted in. (Which is really what many of you
are also stating).
Good idea
I attempt to figure out if they are located in
my region, once the welcome email comes out (which some times is easy
and some times is not because their wiki profile does or doesn't state
where in the USA they are actually located), I shoot them a personal
"Welcome" email and state that if they need any assistance with
anything or mentoring to let me know, and more times than not I never
hear back from them. (Is this a sign that they know what they are
expected to do and dont need any assistance? Or am I, in simple blunt
terms, just getting blown off?)
I try doing the same and have never got as reply from such people.
Nither have I seen their pages being completed.
Regards
--
Rangeen Basu Roy Chowdhury
Fedora Ambassador
sherry151(a)gmail.com
9:55 a.m.
On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 5:14 AM, David Nalley <david(a)gnsa.us> wrote:
On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 5:18 AM, Max Spevack
<mspevack(a)redhat.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I warn you in advance that this is a very long email.
>
> There's been a discussion on famsco-list for the last week and a half now,
> and I volunteered to try to summarize some of that conversation, so that we
> could move it to fedora-ambassadors-list.
>
> The main topics of the discussion center around these three points:
>
> * Purging of inactive Ambassadors
> * Mentoring
> * Raising the standard for membership
>
> ===
>
> The thread was started by David Nalley, and his initial email brought up the
> following:
>
> The "probation" idea for Fedora Ambassadors is flawed, and can be
improved.
> Improving it will help raise the overall quality and effectiveness of
> Fedora Ambassadors. In particular, David advocated for the following:
>
> 1) Fixed term for probation should go away, and be replaced with a specific
> set of tasks that need to be achieved.
>
> 2) If someone makes no progress in X amount of time, we purge them from the
> system. If they are making progress, then give as much time as is needed.
>
> 3) New Ambassadors should immediately be given a mentor -- a specific name
> of an Ambassador in their region.
>
> 4) Current restrictions on getting resources as an Ambassador while on
> probation should go away, and be replaced with "at your mentor's
> discretion".
>
> Max's note #1: This begins to lay out what looks like a more formal
> sponsorship process for Ambassadors, which is similar to the sort of thing
> that happens in the Fedora Package Maintainers community.
>
> Max's note #2: As Fedora Ambassadors continues to grow, a sponsorship
> process becomes more and more critical, and Package Maintainers has set a
> good example and precedent.
>
> ===
>
> Francesco Ugolini commented that we want to continue to ensure that
> resources are managed regionally (which is consistent with David's
> proposal), and that one important task will be to ensure that *whatever* the
> requirements are on new people who want to join Ambassadors, it be as clear,
> and as internationalized, as possible.
>
> Max's note #3: In Ambassadors in particular, it's important for us to try to
> simplify and clarify policy as much as possible. The number of languages on
> our list and in our sub-project is very large, even compared to other parts
> of Fedora (perhaps with the exception of Localization).
>
> ===
>
> Thomas Canniot expressed concerns with the mentorship idea. He was not
> "against" it, but wanted more discussion and some "convincing".
>
> Now I'm going to list the three points that Thomas made, as well as some of
> the conversation that came after each of these points in the email thread.
>
> (1) There are two types of Ambassadors -- the already-active Ambassadors
> around the world who don't need any mentorship, and the Ambassadors who do
> need mentorship and guidance.
>
> David Nalley responded to this point by saying that some of the older
> Ambassadors didn't have anything like a mentor and had to figure out and
> build the current structure by trial and error. Now that we have a chance
> to be more efficient with training and mentorship, shouldn't we take that
> opportunity?
>
> David said that he'd categorize Ambassadors instead as "those who take
> ownership of something" and "those who don't know that they *can* take
> ownership of something", and that we want to move people from the second
> group into the first group.
>
> He also went on to say (and I'm adding in a bit of my own thoughts here
> also) that one of the goals of the Ambassadors project needs to be ensuring
> that new Ambassadors realize quickly that they play a crucial role in
> Fedora, and that they have tremendous power to represent Fedora, and that it
> is also very important that Ambassadors understand and believe in the main
> principles of Fedora -- the four foundations, for example, and what they
> mean.
>
> (2) We don't need mentorship until the growth of Ambassadors slows down.
>
> Max's note #4: I think the rate at which we are getting new Ambassadors
> clearly demonstrates that mentorship is needed now, because QUALITY is far
> more important than QUANTITY. I don't want to be signing up new Ambassadors
> if only 1 in 10 is developing into true stars and leaders in the Ambassadors
> community.
>
> (3) Adding in mentorship and sponsorship suggests that we don't believe
> people can reach the same level of success as some of the older Ambassadors
> without help, and that is disappointing.
>
> Max's note #5: Personally, I disagree with this. The ability to have a
> mentor or a sponsor (who serves as a mentor) is a luxury, not a sign of
> lack-of-confidence.
>
> As David Nalley said: "The Ambassadors are representatives of the Fedora
> Project; They are the spokespeople and the public face for Fedora. What
> concerns me is that we essentially have these representatives that may know
> precious little about Fedora and free software, and the penchant for
> misrepresenting is high. I personally like our low barrier to entry. At the
> same time I think that it is incumbent upon us (FAmSCo) to provide the
> background education to the uninitiated if we are serious about our
> responsibilities the Ambassadors project and plant to continue having a low
> barrier to entry.
>
> As has been noted previously in this email, the Package Maintainers team
> provides an excellent example of this, as does the Art team.
>
> ===
>
> Joerg Simon responded with an email promoting the virtues of mentoring, with
> specific examples from his own time in Fedora, both the people who helped to
> mentor him (Chitlesh & Gerold) as well as the people who he has helped to
> mentor (Mirlan & Thibault). "Trust and Mentoring is the Key!", says
Joerg,
> and I agree with him.
>
> David Nalley notes that we don't want to devalue what it means to be a
> Fedora Ambassador by not having enough structure. Max adds that it is not
> simply enough to say "I think Fedora is great!" but rather that
Ambassadors
> serve a specific, and crucial role in our community. We give our
> Ambassadors tremendous amounts of freedom and trust to be the public face of
> Fedora, and therefore there is a requirement to provide some level of
> "quality control" and oversight.
>
> In short, Fedora Ambassadors is not a social club.
>
> ===
>
> A specific proposed action by Joerg is to clean up the FAS group for Fedora
> Ambassadors.
>
> David Nalley agreed, saying:
>
> "This is an ideal time to do so - with the recent password reset I'd guess
> that 30% or more of the people in the Ambassador fas group have their fas
> account inactive due to failing to change their password. I'd argue that we
> should give them 30 days (~April 6th iirc) and if their account is still
> inactive in FAS we should jettison them. They clearly aren't active if they
> haven't had to use their fedora account (or missing the fedora email addy)
> over a period of 30 days. That's a better indication IMO than any 'I'm
here'
> message."
>
> Susmit and Francesco both gave a +1 to this, as did Rodrigo, who went a step
> further and said that in LATAM, he plans to have a personal conversation
> with all people who want to be Ambassadors.
>
> ===
>
> A specific proposal for a FAmSCo vote was suggested by David:
>
> ""That FAmSCo direct the Ambassador Membership Service to request from
> Infrastructure a list of all users who are Ambassadors and whose account has
> remained inactive for a period of greater than 30 days after a password
> reset, and further that FAmSCo direct the Membership Service to purge said
> users from the Ambassadors list"
>
> Fedora Infrastructure ran a query for us, which showed that of the 772
> Ambassadors in FAS, 300 were inactive based on the statement above.
>
> Max's note #6: For me, this sets off major alarm bells, and goes back to the
> idea of quantity versus quality. The Ambassadors numbers grow, but they are
> inflated because most of the people are joining the group because they want
> to basically join the Fedora Fan Club, and this is the closest thing that we
> have to that, but the purpose of Ambassadors is not to be a Fan Club.
>
> Thomas Canniot agreed that this set off alarm bells for him to, and conceded
> that some cleanup of the FAS group is clearly necessary. Susmit notes that a
> mixture of automated and manual cleanup processes would be the best, to
> prevent false positives or other mistakes that could lead to hurting the
> feelings of an important community member.
>
> Joerg states that he is in favor of cleaning up inactive accounts, and
> coupling that with a higher barrier to entry for the Ambassadors project.
> David agrees, and wonders why we are taking so long to make what seems like
> an obviously right decision.
>
> Francesco notes that a decision is made, but that another opportunity for
> full discussion among Ambassadors is required, which is what this email that
> I have been writing attempts to lay out and summarize.
>
> ===
>
> David Nalley notes that Fedora Infrastructure might already be planning some
> sort of action for people whose accounts remain inactive past a password
> reset, because there is a potential security issue for having dormant
> accounts, with various permissions, just sitting around. Perhaps our problem
> of inactivity will be solved by a larger problem of inactivity across Fedora
> that needs to be addressed.
>
> Max's note #7: Solving the inactivity problem and the mentorship problem are
> two different things!!!
>
> ===
>
> Max's note #8: It seems to me that the actions on the table for FAmSCo to
> ultimately deal with are:
>
> (1) Dealing with inactive accounts, either within our sub-project itself or
> within the whole of Fedora Infrastructure.
>
> (2) Reforming our barriers-to-entry and sponsorship process to remove time
> limits, but to require specific actions and a show of progress.
>
> (3) Putting together a mentorship/sponsorship system similar to that of
> Package Maintainers.
>
> --
> Fedora-ambassadors-list mailing list
> Fedora-ambassadors-list(a)redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-ambassadors-list
>
Yet another warning that this is likely to be a long email.
In the course of our discussion on the FAmSCo list, Joerg has
convinced me of the logic behind raising the barrier to entry. (Note
that of the three issues that Max presented, this one only deals with
raising the barrier to entry.)
Essentially it comes down to who we place the initial burden on.
Mentoring is needed, but if the current virtually non-existent barrier
remains it means that our limited supply of mentors will be incredibly
taxed, and possibly with precious little gain.
In the course of that discussion a number of things were suggested as
prerequisites - a few of which are listed below (not all of them as
honestly the discussion is 38 pages worth of text at this point (sans
prior email quoting)
- has to be a Contributor to another Sub-Project inside Fedora where a
sponsor is needed
- is recommended by a Contributor to another Sub-Project inside Fedora
who will take mentorship for that person
- has contributed to Fedora on a event before
The idea being that this isn't a newbie group.
So lets first look at the definition of what a traditional ambassador is:
a diplomat of the highest rank; accredited as representative from one
country to another
In Fedora's case an Ambassador is a liaison to the general public and
the open source community and represents the public face of Fedora.
While charged with promoting Fedora, Ambassadors are more than PR
droids as inherent in bearing the title of Ambassador comes the
authority and expectation of getting things done and not just being a
mouthpiece.
Looking at the more traditional examples of Ambassadors we find them
to generally be experienced statesmen. They are the highest ranking
diplomat sent to foreign entities.
The problem that I perceive, and I believe others do as well is that
these representatives of the Fedora Project aren't living up to the
same level of quality that we expect of Fedora as a distribution, or
of the contributors in other portions of Fedora. We have high
standards for packagers, art people, etc, and yet we don't for the
representatives of the project?
I fully believe that a portion of the problem is our failure to
communicate the authority which the Ambassadors are given. Max quoted
me in saying that we have a large percentage of people who haven't yet
realized that they can take ownership of things in Fedora and I fully
believe this to be the case.
But more specifically, I perceive a problem in the following areas
with a good percentage of new Ambassadors:
1. Lack of knowledge and understanding of the Free/Libre Open Source
Software movement and it's philosophies and principles.
2. Lack of knowledge about the Fedora Project, it's goals,
foundational believes, structure, and organization.
Please don't misunderstand me, I am not trying to create an elitist
group or proposing that we remove existing Ambassadors because they
'aren't up to snuff'. What I am saying is that going forward we need
to be able to provide a minimally acceptable quality. Every other
subproject has work standards one must meet before being accepted. Why
should we not hold ourselves to that same standard?
I unfortunately fear that left unchecked our organization will devolve
into a social club.
Currently, the most arduous task for someone who wants to be n
Ambassador is that they acquire a FAS account. I can't imagine many
arguing that is enough to qualify them as the highest envoys in the
land.
--
Fedora-ambassadors-list mailing list
Fedora-ambassadors-list(a)redhat.com
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-ambassadors-list
-- Note: I guess it's a thread of long emails --
I for one, will yield to our great FAmSCo overlords! :)
Seriously, I am truly grateful for the vote I placed for many now
participating in FAmSCo. As David is on his first term, I'm excited
for the needed discussions and directoins brought forth. I'm excited
to see needed change happening because of this cohesion among our
FAmSCo leadership.
To start with, I've seen the discussion of Active and Inactive
Ambassadors be brought up (by me and others) only to be shut down by
some who would wish to discourage alienating other Ambassadors who are
doing good works. But I always thought there were ways to identify
those who were driving ambassadorship in Fedora, the methods we used
were archaic and incomplete. In this case, while I don't believe it
will ever be perfect, I think we're getting very close to a good
system that can improve the quality of the Fedora Ambassadors. I also
believe that the quantity will not slow too much, but rather more
people will be interested because they will gain valuable skills now
as an Ambassador.
Raising the barrier some is good and that's why mentoring will be a
very important part of this barrier. So far, I've seen some great
suggestions for how to do that, and I agree with the basic sentiment
of a sponsor. Essentially, every other FAS group has one, we should
too. The sponsor is the mentor, the person who makes sure that the
new ambassadors understands the issues and drives the sponsorship
based upon some specific milestones as well as a few loose guidelines.
My theory is somewhat similar to the one provided by David and
others, we should sponsor new members who have proven themselves and I
think that's really important.
Lastly, I think there are minimums people can achieve, but because
Fedora Ambassadors can lurk in many places, having a set of
requirements might be a bit tight. I'd like to suggest that the new
prospective Ambassador and their mentors sit down with a list of
*suggested* requirements, something they can tangibly look at and say,
yes, I think I can accomplish X, Y and Z to become an ambassador.
Here's a couple quick examples.
All prospective ambassadors would complete some some minimal set of
acknowledgement like Wiki page, introducing yourself, the open source
projects you are involved in and a basic set of benefits you bring to
Fedora. Something similar to what Joerg is requiring now.
= Prospective Ambassador A agrees to accomplish the following to
become officially sponsored within Fedora Ambassadors =
- Blog about your belief system with regard to free software
- Attend a conference in your region with other Ambassadors and under
the guidance of you mentor
- Make a report and blog/email it to the appropriate lists.
- Regularly participate in regional ambassador meetings.
= Prospective Ambassador B agrees to accomplish the following to
become officially sponsored within Fedora Ambassadors =
- Attend local LUGs and present on what Fedora is and it's core goals
(four foundations, etc)
- Identify initiatives within Fedora that you'd like to promote to
others, maybe Fedora Infrastructure. Join this group and help to
promote it to new contributors
- Regularly participate in regional ambassador meetings.
I know my examples are weak, and that probably encouraging ambassadors
into another group of their interest would be key elements of
mentoring/sponsorship, but at some point we need to set those limits.
I just think they don't have to be a set list, but rather an agreed
upon set of promises between the prospective ambassador and the
mentor/sponsor.
I am really appreciative of this direction and am looking forward to
seeing more positive direction and guidance with these sorts of
initiatives.
Cheers,
Clint
10:35 a.m.
On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 3:55 PM, Clint Savage <herlo1(a)gmail.com> wrote:
To start with, I've seen the discussion of Active and Inactive
Ambassadors be brought up (by me and others) only to be shut down by
some who would wish to discourage alienating other Ambassadors who are
doing good works. But I always thought there were ways to identify
those who were driving ambassadorship in Fedora, the methods we used
were archaic and incomplete. In this case, while I don't believe it
will ever be perfect, I think we're getting very close to a good
system that can improve the quality of the Fedora Ambassadors. I also
believe that the quantity will not slow too much, but rather more
people will be interested because they will gain valuable skills now
as an Ambassador.
The big problem of the active/inactive ambassadors was that it
underlined a deep vision of that issue.
From this perspective what Max summarized wanted to underline that we
want to solve a big lack in our commuity starting from another point
of view, understanding what community really need.
Raising the barrier some is good and that's why mentoring will be
a
very important part of this barrier. So far, I've seen some great
suggestions for how to do that, and I agree with the basic sentiment
of a sponsor. Essentially, every other FAS group has one, we should
too. The sponsor is the mentor, the person who makes sure that the
new ambassadors understands the issues and drives the sponsorship
based upon some specific milestones as well as a few loose guidelines.
My theory is somewhat similar to the one provided by David and
others, we should sponsor new members who have proven themselves and I
think that's really important.
Sure. Raising the barrier doesn't mean block the gowth of Ambassadors:
the main goal is to make Ambassadors working giving community (the
World) the best "service" we can give, helping spreading open source
and finding new contributors.
I know my examples are weak, and that probably encouraging
ambassadors
into another group of their interest would be key elements of
mentoring/sponsorship, but at some point we need to set those limits.
I just think they don't have to be a set list, but rather an agreed
upon set of promises between the prospective ambassador and the
mentor/sponsor.
Sure, that's why this discussion was opened to the community and why
we wanted people know what we are discussing about: people have to
understand that we don't want to block community growth, but just
manage a really big community with tools that could really improve
their experience.
I'm sure Ambassadors could agree on this set of proposals David done,
in order to achive this goal we must be sure the processes proposed
are clear.
Regards
Francesco Ugolini
11:08 a.m.
Too many emails and too long to quote.
I am kind of newbie as Ambassador, I feel that I manage to get things
going. Having said that, I feel that if I had a mentor it would save
me time from exploring and learning to start doing things.
If there were higher barriers to become an Ambassador at the time that
I started, I still join and overcome those barriers.
I think that the problem is not about filters and mentorship, that has
to be done. The real task is about how to do it.
--
Neville
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Yn1v
Linux User # 473217
11:11 a.m.
Hello,
As max's email suggests its the best time to refine the process and ensure
quality rather than quality. But the refinement and decisions on the tasks
and mentoring need to be fundamental in the growth as an ambassador right?
So our objectives and direction in this matter and what mentor to which
"newbie" ambassador is what is going to matter!
--
Jose M Manimala
http://www.jmmblog.in.eu.org
Ph: +919790824111
GPGkeyID: F5DD9656
12:28 p.m.
First the apologies of the case, if they find errors in my English.
Well I want to comment on the matter from the standpoint of a new ambassador
of Fedora, because I have 1 weeks that my application was approved.
There are many people who want to begin to join Fedora, but often can not
find how to start, I think if it is convenient to have mentors available to
help the newly initiated to give guidance, not necessarily the same country
as in my case in my country there was no ambassador, so far.
I think it would be very good to have documentation, that this reflected the
experience and knowledge of the ambassadors who have some time and assets.
That as said: "David Nalley, some of the greatest ambassadors have nothing
as a mentor and had to learn and build the current structure by trial and
error. Now we have the opportunity to become more efficient with training
and mentoring We do not have that opportunity? "
So I believe we must build on these experiences, and serve as a guide for
new ambassadors like me and so I think it helps to improve the quality of
new ambassadors, I think this is an improvement.
This is my small contribution.
2009/3/26 jose manimala <josemanimala(a)gmail.com>
Hello,
As max's email suggests its the best time to refine the process and ensure
quality rather than quality. But the refinement and decisions on the tasks
and mentoring need to be fundamental in the growth as an ambassador right?
So our objectives and direction in this matter and what mentor to which
"newbie" ambassador is what is going to matter!
--
Jose M Manimala
http://www.jmmblog.in.eu.org
Ph: +919790824111
GPGkeyID: F5DD9656
--
Fedora-ambassadors-list mailing list
Fedora-ambassadors-list(a)redhat.com
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-ambassadors-list
6:42 a.m.
Morpheus..we can start a forum where we can provide all the basic details
about how to start with fedora ambassador program..also how these new
ambassdor can contibute to foss.
i'm a new ambassador so i know the difficulties faced by beginners..
we can also help them decide what sort of activities they need to do to
contribute to foss.
ragards,
Rachit gupta
B.Tech (CSE)
VIT University,Vellore
2009/3/26 Morpheus . . <morpheusv(a)gmail.com>
First the apologies of the case, if they find errors in my English.
Well I want to comment on the matter from the standpoint of a new
ambassador of Fedora, because I have 1 weeks that my application was
approved.
There are many people who want to begin to join Fedora, but often can not
find how to start, I think if it is convenient to have mentors available to
help the newly initiated to give guidance, not necessarily the same country
as in my case in my country there was no ambassador, so far.
I think it would be very good to have documentation, that this reflected
the experience and knowledge of the ambassadors who have some time and
assets.
That as said: "David Nalley, some of the greatest ambassadors have nothing
as a mentor and had to learn and build the current structure by trial and
error. Now we have the opportunity to become more efficient with training
and mentoring We do not have that opportunity? "
So I believe we must build on these experiences, and serve as a guide for
new ambassadors like me and so I think it helps to improve the quality of
new ambassadors, I think this is an improvement.
This is my small contribution.
2009/3/26 jose manimala <josemanimala(a)gmail.com>
> Hello,
>
> As max's email suggests its the best time to refine the process and ensure
> quality rather than quality. But the refinement and decisions on the tasks
> and mentoring need to be fundamental in the growth as an ambassador right?
> So our objectives and direction in this matter and what mentor to which
> "newbie" ambassador is what is going to matter!
> --
> Jose M Manimala
> http://www.jmmblog.in.eu.org
> Ph: +919790824111
> GPGkeyID: F5DD9656
>
> --
> Fedora-ambassadors-list mailing list
> Fedora-ambassadors-list(a)redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-ambassadors-list
>
>
--
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6:47 a.m.
i'm a new ambassador so i know the difficulties faced by
beginners..
Can you please list the difficulties?
We would like to hear them(and take necessary action to make your
experience better.)
Thanks.
--
Regards,
Susmit.
=============================================
ssh
0x86DD170A
http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/user:susmit
=============================================
Sent from: Calcutta WB India.
7:33 a.m.
Hi,
I have been an ambassador for more than a year now, but honestly
have not been able to contribute in ways I thought I would when I
joined. My only contribution would be a little help here and there in
spreading the word of Fedora to friends, colleges, students. I have also
helped in burning cds and installation.
Honestly the difficulties I faced were mainly I did not have anyone
to account to. I believe that we can come up with plans but with work
pressure and other factors plans can go wasted if we are not accountable
to some body. I did not have a schedule as what are the possibilities I
could achieve in a year or a given time.
I do meticulously read the threads in the list, but that's all. I
do want to be involved but I am not very clear on how I could do things.
I did write a mail on it and did get a suggestion to get into
infrastructure, but then again I was clueless there too. I did send a
mail to that list but did not get any replies. I do understand we all
have busy schedules, but the idea of a mentor would be good. As one with
more experience in the group will definitely be able to see capabilities
in one with lesser experience and be able to guide that person.
Currently I am in Bangkok, Thailand. The meeting schedule comes up
on the time I am unable to attend. With just another ambassador in the
area I really am clueless in promoting fedora beyond my work place. I
have been successful at work getting one of the servers to run on fedora
and many other machines too. I would love to do more.
Satyajit Ranjeev
8:07 a.m.
On Sun, Mar 29, 2009 at 8:33 PM, Satyajit <satyajit(a)nerdshack.com> wrote:
Hi,
I have been an ambassador for more than a year now, but honestly have
not been able to contribute in ways I thought I would when I joined. My only
contribution would be a little help here and there in spreading the word of
Fedora to friends, colleges, students. I have also helped in burning cds and
installation.
Same with me Satyajit. But I believe, that's the whole ambassador in a
nutshell. :D
Honestly the difficulties I faced were mainly I did not have anyone to
account to. I believe that we can come up with plans but with work pressure
and other factors plans can go wasted if we are not accountable to some
body. I did not have a schedule as what are the possibilities I could
achieve in a year or a given time.
Since, Fedora Ambassadors is a volunteer program, it should not impose on
time you can't commit. For myself and others in the Philippines, we have
three big activities for every year - two Fedora release parties and the
Software Freedom Day. In between those three, we split time on whatever
comes along and if we can fit them on our schedules.
I do meticulously read the threads in the list, but that's all. I do
want to be involved but I am not very clear on how I could do things. I did
write a mail on it and did get a suggestion to get into infrastructure, but
then again I was clueless there too. I did send a mail to that list but did
not get any replies. I do understand we all have busy schedules, but the
idea of a mentor would be good. As one with more experience in the group
will definitely be able to see capabilities in one with lesser experience
and be able to guide that person.
I agree whole-heartedly on the mentor thing. It would make the assimilation
process faster.
Currently I am in Bangkok, Thailand. The meeting schedule comes up on
the time I am unable to attend. With just another ambassador in the area I
really am clueless in promoting fedora beyond my work place. I have been
successful at work getting one of the servers to run on fedora and many
other machines too. I would love to do more.
If it's any consolation, we're re-organizing APAC to better respond to the
geographical challenges APAC Fedora Ambassadors face. I believe you're in
our group[1] :D
Satyajit Ranjeev
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[1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ambassadors/APAC/Regions
--
Heherson Pagcaliwagan
http://www.azneita.org
9:25 a.m.
2009/3/29 Heherson Pagcaliwagan <herson(a)azneita.org>:
If it's any consolation, we're re-organizing APAC to better
respond to the
geographical challenges APAC Fedora Ambassadors face. I believe you're in
our group[1] :D
This is news to me. What sort of rearrangement? Has this been
discussed here or is it still in FAMsCo list.
Regards
--
Rangeen Basu Roy Chowdhury
Fedora Ambassador
sherry151(a)gmail.com
10:06 a.m.
This is news to me. What sort of rearrangement? Has this been
discussed here or is it still in FAMsCo list.
No, we discussed it in our previous APAC meeting.
I know you couldn't attend the meeting, but did you went through the
meeting log?
Please do.
But, if you want to discuss it, please send a separate mail else we
will go off track of this current discussion about mentorship and
others.
Thanks.
--
Regards,
Susmit.
=============================================
ssh
0x86DD170A
http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/user:susmit
=============================================
Sent from: Calcutta WB India.
9:28 a.m.
2009/3/29 Rachit Gupta <rachit.tech(a)gmail.com>:
Morpheus..we can start a forum where we can provide all the basic
details
about how to start with fedora ambassador program..also how these new
ambassdor can contibute to foss.
Easier said than done. Take the clue from Ambassador's Quick Starter
Guide[1] (I am not accusing anyone here) project. And isn't the
mailing list supposed to serve exactly the same purpose?
[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ambassadors/Quick_guide
Regards
--
Rangeen Basu Roy Chowdhury
Fedora Ambassador
sherry151(a)gmail.com
10:06 a.m.
On Mar 29, 2009, at 10:28 AM, Rangeen Basu <sherry151(a)gmail.com> wrote:
2009/3/29 Rachit Gupta <rachit.tech(a)gmail.com>:
> Morpheus..we can start a forum where we can provide all the basic
> details
> about how to start with fedora ambassador program..also how these new
> ambassdor can contibute to foss.
Easier said than done. Take the clue from Ambassador's Quick Starter
Guide[1] (I am not accusing anyone here) project. And isn't the
mailing list supposed to serve exactly the same purpose?
[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ambassadors/Quick_guide
Regards
--
Rangeen Basu Roy Chowdhury
Fedora Ambassador
sherry151(a)gmail.com
Personally, I would like to see the Ambassadors mailing list _NOT_
used to discuss the basic elements of contributing to an OSS project
or discussion of basic ideas and philosohy of OSS in general.
Currently I think it is used for these types of discussion, which is
why we have hundreds of messages that say "me too" or "I'm here".
That said, I think we can all agree that currently we do a poor job of
orienting new ambassadors to steer them towards alternatives. The
regional Ambassadors list is more suited to answering new Ambassadors'
questions as the people or processes tend to vary enough region to
region.
I don't want to discourage participation in the community, but many of
us agree that the noise to useful message ratio on ambassador-list is
skewed towards noise. It boils down to this: Think about all the
senior people in the community worldwide that read your email to
ambassador-list, what impression do you want to make on them? Does
your email convey this impression?
Having access to the global Fedora community is a privlege, like all
privleges, if it is abused, it will dissapear.
Many of us have ideas of what we'd like a new ambassador mentoring
program to look like. David (ke4qqq) has an email he sends to new
North American ambassadors to welcome them. I'll put it on a wiki
page tonight along with the thoughts mentioned throughout this thread,
I think that those things will likely be a good start for us to help
orient new members joining our sub-community in Fedora. I'm travelling
today, so if someone wants to take the initiative for creating the
page, I wouldn't mind ;-)
-Scott
4:54 p.m.
On Sun, Mar 29, 2009 at 11:06 AM, Scott McBrien <smcbrien(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Mar 29, 2009, at 10:28 AM, Rangeen Basu <sherry151(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/3/29 Rachit Gupta <rachit.tech(a)gmail.com>:
>>
>> Morpheus..we can start a forum where we can provide all the basic details
>> about how to start with fedora ambassador program..also how these new
>> ambassdor can contibute to foss.
>
> Easier said than done. Take the clue from Ambassador's Quick Starter
> Guide[1] (I am not accusing anyone here) project. And isn't the
> mailing list supposed to serve exactly the same purpose?
>
> [1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ambassadors/Quick_guide
>
> Regards
> --
> Rangeen Basu Roy Chowdhury
> Fedora Ambassador
> sherry151(a)gmail.com
Personally, I would like to see the Ambassadors mailing list _NOT_ used to
discuss the basic elements of contributing to an OSS project or discussion
of basic ideas and philosohy of OSS in general. Currently I think it is
used for these types of discussion, which is why we have hundreds of
messages that say "me too" or "I'm here". That said, I think we
can all
agree that currently we do a poor job of orienting new ambassadors to steer
them towards alternatives. The regional Ambassadors list is more suited to
answering new Ambassadors' questions as the people or processes tend to vary
enough region to region.
I don't want to discourage participation in the community, but many of us
agree that the noise to useful message ratio on ambassador-list is skewed
towards noise. It boils down to this: Think about all the senior people in
the community worldwide that read your email to ambassador-list, what
impression do you want to make on them? Does your email convey this
impression?
Having access to the global Fedora community is a privlege, like all
privleges, if it is abused, it will dissapear.
Many of us have ideas of what we'd like a new ambassador mentoring program
to look like. David (ke4qqq) has an email he sends to new North American
ambassadors to welcome them. I'll put it on a wiki page tonight along with
the thoughts mentioned throughout this thread, I think that those things
will likely be a good start for us to help orient new members joining our
sub-community in Fedora. I'm travelling today, so if someone wants to take
the initiative for creating the page, I wouldn't mind ;-)
-Scott
--
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Interesting point Scott - we've long resisted having separate mailing
lists because we didn't want to fragment the community. That said -
the various regions are very different in many ways. Things that I can
do in the US might not work in EMEA, etc. Perhaps it's time to
reconsider this. I have to admit the noise is pretty high at times,
and I know a number of prominent people who heavily filter (via
procmail) this list.
12:20 a.m.
Hi,
--- On Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 3:24 AM, David Nalley <david(a)gnsa.us> wrote:
| Things that I can
| do in the US might not work in EMEA, etc.
\--
Agreed. But, some ideas/concepts brought in a region, could possibly
be useful in other regions as well [1]. We have to analyze it on a
case-by-case basis alone, and cannot make a generalized statement.
My thoughts on the Fedora Ambassador program:
* New joinees to Fedora Project should _not_ be given the title
'Fedora Ambassador'. You could address them as "Fedora Followers" or
"Fedora Admirer" or "Fedora Fan" or come up with a name! You could
put
them under "observation" for 3-6 months before making them Fedora
Ambassadors. And six months is sufficient time for them to decide and
do any work (documentation, artwork, packaging, code, testing, bug
triaging, advocacy, translation et. al.).
* Every six months, every Fedora Ambassadors' work can be reviewed,
and renewed. What is required is a measure to find out inactive
people. This is useful for Infrastructure to purge inactive accounts.
This could possibly be done every six months. And this is reasonable
enough time, for anyone to participate in the Fedora project. No
excuses!
Since, we have different channels of communication (wiki, mailing
lists, IRC) etc. any login or recent activity by a user could be
time-stamped. If no activity has been registered in the last six
months, Infrastructure could take their remedy measures.
Regards,
SK
[1] Pop Idol in UK. American Idol in US. Indian Idol in India.
--
Shakthi Kannan
http://www.shakthimaan.com
2:37 a.m.
Hi all,
sorry if i don't understand about this big fuss of "Ambassador" ? I see
for years Fedora is running better and better not only the Fedora Core
OS but as the whole in community. I believe Fedora do not need such MIRO
control on Ambassadorship.
What Fedora can do is just trigger email to the Ambassadors, those
responded, classified them as Active Ambassadors and make them listed in
Fedora Ambassadors page so to like others to contact them. For those
whom do not reply with in a month, KIV them to Ambassador KIV group,
make them hidden to End User but not Ambassasors, but purge them off
after half year of no reply.
Just my 2cts worth.
--
Best Regards,
Jason
Singapore Fedora Ambassador
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Jason_Benedict_Low
VoIP = sip:jasonbenedict@fedoraproject.org
------ When i work nobody care. When i rest everybody stare. ------
12:12 a.m.
On Mon, 2009-03-30 at 15:37 +0800, Jason Benedict wrote:
Hi all,
sorry if i don't understand about this big fuss of "Ambassador" ? I see
for years Fedora is running better and better not only the Fedora Core
OS but as the whole in community. I believe Fedora do not need such MIRO
control on Ambassadorship.
What Fedora can do is just trigger email to the Ambassadors, those
responded, classified them as Active Ambassadors and make them listed in
Fedora Ambassadors page so to like others to contact them. For those
whom do not reply with in a month, KIV them to Ambassador KIV group,
make them hidden to End User but not Ambassasors, but purge them off
after half year of no reply.
Just my 2cts worth.
+ 1
:)
1:37 a.m.
Roy Ong wrote:
On Mon, 2009-03-30 at 15:37 +0800, Jason Benedict wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> sorry if i don't understand about this big fuss of "Ambassador" ? I see
> for years Fedora is running better and better not only the Fedora Core
> OS but as the whole in community. I believe Fedora do not need such MIRO
> control on Ambassadorship.
>
> What Fedora can do is just trigger email to the Ambassadors, those
> responded, classified them as Active Ambassadors and make them listed in
> Fedora Ambassadors page so to like others to contact them. For those
> whom do not reply with in a month, KIV them to Ambassador KIV group,
> make them hidden to End User but not Ambassasors, but purge them off
> after half year of no reply.
>
> Just my 2cts worth.
>
+ 1
:)
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+1 from me too
Paul
5:27 a.m.
sorry if i don't understand about this big fuss of
"Ambassador" ? I see for
>> years Fedora is running better and better not only the Fedora Core OS but as
>> the whole in community.
>>
>
> + 1
>
+1 from me too
-10e1000
So, with this, problem solved. Everything it's "just fine". Despite the
fact
this is the longest thread I saw until now on this mailing list (apart from
the useless "me too").
If we can't agree on a solution to the problem it doesn't mean the problem
isn't there! Let's just stick out heads on the sand. "Fedora it's going
great!" There is no such thing of Ubuntu (it seems to be tabu to talk about
this), there is no such thing as 40% of the registered ambassadors (this is
almost 1 in 2 of them!) inactive. The activity of the rest of them consists
mainly on asking in vain "what can I do?". I'm sorry but it doesn't
seems to
me that things are ok at all.
We have every week a few new ambassadors registred. This is really a good
thing. But how many of them will end up being real contributors? If we
continue like this, we'll have next year 2000 ambassadors (wich looks great
on paper) and the next survey will prove that 90% of them are inactive. We
might as well create 10000 fictive accounts on Fedora ambassadors list and
be proud of our "strenght".
I whant to know that this thread will be closed in N days and the decisions
are XYand Z. Whatever decisions will come up it will be better that ignoring
the problem.
Ewan Luca
6:14 a.m.
On Tue, 2009-03-31 at 13:27 +0300, Ewan Luca wrote:
sorry if i don't understand about this big
fuss of "Ambassador" ? I see for years Fedora
is running better and better not only the
Fedora Core OS but as the whole in community.
+ 1
+1 from me too
-10e1000
So, with this, problem solved. Everything it's "just fine". Despite
the fact this is the longest thread I saw until now on this mailing
list (apart from the useless "me too").
If we can't agree on a solution to the problem it doesn't mean the
problem isn't there! Let's just stick out heads on the sand. "Fedora
it's going great!" There is no such thing of Ubuntu (it seems to be
tabu to talk about this), there is no such thing as 40% of the
registered ambassadors (this is almost 1 in 2 of them!) inactive. The
activity of the rest of them consists mainly on asking in vain "what
can I do?". I'm sorry but it doesn't seems to me that things are ok at
all.
We have every week a few new ambassadors registred. This is really a
good thing. But how many of them will end up being real contributors?
If we continue like this, we'll have next year 2000 ambassadors (wich
looks great on paper) and the next survey will prove that 90% of them
are inactive. We might as well create 10000 fictive accounts on Fedora
ambassadors list and be proud of our "strenght".
I whant to know that this thread will be closed in N days and the
decisions are XYand Z. Whatever decisions will come up it will be
better that ignoring the problem.
Ewan Luca
The idea about it is that it takes too much effort to "police" the
system. You can set the bar really high and make it "difficult" to
achieve the Ambassador status or set it lower and make it all inclusive.
Quantity or Quality? I know we all want Quality ... but how does one
quantify ambassador behavior that is worthwhile for the community?
FOR EXAMPLE, imagine if we set up a scoring system that only renews your
ambassador status for the next month only if you score 500 or higher
(you will be automatically de-registered from the ambassador system if
you end the month with less than 500 points)
-> all ambassadors start with 500 points
-> there is an auto-write down of 100 points every month
-> +100 for finishing and completing new ambassador briefing/training
-> +100 for successfully initiating and driving a community event
-> +100 for delivering an address at an approved event
-> -100 for not participating actively/effectively on mailing lists
-> -200 for not attending meetings
-> -200 for not responding to your fedora emails in a timely fashion
This system ensures that we will have "active" ambassadors but just how
many ambassadors will be left at the end of the year? 10? 15?
Its a tough balancing act. Too many ambassadors and we are seen to be
ineffective. Too few ambassadors and others may feel that its only an
"exclusive" few that get to "promote" Fedora.
While I definitely agree that "772 Ambassadors in FAS, 300 were
inactive" as shown in Max's initial email on 26 Mar 2009 is high, at
this time, we just need a simple mechanism to "remove" these inactive
accounts and keep going. No point spending too much time and effort to
monitor these inactive accounts. Let's spend time on the core efforts
instead.
My personal 2cents ...
(a) if you do not have valid contact information on your wiki page, it
tells the world that you are not willing to have others contact you
(b) if you do not keep a valid email address on the FAS system, it shows
that you don't want the administrator to contact you
(c) if you don't want the world to contact you and you don't want the
administrator to contact you ... then shouldn't you be excused from the
ambassador list?
If this (a) + (b) + (c) brings the list down to a reasonable size, then
we would have achieve the objective. Its simple and shouldn't annoy
anyone ....... or at least, that's what I hope :)
6:22 a.m.
On Tue, 2009-03-31 at 19:14 +0800, Roy Ong wrote:
-> all ambassadors start with 500 points
-> there is an auto-write down of 100 points every month
-> +100 for finishing and completing new ambassador briefing/training
-> +100 for successfully initiating and driving a community event
-> +100 for delivering an address at an approved event
-> -100 for not participating actively/effectively on mailing lists
-> -200 for not attending meetings
-> -200 for not responding to your fedora emails in a timely fashion
Just to make sure I have not missed it... is there really a new
ambassador briefing and training?
Thanks,
cprofitt
10:56 p.m.
Roy Ong wrote:
On Tue, 2009-03-31 at 13:27 +0300, Ewan Luca wrote:
> sorry if i don't understand about this big
> fuss of "Ambassador" ? I see for years Fedora
> is running better and better not only the
> Fedora Core OS but as the whole in community.
>
> + 1
> +1 from me too
>
>
> -10e1000
> So, with this, problem solved. Everything it's "just fine". Despite
> the fact this is the longest thread I saw until now on this mailing
> list (apart from the useless "me too").
> If we can't agree on a solution to the problem it doesn't mean the
> problem isn't there! Let's just stick out heads on the sand. "Fedora
> it's going great!" There is no such thing of Ubuntu (it seems to be
> tabu to talk about this), there is no such thing as 40% of the
> registered ambassadors (this is almost 1 in 2 of them!) inactive. The
> activity of the rest of them consists mainly on asking in vain "what
> can I do?". I'm sorry but it doesn't seems to me that things are ok at
> all.
> We have every week a few new ambassadors registred. This is really a
> good thing. But how many of them will end up being real contributors?
> If we continue like this, we'll have next year 2000 ambassadors (wich
> looks great on paper) and the next survey will prove that 90% of them
> are inactive. We might as well create 10000 fictive accounts on Fedora
> ambassadors list and be proud of our "strenght".
> I whant to know that this thread will be closed in N days and the
> decisions are XYand Z. Whatever decisions will come up it will be
> better that ignoring the problem.
>
> Ewan Luca
>
The idea about it is that it takes too much effort to "police" the
system. You can set the bar really high and make it "difficult" to
achieve the Ambassador status or set it lower and make it all inclusive.
Quantity or Quality? I know we all want Quality ... but how does one
quantify ambassador behavior that is worthwhile for the community?
FOR EXAMPLE, imagine if we set up a scoring system that only renews your
ambassador status for the next month only if you score 500 or higher
(you will be automatically de-registered from the ambassador system if
you end the month with less than 500 points)
-> all ambassadors start with 500 points
-> there is an auto-write down of 100 points every month
-> +100 for finishing and completing new ambassador briefing/training
-> +100 for successfully initiating and driving a community event
-> +100 for delivering an address at an approved event
-> -100 for not participating actively/effectively on mailing lists
-> -200 for not attending meetings
-> -200 for not responding to your fedora emails in a timely fashion
This system ensures that we will have "active" ambassadors but just how
many ambassadors will be left at the end of the year? 10? 15?
Its a tough balancing act. Too many ambassadors and we are seen to be
ineffective. Too few ambassadors and others may feel that its only an
"exclusive" few that get to "promote" Fedora.
While I definitely agree that "772 Ambassadors in FAS, 300 were
inactive" as shown in Max's initial email on 26 Mar 2009 is high, at
this time, we just need a simple mechanism to "remove" these inactive
accounts and keep going. No point spending too much time and effort to
monitor these inactive accounts. Let's spend time on the core efforts
instead.
My personal 2cents ...
(a) if you do not have valid contact information on your wiki page, it
tells the world that you are not willing to have others contact you
(b) if you do not keep a valid email address on the FAS system, it shows
that you don't want the administrator to contact you
(c) if you don't want the world to contact you and you don't want the
administrator to contact you ... then shouldn't you be excused from the
ambassador list?
If this (a) + (b) + (c) brings the list down to a reasonable size, then
we would have achieve the objective. Its simple and shouldn't annoy
anyone ....... or at least, that's what I hope :)
+1 :-)
--
Best Regards,
Jason
Singapore Fedora Ambassador
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Jason_Benedict_Low
VoIP = sip:jasonbenedict@fedoraproject.org
------ When i work nobody care. When i rest everybody stare. ------
9:43 p.m.
Ewan Luca wrote:
sorry if i don't understand about this big fuss of
"Ambassador" ? I see for years Fedora is running better
and better not only the Fedora Core OS but as the whole in
community.
+ 1
+1 from me too
-10e1000
So, with this, problem solved. Everything it's "just fine". Despite
the fact this is the longest thread I saw until now on this mailing
list (apart from the useless "me too").
If we can't agree on a solution to the problem it doesn't mean the
problem isn't there! Let's just stick out heads on the sand. "Fedora
it's going great!" There is no such thing of Ubuntu (it seems to be
tabu to talk about this), there is no such thing as 40% of the
registered ambassadors (this is almost 1 in 2 of them!) inactive. The
activity of the rest of them consists mainly on asking in vain "what
can I do?". I'm sorry but it doesn't seems to me that things are ok at
all.
We have every week a few new ambassadors registred. This is really a
good thing. But how many of them will end up being real contributors?
If we continue like this, we'll have next year 2000 ambassadors (wich
looks great on paper) and the next survey will prove that 90% of them
are inactive. We might as well create 10000 fictive accounts on Fedora
ambassadors list and be proud of our "strenght".
I whant to know that this thread will be closed in N days and the
decisions are XYand Z. Whatever decisions will come up it will be
better that ignoring the problem.
You have your point. Ignore this issue is not a
solution. That is where
and why i mentioned Fedora can try this for a start:-
-----
What Fedora can do is just trigger email to the Ambassadors, those
responded, classified them as Active Ambassadors and make them listed in
Fedora Ambassadors page so to like others to contact them. For those
whom do not reply with in a month, KIV them to Ambassador KIV group,
make them hidden to End User but not Ambassasors, but purge them off
after half year of no reply.
-----
Then improve it along the way, rather then keep going on in the mailing
list and no action per say. India had did a good job on start the
mailing list out to all ambassadors in India to screen for active and
inactive ambassadors. So, may be Fedora Ambassadors steering committee,
Susmit, as a mentor for the APAC region can assist in getting it done
like wise in India ?And in Region EMEA, they got "2. Ambassadors
Membership Verification (Joerg)" may be APAC can learn from them, Just
another 2cts worth.
--
Best Regards,
Jason
Singapore Fedora Ambassador
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Jason_Benedict_Low
VoIP = sip:jasonbenedict@fedoraproject.org
------ When i work nobody care. When i rest everybody stare. ------
7:01 p.m.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 8:25 PM, Clint Savage <herlo1(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Lastly, I think there are minimums people can achieve, but because
Fedora Ambassadors can lurk in many places, having a set of
requirements might be a bit tight. I'd like to suggest that the new
prospective Ambassador and their mentors sit down with a list of
*suggested* requirements, something they can tangibly look at and say,
yes, I think I can accomplish X, Y and Z to become an ambassador.
Here's a couple quick examples.
All prospective ambassadors would complete some some minimal set of
acknowledgement like Wiki page, introducing yourself, the open source
projects you are involved in and a basic set of benefits you bring to
Fedora. Something similar to what Joerg is requiring now.
Prospective Ambassador accumulates enough credits (integral valued)
through different Fedora related activities on Fedora site, in the
Internet and off line.
This requires some modifications in the present infrastructure, but
should prove to be useful for
other Fedora groups.
Best
A. Mani
--
A. Mani
Member, Cal. Math. Soc
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10:45 p.m.
On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 6:14 AM, David Nalley <david(a)gnsa.us> wrote:
Yet another warning that this is likely to be a long email.
In the course of our discussion on the FAmSCo list, Joerg has
convinced me of the logic behind raising the barrier to entry. (Note
that of the three issues that Max presented, this one only deals with
raising the barrier to entry.)
I don't object to raising the barrier but I want to be very careful
how we do it.
Essentially it comes down to who we place the initial burden on.
Mentoring is needed, but if the current virtually non-existent barrier
remains it means that our limited supply of mentors will be incredibly
taxed, and possibly with precious little gain.
In the course of that discussion a number of things were suggested as
prerequisites - a few of which are listed below (not all of them as
honestly the discussion is 38 pages worth of text at this point (sans
prior email quoting)
- has to be a Contributor to another Sub-Project inside Fedora where a
sponsor is needed
I very strongly disagree with this idea for two reasons.
(1) The notion of a sponsor is inconsistent across Fedora groups.
Some, like the art team, don't even have a notion of a sponsor. For
the ambassadors our sponsor, kital, guides new folks through the
process and then approves them as members. In packaging, as I
understand their process, the sponsor basically vouches for the new
member's competence to create packages properly (i.e., has
demonstrated appropriate skills) and recommends that the community
accept the new member into the group (which is done by vote). In
infrastructure as I understand that process the sponsor vouches for
both skills and trustworthiness.
Due to the inconsistent role of the sponsor across Fedora groups I
think this requirement is arbitrary and meaningless. Being on the art
team is no less meaningful or important than being a bug triager in my
mind.
(2) While I will not deny that being a member of other FAS groups is a
good thing, I don't think it defines in any way a good ambassador.
Someone who spends 90% of his Fedora time helping other Fedora users
solve their problems in a positive way on IRC and 10% of his time
promoting Fedora at his local user group meetings deserves in my mind
to be an ambassador every bit as much as anyone else even if he
belongs to no other FAS groups. And requiring him to join another
group that he doesn't want to join just seems silly to me.
- is recommended by a Contributor to another Sub-Project inside
Fedora
who will take mentorship for that person
Being recommended by another Fedora contributor is a fine endorsement.
But how can the contributor be the ambassador's mentor when the
contributor isn't an ambassador?
- has contributed to Fedora on a event before
Has contributed to the Fedora community in some demonstrable way
before? Has contributed in the role of an ambassador previously in
some demonstrable way? I don't see any reason to elevate events above
other ways of contributing.
The idea being that this isn't a newbie group.
So lets first look at the definition of what a traditional ambassador is:
a diplomat of the highest rank; accredited as representative from one
country to another
In Fedora's case an Ambassador is a liaison to the general public and
the open source community and represents the public face of Fedora.
While charged with promoting Fedora, Ambassadors are more than PR
droids as inherent in bearing the title of Ambassador comes the
authority and expectation of getting things done and not just being a
mouthpiece.
I still want to allow people to contribute in ways they find
enjoyable. So if someone wants to be a PR droid by blogging
incessantly that is cool with me. If someone else wants to do every
single thing that an ambassador could possibly do that is even cooler.
I'm ok letting the ambassador decide in what ways they are happy
contributing. Not everyone can be the Ambassador to the UN. Someone
might just want to be the Ambassador to Fedora, South Dakota.
Looking at the more traditional examples of Ambassadors we find them
to generally be experienced statesmen. They are the highest ranking
diplomat sent to foreign entities.
The problem that I perceive, and I believe others do as well is that
these representatives of the Fedora Project aren't living up to the
same level of quality that we expect of Fedora as a distribution, or
of the contributors in other portions of Fedora. We have high
standards for packagers, art people, etc, and yet we don't for the
representatives of the project?
This is a very compelling statement. Maybe one place to start turning
this tide is by expressing this point more effectively on the wiki.
Ambassadors are critical to the mission of the project. Begin to set
the expectation of what an ambassador is in the first place people
read about ambassadors.
I fully believe that a portion of the problem is our failure to
communicate the authority which the Ambassadors are given. Max quoted
me in saying that we have a large percentage of people who haven't yet
realized that they can take ownership of things in Fedora and I fully
believe this to be the case.
But more specifically, I perceive a problem in the following areas
with a good percentage of new Ambassadors:
1. Lack of knowledge and understanding of the Free/Libre Open Source
Software movement and it's philosophies and principles.
2. Lack of knowledge about the Fedora Project, it's goals,
foundational believes, structure, and organization.
Also all points I completely agree with.
Please don't misunderstand me, I am not trying to create an
elitist
group or proposing that we remove existing Ambassadors because they
'aren't up to snuff'. What I am saying is that going forward we need
to be able to provide a minimally acceptable quality. Every other
subproject has work standards one must meet before being accepted. Why
should we not hold ourselves to that same standard?
I unfortunately fear that left unchecked our organization will devolve
into a social club.
Currently, the most arduous task for someone who wants to be n
Ambassador is that they acquire a FAS account. I can't imagine many
arguing that is enough to qualify them as the highest envoys in the
land.
I agree with this sentiment but tempered with the realization that
many ambassadors do all their work in very localized areas and we need
to not set barriers that prohibit such an arrangement.
Thanks David and others who are working on this issue. It is really a
very important enterprise and one I hope we get right. The result of
this is critical to the smooth functioning of our group as we continue
to grow in numbers. I think you are definitely heading down the right
track here.
John
1:16 a.m.
I fully agree with the concept of raising the barrier to entry and mentoring
Raising of the barrier to entry can be done through some kind of
online testing if possible ( I dont have much idea about them). A
person who is applying for Fedora ambassadorship should give that test
and have to clear it before moving to the next round that can be a one
to one irc session .If both the sessions are satisfactory the person
will be selected for a 3-6 months of probation / training period where
he has to fulfill some goals to become a Fedora Ambassador.
Shambo
4:01 a.m.
Hi
On Fri, Mar 27, 2009 at 11:46 AM, Shambo Bose <shambo.linux(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I fully agree with the concept of raising the barrier to entry and
mentoring
Raising of the barrier to entry can be done through some kind of
online testing if possible ( I dont have much idea about them). A
person who is applying for Fedora ambassadorship should give that test
and have to clear it before moving to the next round that can be a one
IMHO, such tests for entry are always a bad idea though I am not very
clear about what kind of test you are talking about. If it something
like a written test then bad bad idea. You cannot judge the potential
of a person by only a test. It is much more subjective and should be
spread over a longer time span.
to one irc session .If both the sessions are satisfactory the person
will be selected for a 3-6 months of probation / training period where
he has to fulfill some goals to become a Fedora Ambassador.
As Max stated, a variable probation period is better. For example what
about a person who is just perfect for the job and can cope up in just
a week. 3 months is a wastage for him. So, again the same concept of
sponsors like the packaging project comes in. I believe raising the
barrier is good but finding people to judge whether an applicant has
crossed that barrier is even more important and so is to find proper
mentors who can teach how to cross that barrier.
Regards
--
Rangeen Basu Roy Chowdhury
Fedora Ambassador
sherry151(a)gmail.com
7:15 a.m.
Inline reply
On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 11:45 PM, inode0 <inode0(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 6:14 AM, David Nalley <david(a)gnsa.us>
wrote:
> Yet another warning that this is likely to be a long email.
>
> In the course of our discussion on the FAmSCo list, Joerg has
> convinced me of the logic behind raising the barrier to entry. (Note
> that of the three issues that Max presented, this one only deals with
> raising the barrier to entry.)
I don't object to raising the barrier but I want to be very careful
how we do it.
> Essentially it comes down to who we place the initial burden on.
> Mentoring is needed, but if the current virtually non-existent barrier
> remains it means that our limited supply of mentors will be incredibly
> taxed, and possibly with precious little gain.
>
> In the course of that discussion a number of things were suggested as
> prerequisites - a few of which are listed below (not all of them as
> honestly the discussion is 38 pages worth of text at this point (sans
> prior email quoting)
> - has to be a Contributor to another Sub-Project inside Fedora where a
> sponsor is needed
I very strongly disagree with this idea for two reasons.
(1) The notion of a sponsor is inconsistent across Fedora groups.
Some, like the art team, don't even have a notion of a sponsor. For
the ambassadors our sponsor, kital, guides new folks through the
process and then approves them as members. In packaging, as I
understand their process, the sponsor basically vouches for the new
member's competence to create packages properly (i.e., has
demonstrated appropriate skills) and recommends that the community
accept the new member into the group (which is done by vote). In
infrastructure as I understand that process the sponsor vouches for
both skills and trustworthiness.
Some of these points are nits, but I think competence in packaging is
but 1/2 of the process is also proving that you understand the
packaging guidelines.
Community doesn't vote, the sponsor has the authority vested in him to
approve or deny an applicant.
FESCo does vote on proven packager and packaging sponsors to approve them.
Due to the inconsistent role of the sponsor across Fedora groups I
think this requirement is arbitrary and meaningless. Being on the art
team is no less meaningful or important than being a bug triager in my
mind.
(2) While I will not deny that being a member of other FAS groups is a
good thing, I don't think it defines in any way a good ambassador.
Someone who spends 90% of his Fedora time helping other Fedora users
solve their problems in a positive way on IRC and 10% of his time
promoting Fedora at his local user group meetings deserves in my mind
to be an ambassador every bit as much as anyone else even if he
belongs to no other FAS groups. And requiring him to join another
group that he doesn't want to join just seems silly to me.
I don't think Joerg intended these to be cumulative. Rather that any
of these is sufficient. Yes inherently some of these people. may not
meet this specific criteria, but if an individual is doing work in
Fedora in another aspect that gives them that much better of a
perspective to represent Fedora IMO.
> - is recommended by a Contributor to another Sub-Project inside Fedora
> who will take mentorship for that person
Being recommended by another Fedora contributor is a fine endorsement.
But how can the contributor be the ambassador's mentor when the
contributor isn't an ambassador?
> - has contributed to Fedora on a event before
Has contributed to the Fedora community in some demonstrable way
before? Has contributed in the role of an ambassador previously in
some demonstrable way? I don't see any reason to elevate events above
other ways of contributing.
> The idea being that this isn't a newbie group.
>
> So lets first look at the definition of what a traditional ambassador is:
> a diplomat of the highest rank; accredited as representative from one
> country to another
>
> In Fedora's case an Ambassador is a liaison to the general public and
> the open source community and represents the public face of Fedora.
> While charged with promoting Fedora, Ambassadors are more than PR
> droids as inherent in bearing the title of Ambassador comes the
> authority and expectation of getting things done and not just being a
> mouthpiece.
I still want to allow people to contribute in ways they find
enjoyable. So if someone wants to be a PR droid by blogging
incessantly that is cool with me. If someone else wants to do every
single thing that an ambassador could possibly do that is even cooler.
I'm ok letting the ambassador decide in what ways they are happy
contributing. Not everyone can be the Ambassador to the UN. Someone
might just want to be the Ambassador to Fedora, South Dakota.
I don't care if someone is an Ambassador to the world or an Ambassador
to Liberty, SC (town of 3000) In my mind the standard is good
representation, be that to 5 people or 50,000.
> Looking at the more traditional examples of Ambassadors we find them
> to generally be experienced statesmen. They are the highest ranking
> diplomat sent to foreign entities.
>
> The problem that I perceive, and I believe others do as well is that
> these representatives of the Fedora Project aren't living up to the
> same level of quality that we expect of Fedora as a distribution, or
> of the contributors in other portions of Fedora. We have high
> standards for packagers, art people, etc, and yet we don't for the
> representatives of the project?
This is a very compelling statement. Maybe one place to start turning
this tide is by expressing this point more effectively on the wiki.
Ambassadors are critical to the mission of the project. Begin to set
the expectation of what an ambassador is in the first place people
read about ambassadors.
> I fully believe that a portion of the problem is our failure to
> communicate the authority which the Ambassadors are given. Max quoted
> me in saying that we have a large percentage of people who haven't yet
> realized that they can take ownership of things in Fedora and I fully
> believe this to be the case.
>
> But more specifically, I perceive a problem in the following areas
> with a good percentage of new Ambassadors:
>
> 1. Lack of knowledge and understanding of the Free/Libre Open Source
> Software movement and it's philosophies and principles.
>
> 2. Lack of knowledge about the Fedora Project, it's goals,
> foundational believes, structure, and organization.
Also all points I completely agree with.
> Please don't misunderstand me, I am not trying to create an elitist
> group or proposing that we remove existing Ambassadors because they
> 'aren't up to snuff'. What I am saying is that going forward we need
> to be able to provide a minimally acceptable quality. Every other
> subproject has work standards one must meet before being accepted. Why
> should we not hold ourselves to that same standard?
>
> I unfortunately fear that left unchecked our organization will devolve
> into a social club.
>
> Currently, the most arduous task for someone who wants to be n
> Ambassador is that they acquire a FAS account. I can't imagine many
> arguing that is enough to qualify them as the highest envoys in the
> land.
I agree with this sentiment but tempered with the realization that
many ambassadors do all their work in very localized areas and we need
to not set barriers that prohibit such an arrangement.
Again the standard that I think we attain to is quality
representation. I can't justify lowering the standards in my mind
because a person will only be the face of Fedora to 50 people. Bad
representation is bad representation. What we must guard against is
emplacing arbitrary standards that don't increase quality.
Thanks David and others who are working on this issue. It is really a
very important enterprise and one I hope we get right. The result of
this is critical to the smooth functioning of our group as we continue
to grow in numbers. I think you are definitely heading down the right
track here.
John
--
Fedora-ambassadors-list mailing list
Fedora-ambassadors-list(a)redhat.com
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-ambassadors-list
8:25 a.m.
On Fri, Mar 27, 2009 at 7:15 AM, David Nalley <david(a)gnsa.us> wrote:
On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 11:45 PM, inode0 <inode0(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 6:14 AM, David Nalley <david(a)gnsa.us> wrote:
>> Essentially it comes down to who we place the initial burden on.
>> Mentoring is needed, but if the current virtually non-existent barrier
>> remains it means that our limited supply of mentors will be incredibly
>> taxed, and possibly with precious little gain.
>>
>> In the course of that discussion a number of things were suggested as
>> prerequisites - a few of which are listed below (not all of them as
>> honestly the discussion is 38 pages worth of text at this point (sans
>> prior email quoting)
>> - has to be a Contributor to another Sub-Project inside Fedora where a
>> sponsor is needed
>
> I very strongly disagree with this idea for two reasons.
>
> (1) The notion of a sponsor is inconsistent across Fedora groups.
> Some, like the art team, don't even have a notion of a sponsor. For
> the ambassadors our sponsor, kital, guides new folks through the
> process and then approves them as members. In packaging, as I
> understand their process, the sponsor basically vouches for the new
> member's competence to create packages properly (i.e., has
> demonstrated appropriate skills) and recommends that the community
> accept the new member into the group (which is done by vote). In
> infrastructure as I understand that process the sponsor vouches for
> both skills and trustworthiness.
Some of these points are nits, but I think competence in packaging is
but 1/2 of the process is also proving that you understand the
packaging guidelines.
Community doesn't vote, the sponsor has the authority vested in him to
approve or deny an applicant.
FESCo does vote on proven packager and packaging sponsors to approve them.
I only intended to make one point here, the role of sponsors in
various Fedora groups means different things to different groups. If
the point is to belong to some other part of Fedora then whether it
has sponsorship or not is irrelevant.
>
> Due to the inconsistent role of the sponsor across Fedora groups I
> think this requirement is arbitrary and meaningless. Being on the art
> team is no less meaningful or important than being a bug triager in my
> mind.
>
> (2) While I will not deny that being a member of other FAS groups is a
> good thing, I don't think it defines in any way a good ambassador.
> Someone who spends 90% of his Fedora time helping other Fedora users
> solve their problems in a positive way on IRC and 10% of his time
> promoting Fedora at his local user group meetings deserves in my mind
> to be an ambassador every bit as much as anyone else even if he
> belongs to no other FAS groups. And requiring him to join another
> group that he doesn't want to join just seems silly to me.
I don't think Joerg intended these to be cumulative. Rather that any
of these is sufficient. Yes inherently some of these people. may not
meet this specific criteria, but if an individual is doing work in
Fedora in another aspect that gives them that much better of a
perspective to represent Fedora IMO.
Sure. Someone who spends countless hours in #fedora is better prepared
to be a good ambassador in #fedora than someone who is fixated on
packaging cowsay for example. Belonging to one FAS group and even
being an active contributor in that group buys you something but I
think you are overselling its importance. An ambassador participating
in other FAS groups makes the ambassador a better ambassador. This is
in large part I think because when an ambassador participates in other
groups he looks around through his ambassador eyes. But belonging to
another FAS group has little relation in my mind to becoming a good
ambassador to start with. How many current packagers would make good
ambassadors? I don't know the answer to that question but I suspect
that being a packager is not highly correlated with being a good
ambassador. If it isn't a good indicator I don't think it makes a good
screening test.
I think it mostly come down to my agreeing with Mathieu. I don't think
lists of required actions and experiences can ever take the place of
human judgment. If these lists are for the benefit of sponsors to help
guide them then it doesn't matter so much to me whether they are
incomplete or contain things I might disagree with in some way. If
they are to be advertised to potential new contributors then I
probably won't ever like the list that results.
>> - is recommended by a Contributor to another Sub-Project
inside Fedora
>> who will take mentorship for that person
>
> Being recommended by another Fedora contributor is a fine endorsement.
> But how can the contributor be the ambassador's mentor when the
> contributor isn't an ambassador?
>
>> - has contributed to Fedora on a event before
>
> Has contributed to the Fedora community in some demonstrable way
> before? Has contributed in the role of an ambassador previously in
> some demonstrable way? I don't see any reason to elevate events above
> other ways of contributing.
>
>> The idea being that this isn't a newbie group.
>>
>> So lets first look at the definition of what a traditional ambassador is:
>> a diplomat of the highest rank; accredited as representative from one
>> country to another
>>
>> In Fedora's case an Ambassador is a liaison to the general public and
>> the open source community and represents the public face of Fedora.
>> While charged with promoting Fedora, Ambassadors are more than PR
>> droids as inherent in bearing the title of Ambassador comes the
>> authority and expectation of getting things done and not just being a
>> mouthpiece.
>
> I still want to allow people to contribute in ways they find
> enjoyable. So if someone wants to be a PR droid by blogging
> incessantly that is cool with me. If someone else wants to do every
> single thing that an ambassador could possibly do that is even cooler.
> I'm ok letting the ambassador decide in what ways they are happy
> contributing. Not everyone can be the Ambassador to the UN. Someone
> might just want to be the Ambassador to Fedora, South Dakota.
I don't care if someone is an Ambassador to the world or an Ambassador
to Liberty, SC (town of 3000) In my mind the standard is good
representation, be that to 5 people or 50,000.
Maybe I don't understand your point exactly. When you say, "...
inherent in bearing the title of Ambassador comes the authority and
expectation of getting things done and not just being a mouthpiece,"
what things is the Ambassador to Fedora, South Dakota expected to get
done?
I think promoting Fedora in that community is enough, that is my
expectation of the ambassador. The ambassador has a world of
opportunity to do more in some locations but I'm really not sure that
is universal.
>> Looking at the more traditional examples of Ambassadors we
find them
>> to generally be experienced statesmen. They are the highest ranking
>> diplomat sent to foreign entities.
>>
>> The problem that I perceive, and I believe others do as well is that
>> these representatives of the Fedora Project aren't living up to the
>> same level of quality that we expect of Fedora as a distribution, or
>> of the contributors in other portions of Fedora. We have high
>> standards for packagers, art people, etc, and yet we don't for the
>> representatives of the project?
>
> This is a very compelling statement. Maybe one place to start turning
> this tide is by expressing this point more effectively on the wiki.
> Ambassadors are critical to the mission of the project. Begin to set
> the expectation of what an ambassador is in the first place people
> read about ambassadors.
>
>> I fully believe that a portion of the problem is our failure to
>> communicate the authority which the Ambassadors are given. Max quoted
>> me in saying that we have a large percentage of people who haven't yet
>> realized that they can take ownership of things in Fedora and I fully
>> believe this to be the case.
>>
>> But more specifically, I perceive a problem in the following areas
>> with a good percentage of new Ambassadors:
>>
>> 1. Lack of knowledge and understanding of the Free/Libre Open Source
>> Software movement and it's philosophies and principles.
>>
>> 2. Lack of knowledge about the Fedora Project, it's goals,
>> foundational believes, structure, and organization.
>
> Also all points I completely agree with.
>
>> Please don't misunderstand me, I am not trying to create an elitist
>> group or proposing that we remove existing Ambassadors because they
>> 'aren't up to snuff'. What I am saying is that going forward we need
>> to be able to provide a minimally acceptable quality. Every other
>> subproject has work standards one must meet before being accepted. Why
>> should we not hold ourselves to that same standard?
>>
>> I unfortunately fear that left unchecked our organization will devolve
>> into a social club.
>>
>> Currently, the most arduous task for someone who wants to be n
>> Ambassador is that they acquire a FAS account. I can't imagine many
>> arguing that is enough to qualify them as the highest envoys in the
>> land.
>
> I agree with this sentiment but tempered with the realization that
> many ambassadors do all their work in very localized areas and we need
> to not set barriers that prohibit such an arrangement.
Again the standard that I think we attain to is quality
representation. I can't justify lowering the standards in my mind
because a person will only be the face of Fedora to 50 people. Bad
representation is bad representation. What we must guard against is
emplacing arbitrary standards that don't increase quality.
The standards are to prevent bad representation. I'm willing to admit
that in many situations mediocre representation is better than no
representation, and in many locations that will be the choice we get
to begin with. I favor entry level requirements that allow for this.
John
10:19 a.m.
So long mails are back in fashion. Yupiii!
Ambassador guidance
I read the hole thread and I want to stress the points made by other new
ambassadors that posted replies: New ambassadors need guidance! 3 weeks ago,
as a newly accepted ambassador I feel the need to get a starting point. This
is why I started https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ambassadors/Quick_guide. As
of today little progress has been achieved due to lack of contribution from
people who have the knowledge or experience to make such contribution. As my
knowledge of Fedora community I'll complete the project so new ambassadors
will have at least some point of reference.
About mentor and sponsor.
I am yet to understand the difference between mentor and sponsor and I'm
sure this might be confusing to other new ambassadors as well. I'm going to
reffer for now to a "mentor" as somebody that will help/guide/point me as a
new ambassador in the right direction.
I understand that the workload involved in mentoring might be overwhelming
but I would have liked (still am) to know that X is my mentor and I can ask
him what I need to know. Without this help I'm left wondering the wiki
labyrinth. I undestand that there are people that can get theyr compass on
their own. Good for them. I need a mentor. I would liked as a newly accepted
ambassador to get the "Welcome mail" (the one I myself get from Jorg -thank
you Jorg - for example) with 2 links:
- "Quick guide for ambassadors"
- "Apply for a mentor" where, after I read the basics, I can ASK to be
assigned to a mentor*.
By making such an application for a mentor the new ambassador will be more
likely to understand the rules and implications of such a relation.
Ambassadors standard - measurement and control
Let me make myself into a case study. I became an Fedora ambassador 2 days
after I instaled linux for the first time on a computer. I have no technical
studies or background and no thing but a general idea of Open Source. Yet
I'v been accepted as ambassador (for you to judge if this was a mistake for
Fedora community as I know now that I can contribute without such technical
knoledge).
I think the question to be asked is: "Am I *now* a good ambassador?" There
is no measurement sistem to determine that. There is no one to held me
accontable so I can sit on my ass and replay now and then "me too" endless
mails.
I'm willing (and I think this is how it should be) to send once o month (or
every 2 months or... to be decided) a activity report (to Famsco or to my
mentor or on my wiki page). If I miss 3 raports in a row I be degraded from
ambassador status or put on probation or shoot or something.
Hereby is my first rapport:
e1luca ambassadors activities (example)
new installs: 0
public apearences: 0
media appearences: 0
private meetings(Fedora subject) 2
blogposts 5
details: www.opencurse.blogspot.com
other Fedora related 2
details: Quick guide, Fedora interviews
Now, knowing what I'm doing famsco might have a clearer understanding of
what the results of Fedora Ambassadors really are (see next point).
Ambassadors standard - measurement and control (II)
I would like to see somewere "Fedora ambassadors anual report". For this we
need clear goals, measurement systems and structure. Even with 300 inactive
ambassadors there are still 400 people in our organisation. This is a lot of
manpower. We should be able to get some measurable results from such a
force. (wars and revolution have been started with less!)
Ewan Luca,
Fedora Ambassador
12:07 p.m.
Am Freitag 27 März 2009 16:19:06 schrieb Ewan Luca:
- "Quick guide for ambassadors"
I think the welcome
message[1] contains a lot usefull informations you can
follow. We enhance this permanent as soon as someone makes a good suggestion.
If you think we need more details - feel free to enhance the content behind
the links!
- "Apply for a mentor" where, after I read the basics, I
can ASK to be
We do this since awhile - i have sent you only the welcome message[1]
- i
assumed you are one of nicu's crew, my fault sorry
I have added the regional mentor information to [1]
[1]https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ambassadors/MembershipService#Final_Welc...
cu Joerg
--
Joerg (kital) Simon
jsimon(a)fedoraproject.org
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/JoergSimon
http://kitall.blogspot.com
Key Fingerprint:
3691 0989 2DCA 58A2 8D1F 2CAC C823 558E 5B5B 5688
12:38 p.m.
2009/3/27 Ewan Luca <ewanluca(a)gmail.com>:
So long mails are back in fashion. Yupiii!
Ambassador guidance
I read the hole thread and I want to stress the points made by other new
ambassadors that posted replies: New ambassadors need guidance! 3 weeks ago,
as a newly accepted ambassador I feel the need to get a starting point. This
is why I started https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ambassadors/Quick_guide. As
of today little progress has been achieved due to lack of contribution from
people who have the knowledge or experience to make such contribution. As my
knowledge of Fedora community I'll complete the project so new ambassadors
will have at least some point of reference.
I'm sorry if I can't work actviely on thas stuff now, but, due to
language barrier, creating some interesting content require time, and,
surely, a 99% attention only to this stuff (I can suggests resource to
be used, but having a guide written in a not so good english is
something that could be useless).
I think you have done a great job since now and I'm sure your
abilities could make this initiative as active as usefull. The big
problem is that there is the necessity to have a well-written content
and that's a not easy stuff, I'm sure you'll be able to encourage
contribution around the project.
If you need help feel free to ask :)
Regards
Francesco Ugolini
12:53 p.m.
I started https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ambassadors/Quick_guide. As
> of today little progress has been achieved...
I'm sorry if I can't work actviely on thas stuff now, but, due to
language barrier, creating some interesting content require time, and,
surely, a 99% attention only to this stuff (I can suggests resource to
be used, but having a guide written in a not so good english is
something that could be useless).
Francesco Ugolini
Same language barriers might have made my statement sound like an
accusation. This is not the case. I was just trying to say that I think this
project should not be abandoned.
I think the welcome message[1] contains a lot usefull informations you can
follow. We enhance this permanent as soon as someone makes a good
suggestion.
If you think we need more details - feel free to enhance the content behind
the links!
The message makes perfect sense to me now. Back then was too much
information to take in.
5:08 p.m.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
Quality of Ambassadors:
I think the best way to measure it is through a simple credit system.
1. a.) Ambassador /prospective ambassador reads *important* article
(Only some articles may be eligible for credit)
b.) Prospective ambassador answers related multiple choice questions
c.) If a minimum score of 90% is not attained, then the candidate
goes through the whole process again.
On successful completion, candidate gets 1 credit or some credit.
2. a.) Ambassador/prospective ambassador contributes X no of commits
to a Fedora project.
We know plenty of inefficient code metrics. Based on a less
inefficient one we give some credit to the candidate.
Only exceptionally hard working programmers should be able to become
ambassadors based on their code contribution alone.
3. Ambassador /prospective ambassador writes a article in
This is getting long.
Shall I make a wiki page for the evaluation system?
Best
A. Mani
--
A. Mani
Member, Cal. Math. Soc
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6:41 p.m.
On Fri, Mar 27, 2009 at 6:08 PM, Mani A <a.mani.cms(a)gmail.com> wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
Quality of Ambassadors:
I think the best way to measure it is through a simple credit system.
1. a.) Ambassador /prospective ambassador reads *important* article
(Only some articles may be eligible for credit)
b.) Prospective ambassador answers related multiple choice questions
c.) If a minimum score of 90% is not attained, then the candidate
goes through the whole process again.
On successful completion, candidate gets 1 credit or some credit.
2. a.) Ambassador/prospective ambassador contributes X no of commits
to a Fedora project.
We know plenty of inefficient code metrics. Based on a less
inefficient one we give some credit to the candidate.
Only exceptionally hard working programmers should be able to become
ambassadors based on their code contribution alone.
3. Ambassador /prospective ambassador writes a article in
This is getting long.
Shall I make a wiki page for the evaluation system?
Best
A. Mani
--
A. Mani
Member, Cal. Math. Soc
Ok, I have a problem with a ranking or evaluation system. It's one thing to
have a mentee period, because I think we can all agree that the current
program lacks an effective onboarding strategy for getting want-to-be
Ambassadors involved.
The kind of system proposed above reminds me of why I quit playing World of
Warcraft. For those of you who don't play Massively Multiplayer Online Role
Playing Games (MMORPGs) I apologize in advance if the analogy doesn't make
sense. I was in a pretty decent sized guild but then they started a ranking
system where points were awarded for participation in 5 hour long dungeon
raids. I had other interests, and a job, and a myriad of other things that
occupied my time. Before I knew it, I was so behind the points eight ball
that it was pointless for me to play because I'd never be able to redeem
enough points to get whatever it is one redeems points for.
Having a points or ranking system for Ambassadors will ultimately lead to
the idea that one is a better Ambassador than another because they have more
points, regardless of how passionate the Ambassador is. Having ranks is
detrimental to the point that Fedora is a community, moving together
forward, in an inharmonious cacophony to be sure, but forward none-the-less.
Should an Ambassador be penalized because their job, family, other
interests are requiring more time than they used to and they can't spend as
much time with the community?
I've read this thread throughout and say ++ to a mentor system, ++ to having
published milestones/events mentors encourage new ambassadors to complete.
I am completely opposed to these milestones being required to be called an
Ambassador. I am opposed to having different adjectives applied to
Ambassadors like provisional, probational, prospect, etc. that would
indicate to someone outside the community that the participant is anything
less than what they are, a volunteer, a proponent, and a member of the
Fedora community dedicated toward spreading the good tidings of Fedora.
-Scott
aka StabbyMc
8:22 p.m.
Well, after reading the thread, I would like to give my supports to the
ideas of mentor system and opposition to others.
The mentor system will help enlarging our team, and more effective freshers.
And other 2 will do harm to our goal, in my idea. Why we want to divide the
people here into several groups, and puting a tag(idler, nobleman, etc) on
their head? Maybe the start point of this advice is good. It's just like a
online game, the guy starts as a cotton garments, and he wants to be a great
man with his hard-working. But, But, this is a community, not a online game.
Also the standards, it's too general to be used to rank a score. It's
excepted that after the purging, then in short time, a noisy, disorderly
fight or quarrel will start again about the ranking.
2009/3/28 scott mcbrien <smcbrien(a)gmail.com>
On Fri, Mar 27, 2009 at 6:08 PM, Mani A <a.mani.cms(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> Quality of Ambassadors:
>
> I think the best way to measure it is through a simple credit system.
>
> 1. a.) Ambassador /prospective ambassador reads *important* article
> (Only some articles may be eligible for credit)
> b.) Prospective ambassador answers related multiple choice questions
> c.) If a minimum score of 90% is not attained, then the candidate
> goes through the whole process again.
>
> On successful completion, candidate gets 1 credit or some credit.
>
> 2. a.) Ambassador/prospective ambassador contributes X no of commits
> to a Fedora project.
>
> We know plenty of inefficient code metrics. Based on a less
> inefficient one we give some credit to the candidate.
>
> Only exceptionally hard working programmers should be able to become
> ambassadors based on their code contribution alone.
>
> 3. Ambassador /prospective ambassador writes a article in
>
> This is getting long.
> Shall I make a wiki page for the evaluation system?
>
>
> Best
>
> A. Mani
>
>
> --
> A. Mani
> Member, Cal. Math. Soc
Ok, I have a problem with a ranking or evaluation system. It's one thing
to have a mentee period, because I think we can all agree that the current
program lacks an effective onboarding strategy for getting want-to-be
Ambassadors involved.
The kind of system proposed above reminds me of why I quit playing World of
Warcraft. For those of you who don't play Massively Multiplayer Online Role
Playing Games (MMORPGs) I apologize in advance if the analogy doesn't make
sense. I was in a pretty decent sized guild but then they started a ranking
system where points were awarded for participation in 5 hour long dungeon
raids. I had other interests, and a job, and a myriad of other things that
occupied my time. Before I knew it, I was so behind the points eight ball
that it was pointless for me to play because I'd never be able to redeem
enough points to get whatever it is one redeems points for.
Having a points or ranking system for Ambassadors will ultimately lead to
the idea that one is a better Ambassador than another because they have more
points, regardless of how passionate the Ambassador is. Having ranks is
detrimental to the point that Fedora is a community, moving together
forward, in an inharmonious cacophony to be sure, but forward none-the-less.
Should an Ambassador be penalized because their job, family, other
interests are requiring more time than they used to and they can't spend as
much time with the community?
I've read this thread throughout and say ++ to a mentor system, ++ to
having published milestones/events mentors encourage new ambassadors to
complete. I am completely opposed to these milestones being required to be
called an Ambassador. I am opposed to having different adjectives applied to
Ambassadors like provisional, probational, prospect, etc. that would
indicate to someone outside the community that the participant is anything
less than what they are, a volunteer, a proponent, and a member of the
Fedora community dedicated toward spreading the good tidings of Fedora.
-Scott
aka StabbyMc
--
Fedora-ambassadors-list mailing list
Fedora-ambassadors-list(a)redhat.com
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-ambassadors-list
--
Regards
-----------------------------------------
Aaron, Li
中国北京 Beijing, China
4:38 p.m.
On Sat, Mar 28, 2009 at 3:38 AM, Mani A <a.mani.cms(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I think the best way to measure it is through a simple credit
system.
1. a.) Ambassador /prospective ambassador reads *important* article
(Only some articles may be eligible for credit)
b.) Prospective ambassador answers related multiple choice questions
c.) If a minimum score of 90% is not attained, then the candidate
goes through the whole process again.
On successful completion, candidate gets 1 credit or some credit.
Bad bad idea. As others said, Fedora is a community and not a
corporate. So there should not be any rankings but only arying degree
of responsibilities which is decided in the process itself.
2. a.) Ambassador/prospective ambassador contributes X no of
commits
to a Fedora project.
A lot of people I know who do not commit code, but are
exceptionally
good ambassadors (I don't want to start giving examples).
Only exceptionally hard working programmers should be able to become
ambassadors based on their code contribution alone.
What if the person is extremely smart and outgoing and diplomatic and
has all those other qualities that makes him just perfect for te ob of
an ambassador, only ting he lacks is that he is management student and
knows noting about programming.Should he be denied the opportunity to
contribute.
3. Ambassador /prospective ambassador writes a article in
This is getting long.
Shall I make a wiki page for the evaluation system?
IMHO you should wait for some more responses before you decide to
invest your valuable time.
Please don't get the idea that I am against mentoring or sponsoring. I
strongly support it. I only wanted to put forward to you my
understanding of the matter in hand.
Regards
--
Rangeen Basu Roy Chowdhury
Fedora Ambassador
sherry151(a)gmail.com
5:20 p.m.
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On Sun, Mar 29, 2009 at 3:08 AM, Rangeen Basu <sherry151(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Sat, Mar 28, 2009 at 3:38 AM, Mani A <a.mani.cms(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
> I think the best way to measure it is through a simple credit system.
>
> 1. a.) Ambassador /prospective ambassador reads *important* article
> (Only some articles may be eligible for credit)
> b.) Prospective ambassador answers related multiple choice questions
> c.) If a minimum score of 90% is not attained, then the candidate
> goes through the whole process again.
>
> On successful completion, candidate gets 1 credit or some credit.
Bad bad idea. As others said, Fedora is a community and not a
corporate. So there should not be any rankings but only arying degree
of responsibilities which is decided in the process itself.
The main goal is to ensure standards. So we can always put the end result in
subjective terms. We should use as many technologies as is possible.
Communities
should know how to develop their own standards.
How do you propose to ensure that a prospective ambassador is
sufficiently capable and understands things?
Mentors can not find the time for all the spoon feeding.
> 2. a.) Ambassador/prospective ambassador contributes X no of
commits
> to a Fedora project.
A lot of people I know who do not commit code, but are exceptionally
good ambassadors (I don't want to start giving examples).
> Only exceptionally hard working programmers should be able to become
> ambassadors based on their code contribution alone.
What if the person is extremely smart and outgoing and diplomatic and
has all those other qualities that makes him just perfect for te ob of
an ambassador, only ting he lacks is that he is management student and
knows noting about programming.Should he be denied the opportunity to
contribute.
You have misunderstood the point. The proposal is 'Code contribution
alone should not sufficient'.
I have just started with the 'specs'.
Please don't get the idea that I am against mentoring or
sponsoring. I
strongly support it. I only wanted to put forward to you my
understanding of the matter in hand.
I am also not against mentoring. This system can be useful in both situations.
It is difficult for mentors to ensure that 'prospective ambassador is
sufficiently knowledgeable'.
But mentors can be very useful in helping with organisation and
implementation of programmes.
Best
A. Mani
--
A. Mani
Member, Cal. Math. Soc
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9:47 p.m.
On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 4:18 AM, Max Spevack <mspevack(a)redhat.com> wrote:
Hi all,
I warn you in advance that this is a very long email.
There's been a discussion on famsco-list for the last week and a half now,
and I volunteered to try to summarize some of that conversation, so that we
could move it to fedora-ambassadors-list.
Wow! This took some serious effort Max and I really appreciate it.
Helping the ambassador community understand the work that FAmSCo is
undertaking and giving us the opportunity to contribute to the end
result is really a great thing for the community.
My response might be longer than yours so please bear with me. All
comments below are intended to just let you know the way I'm thinking
about these issues. I don't expect you to adopt them, just give them
some consideration and make your best decision after suffering through
what you are about to suffer through. :).
The main topics of the discussion center around these three points:
* Purging of inactive Ambassadors
* Mentoring
* Raising the standard for membership
===
The thread was started by David Nalley, and his initial email brought up the
following:
The "probation" idea for Fedora Ambassadors is flawed, and can be improved.
Improving it will help raise the overall quality and effectiveness of
Fedora Ambassadors. In particular, David advocated for the following:
1) Fixed term for probation should go away, and be replaced with a specific
set of tasks that need to be achieved.
2) If someone makes no progress in X amount of time, we purge them from the
system. If they are making progress, then give as much time as is needed.
3) New Ambassadors should immediately be given a mentor -- a specific name
of an Ambassador in their region.
To help you understand my thoughts on all this I'd like to begin by
describing the roles of mentor and sponsor as I'll be using them since
I don't think everyone agrees on what these roles are currently. Oh,
heck, let's just visit a dictionary for this.
Mentor:
(1) A wise and trusted counselor or teacher.
Sponsor:
(1) One who assumes responsibility for another person or a group
during a period of instruction, apprenticeship, or probation.
(2) One who vouches for the suitability of a candidate for admission.
Given these common definitions, I think in the early stages of
membership we want to pair up in some fashion a new ambassador (or a
new candidate to become an ambassador) with a sponsor. The role of the
sponsor would be to help guide the candidate through the process and
in my opinion should culminate in the sponsor recommending the
candidate for admission to the group. There should be some at least
loosely defined criteria for anyone recommended by a sponsor that
should include basic grokking of free software and the philosophy of
Fedora. This doesn't need to be a high bar but just some minimal
understanding of key issues demonstrated by the candidate.
kital has been performing the guidance function for all new
ambassadors and we should relieve him of some of that burden.
Once admitted to the group as an ambassador we should help the new
ambassador find a mentor for longer term, deeper help. This often
might end up being the same person as the sponsor if they hit it off
well. But it could be anyone the ambassador trusts and is comfortable
working with who can volunteer the time to help this ambassador. I'm
not sure all sponsors would be able to provide deep mentoring to
everyone they sponsor. That is asking a lot I think.
4) Current restrictions on getting resources as an Ambassador while
on
probation should go away, and be replaced with "at your mentor's
discretion".
Max's note #1: This begins to lay out what looks like a more formal
sponsorship process for Ambassadors, which is similar to the sort of thing
that happens in the Fedora Package Maintainers community.
Max's note #2: As Fedora Ambassadors continues to grow, a sponsorship
process becomes more and more critical, and Package Maintainers has set a
good example and precedent.
I agree with this and think we should bite the bullet and just set up
a sponsorship system now.
===
Francesco Ugolini commented that we want to continue to ensure that
resources are managed regionally (which is consistent with David's
proposal), and that one important task will be to ensure that *whatever* the
requirements are on new people who want to join Ambassadors, it be as clear,
and as internationalized, as possible.
Max's note #3: In Ambassadors in particular, it's important for us to try to
simplify and clarify policy as much as possible. The number of languages on
our list and in our sub-project is very large, even compared to other parts
of Fedora (perhaps with the exception of Localization).
===
Thomas Canniot expressed concerns with the mentorship idea. He was not
"against" it, but wanted more discussion and some "convincing".
Now I'm going to list the three points that Thomas made, as well as some of
the conversation that came after each of these points in the email thread.
(1) There are two types of Ambassadors -- the already-active Ambassadors
around the world who don't need any mentorship, and the Ambassadors who do
need mentorship and guidance.
I don't feel like an old ambassador but some might classify as such
and I still feel like I could use mentoring. We can all benefit from
the wisdom of Max and others who understand our community far deeper
than we do.
David Nalley responded to this point by saying that some of the
older
Ambassadors didn't have anything like a mentor and had to figure out and
build the current structure by trial and error. Now that we have a chance
to be more efficient with training and mentorship, shouldn't we take that
opportunity?
David said that he'd categorize Ambassadors instead as "those who take
ownership of something" and "those who don't know that they *can* take
ownership of something", and that we want to move people from the second
group into the first group.
He also went on to say (and I'm adding in a bit of my own thoughts here
also) that one of the goals of the Ambassadors project needs to be ensuring
that new Ambassadors realize quickly that they play a crucial role in
Fedora, and that they have tremendous power to represent Fedora, and that it
is also very important that Ambassadors understand and believe in the main
principles of Fedora -- the four foundations, for example, and what they
mean.
And this is exactly the sort of thing I really want the sponsor to
"sign off on" when recommending a new ambassador to the group.
(2) We don't need mentorship until the growth of Ambassadors
slows down.
Max's note #4: I think the rate at which we are getting new Ambassadors
clearly demonstrates that mentorship is needed now, because QUALITY is far
more important than QUANTITY. I don't want to be signing up new Ambassadors
if only 1 in 10 is developing into true stars and leaders in the Ambassadors
community.
(3) Adding in mentorship and sponsorship suggests that we don't believe
people can reach the same level of success as some of the older Ambassadors
without help, and that is disappointing.
Max's note #5: Personally, I disagree with this. The ability to have a
mentor or a sponsor (who serves as a mentor) is a luxury, not a sign of
lack-of-confidence.
As David Nalley said: "The Ambassadors are representatives of the Fedora
Project; They are the spokespeople and the public face for Fedora. What
concerns me is that we essentially have these representatives that may know
precious little about Fedora and free software, and the penchant for
misrepresenting is high. I personally like our low barrier to entry. At the
same time I think that it is incumbent upon us (FAmSCo) to provide the
background education to the uninitiated if we are serious about our
responsibilities the Ambassadors project and plant to continue having a low
barrier to entry.
I could not agree with this statement more. I think this is really the
key to making sure we have quality ambassadors in the future.
As has been noted previously in this email, the Package Maintainers
team
provides an excellent example of this, as does the Art team.
The Art team does a stupendous job of reinforcing core values in their
contributor base.
===
Joerg Simon responded with an email promoting the virtues of mentoring, with
specific examples from his own time in Fedora, both the people who helped to
mentor him (Chitlesh & Gerold) as well as the people who he has helped to
mentor (Mirlan & Thibault). "Trust and Mentoring is the Key!", says
Joerg,
and I agree with him.
David Nalley notes that we don't want to devalue what it means to be a
Fedora Ambassador by not having enough structure. Max adds that it is not
simply enough to say "I think Fedora is great!" but rather that Ambassadors
serve a specific, and crucial role in our community. We give our
Ambassadors tremendous amounts of freedom and trust to be the public face of
Fedora, and therefore there is a requirement to provide some level of
"quality control" and oversight.
In short, Fedora Ambassadors is not a social club.
===
A specific proposed action by Joerg is to clean up the FAS group for Fedora
Ambassadors.
David Nalley agreed, saying:
"This is an ideal time to do so - with the recent password reset I'd guess
that 30% or more of the people in the Ambassador fas group have their fas
account inactive due to failing to change their password. I'd argue that we
should give them 30 days (~April 6th iirc) and if their account is still
inactive in FAS we should jettison them. They clearly aren't active if they
haven't had to use their fedora account (or missing the fedora email addy)
over a period of 30 days. That's a better indication IMO than any 'I'm
here'
message."
Susmit and Francesco both gave a +1 to this, as did Rodrigo, who went a step
further and said that in LATAM, he plans to have a personal conversation
with all people who want to be Ambassadors.
The only thing that continues to bother me about this is the nagging
feeling that we are changing the rules on ambassadors without giving
them reasonable warning. Some people probably very seldom log into FAS
and figure they will change it when they next have a reason to login.
Even I had no idea that by not changing it (I did change it but
probably read the warnings with about the same level of care as most
people) my account would be flagged as inactive.
===
A specific proposal for a FAmSCo vote was suggested by David:
""That FAmSCo direct the Ambassador Membership Service to request from
Infrastructure a list of all users who are Ambassadors and whose account has
remained inactive for a period of greater than 30 days after a password
reset, and further that FAmSCo direct the Membership Service to purge said
users from the Ambassadors list"
Fedora Infrastructure ran a query for us, which showed that of the 772
Ambassadors in FAS, 300 were inactive based on the statement above.
Max's note #6: For me, this sets off major alarm bells, and goes back to the
idea of quantity versus quality. The Ambassadors numbers grow, but they are
inflated because most of the people are joining the group because they want
to basically join the Fedora Fan Club, and this is the closest thing that we
have to that, but the purpose of Ambassadors is not to be a Fan Club.
Thomas Canniot agreed that this set off alarm bells for him to, and conceded
that some cleanup of the FAS group is clearly necessary. Susmit notes that a
mixture of automated and manual cleanup processes would be the best, to
prevent false positives or other mistakes that could lead to hurting the
feelings of an important community member.
Joerg states that he is in favor of cleaning up inactive accounts, and
coupling that with a higher barrier to entry for the Ambassadors project.
David agrees, and wonders why we are taking so long to make what seems like
an obviously right decision.
Francesco notes that a decision is made, but that another opportunity for
full discussion among Ambassadors is required, which is what this email that
I have been writing attempts to lay out and summarize.
Wasn't this voted on and settled today?
===
David Nalley notes that Fedora Infrastructure might already be planning some
sort of action for people whose accounts remain inactive past a password
reset, because there is a potential security issue for having dormant
accounts, with various permissions, just sitting around. Perhaps our problem
of inactivity will be solved by a larger problem of inactivity across Fedora
that needs to be addressed.
Max's note #7: Solving the inactivity problem and the mentorship problem are
two different things!!!
===
Max's note #8: It seems to me that the actions on the table for FAmSCo to
ultimately deal with are:
(1) Dealing with inactive accounts, either within our sub-project itself or
within the whole of Fedora Infrastructure.
(2) Reforming our barriers-to-entry and sponsorship process to remove time
limits, but to require specific actions and a show of progress.
(3) Putting together a mentorship/sponsorship system similar to that of
Package Maintainers.
Thanks again for this great summary Max. And thanks to everyone on
FAmSCo who takes the time to read and consider the ideas that
percolate up from the community.
John
6:58 a.m.
Inline reply follows
On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 10:47 PM, inode0 <inode0(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 4:18 AM, Max Spevack
<mspevack(a)redhat.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I warn you in advance that this is a very long email.
>
> There's been a discussion on famsco-list for the last week and a half now,
> and I volunteered to try to summarize some of that conversation, so that we
> could move it to fedora-ambassadors-list.
Wow! This took some serious effort Max and I really appreciate it.
Helping the ambassador community understand the work that FAmSCo is
undertaking and giving us the opportunity to contribute to the end
result is really a great thing for the community.
My response might be longer than yours so please bear with me. All
comments below are intended to just let you know the way I'm thinking
about these issues. I don't expect you to adopt them, just give them
some consideration and make your best decision after suffering through
what you are about to suffer through. :).
Hi John - I appreciate the thoughtful responses.
Due to the length of your responses I printed them out, read through
them a few times, and marked up my copies.
> The main topics of the discussion center around these three points:
>
> * Purging of inactive Ambassadors
> * Mentoring
> * Raising the standard for membership
>
> ===
>
> The thread was started by David Nalley, and his initial email brought up the
> following:
>
> The "probation" idea for Fedora Ambassadors is flawed, and can be
improved.
> Improving it will help raise the overall quality and effectiveness of
> Fedora Ambassadors. In particular, David advocated for the following:
>
> 1) Fixed term for probation should go away, and be replaced with a specific
> set of tasks that need to be achieved.
>
> 2) If someone makes no progress in X amount of time, we purge them from the
> system. If they are making progress, then give as much time as is needed.
>
> 3) New Ambassadors should immediately be given a mentor -- a specific name
> of an Ambassador in their region.
To help you understand my thoughts on all this I'd like to begin by
describing the roles of mentor and sponsor as I'll be using them since
I don't think everyone agrees on what these roles are currently. Oh,
heck, let's just visit a dictionary for this.
Excellent idea - does us no good if we have a discussion but don't
have a common reference.
Mentor:
(1) A wise and trusted counselor or teacher.
Sponsor:
(1) One who assumes responsibility for another person or a group
during a period of instruction, apprenticeship, or probation.
(2) One who vouches for the suitability of a candidate for admission.
Given these common definitions, I think in the early stages of
membership we want to pair up in some fashion a new ambassador (or a
new candidate to become an ambassador) with a sponsor. The role of the
sponsor would be to help guide the candidate through the process and
in my opinion should culminate in the sponsor recommending the
candidate for admission to the group. There should be some at least
loosely defined criteria for anyone recommended by a sponsor that
should include basic grokking of free software and the philosophy of
Fedora. This doesn't need to be a high bar but just some minimal
understanding of key issues demonstrated by the candidate.
So my concern here is the shear number of applicants and thus
workload. Unfortunately due to some of the privacy concerns, people
outside of FAmSCo don't see the volumes of people we already reject.
based on their failure to follow directions and complete things like
User:foo pages. I don't have exact numbers though I am sure Joerg
could provide them, but my feeling is that for every approved
Ambassador there are four applicants. Immediately funneling them to a
sponsor will rapidly overload our sponsors I fear.
kital has been performing the guidance function for all new
ambassadors and we should relieve him of some of that burden.
Once admitted to the group as an ambassador we should help the new
ambassador find a mentor for longer term, deeper help. This often
might end up being the same person as the sponsor if they hit it off
well. But it could be anyone the ambassador trusts and is comfortable
working with who can volunteer the time to help this ambassador. I'm
not sure all sponsors would be able to provide deep mentoring to
everyone they sponsor. That is asking a lot I think.
> 4) Current restrictions on getting resources as an Ambassador while on
> probation should go away, and be replaced with "at your mentor's
> discretion".
>
> Max's note #1: This begins to lay out what looks like a more formal
> sponsorship process for Ambassadors, which is similar to the sort of thing
> that happens in the Fedora Package Maintainers community.
>
> Max's note #2: As Fedora Ambassadors continues to grow, a sponsorship
> process becomes more and more critical, and Package Maintainers has set a
> good example and precedent.
I agree with this and think we should bite the bullet and just set up
a sponsorship system now.
Just to ensure that we are all on the same page. The packaging
sponsorship process often takes months, esp for a newcomer who doesn't
know the people involved. Not saying that this is a bad thing, but
it's a marked difference from where we are today, and want to make
sure that people understand some of the shift we are talking about.
> ===
>
> Francesco Ugolini commented that we want to continue to ensure that
> resources are managed regionally (which is consistent with David's
> proposal), and that one important task will be to ensure that *whatever* the
> requirements are on new people who want to join Ambassadors, it be as clear,
> and as internationalized, as possible.
>
> Max's note #3: In Ambassadors in particular, it's important for us to try to
> simplify and clarify policy as much as possible. The number of languages on
> our list and in our sub-project is very large, even compared to other parts
> of Fedora (perhaps with the exception of Localization).
>
> ===
>
> Thomas Canniot expressed concerns with the mentorship idea. He was not
> "against" it, but wanted more discussion and some "convincing".
>
> Now I'm going to list the three points that Thomas made, as well as some of
> the conversation that came after each of these points in the email thread.
>
> (1) There are two types of Ambassadors -- the already-active Ambassadors
> around the world who don't need any mentorship, and the Ambassadors who do
> need mentorship and guidance.
I don't feel like an old ambassador but some might classify as such
and I still feel like I could use mentoring. We can all benefit from
the wisdom of Max and others who understand our community far deeper
than we do.
> David Nalley responded to this point by saying that some of the older
> Ambassadors didn't have anything like a mentor and had to figure out and
> build the current structure by trial and error. Now that we have a chance
> to be more efficient with training and mentorship, shouldn't we take that
> opportunity?
>
> David said that he'd categorize Ambassadors instead as "those who take
> ownership of something" and "those who don't know that they *can* take
> ownership of something", and that we want to move people from the second
> group into the first group.
>
> He also went on to say (and I'm adding in a bit of my own thoughts here
> also) that one of the goals of the Ambassadors project needs to be ensuring
> that new Ambassadors realize quickly that they play a crucial role in
> Fedora, and that they have tremendous power to represent Fedora, and that it
> is also very important that Ambassadors understand and believe in the main
> principles of Fedora -- the four foundations, for example, and what they
> mean.
And this is exactly the sort of thing I really want the sponsor to
"sign off on" when recommending a new ambassador to the group.
> (2) We don't need mentorship until the growth of Ambassadors slows down.
>
> Max's note #4: I think the rate at which we are getting new Ambassadors
> clearly demonstrates that mentorship is needed now, because QUALITY is far
> more important than QUANTITY. I don't want to be signing up new Ambassadors
> if only 1 in 10 is developing into true stars and leaders in the Ambassadors
> community.
>
> (3) Adding in mentorship and sponsorship suggests that we don't believe
> people can reach the same level of success as some of the older Ambassadors
> without help, and that is disappointing.
>
> Max's note #5: Personally, I disagree with this. The ability to have a
> mentor or a sponsor (who serves as a mentor) is a luxury, not a sign of
> lack-of-confidence.
>
> As David Nalley said: "The Ambassadors are representatives of the Fedora
> Project; They are the spokespeople and the public face for Fedora. What
> concerns me is that we essentially have these representatives that may know
> precious little about Fedora and free software, and the penchant for
> misrepresenting is high. I personally like our low barrier to entry. At the
> same time I think that it is incumbent upon us (FAmSCo) to provide the
> background education to the uninitiated if we are serious about our
> responsibilities the Ambassadors project and plant to continue having a low
> barrier to entry.
I could not agree with this statement more. I think this is really the
key to making sure we have quality ambassadors in the future.
> As has been noted previously in this email, the Package Maintainers team
> provides an excellent example of this, as does the Art team.
The Art team does a stupendous job of reinforcing core values in their
contributor base.
> ===
>
> Joerg Simon responded with an email promoting the virtues of mentoring, with
> specific examples from his own time in Fedora, both the people who helped to
> mentor him (Chitlesh & Gerold) as well as the people who he has helped to
> mentor (Mirlan & Thibault). "Trust and Mentoring is the Key!", says
Joerg,
> and I agree with him.
>
> David Nalley notes that we don't want to devalue what it means to be a
> Fedora Ambassador by not having enough structure. Max adds that it is not
> simply enough to say "I think Fedora is great!" but rather that
Ambassadors
> serve a specific, and crucial role in our community. We give our
> Ambassadors tremendous amounts of freedom and trust to be the public face of
> Fedora, and therefore there is a requirement to provide some level of
> "quality control" and oversight.
>
> In short, Fedora Ambassadors is not a social club.
>
> ===
>
> A specific proposed action by Joerg is to clean up the FAS group for Fedora
> Ambassadors.
>
> David Nalley agreed, saying:
>
> "This is an ideal time to do so - with the recent password reset I'd guess
> that 30% or more of the people in the Ambassador fas group have their fas
> account inactive due to failing to change their password. I'd argue that we
> should give them 30 days (~April 6th iirc) and if their account is still
> inactive in FAS we should jettison them. They clearly aren't active if they
> haven't had to use their fedora account (or missing the fedora email addy)
> over a period of 30 days. That's a better indication IMO than any 'I'm
here'
> message."
>
> Susmit and Francesco both gave a +1 to this, as did Rodrigo, who went a step
> further and said that in LATAM, he plans to have a personal conversation
> with all people who want to be Ambassadors.
The only thing that continues to bother me about this is the nagging
feeling that we are changing the rules on ambassadors without giving
them reasonable warning. Some people probably very seldom log into FAS
and figure they will change it when they next have a reason to login.
Even I had no idea that by not changing it (I did change it but
probably read the warnings with about the same level of care as most
people) my account would be flagged as inactive.
> ===
>
> A specific proposal for a FAmSCo vote was suggested by David:
>
> ""That FAmSCo direct the Ambassador Membership Service to request from
> Infrastructure a list of all users who are Ambassadors and whose account has
> remained inactive for a period of greater than 30 days after a password
> reset, and further that FAmSCo direct the Membership Service to purge said
> users from the Ambassadors list"
>
> Fedora Infrastructure ran a query for us, which showed that of the 772
> Ambassadors in FAS, 300 were inactive based on the statement above.
>
> Max's note #6: For me, this sets off major alarm bells, and goes back to the
> idea of quantity versus quality. The Ambassadors numbers grow, but they are
> inflated because most of the people are joining the group because they want
> to basically join the Fedora Fan Club, and this is the closest thing that we
> have to that, but the purpose of Ambassadors is not to be a Fan Club.
>
> Thomas Canniot agreed that this set off alarm bells for him to, and conceded
> that some cleanup of the FAS group is clearly necessary. Susmit notes that a
> mixture of automated and manual cleanup processes would be the best, to
> prevent false positives or other mistakes that could lead to hurting the
> feelings of an important community member.
>
> Joerg states that he is in favor of cleaning up inactive accounts, and
> coupling that with a higher barrier to entry for the Ambassadors project.
> David agrees, and wonders why we are taking so long to make what seems like
> an obviously right decision.
>
> Francesco notes that a decision is made, but that another opportunity for
> full discussion among Ambassadors is required, which is what this email that
> I have been writing attempts to lay out and summarize.
Wasn't this voted on and settled today?
> ===
>
> David Nalley notes that Fedora Infrastructure might already be planning some
> sort of action for people whose accounts remain inactive past a password
> reset, because there is a potential security issue for having dormant
> accounts, with various permissions, just sitting around. Perhaps our problem
> of inactivity will be solved by a larger problem of inactivity across Fedora
> that needs to be addressed.
>
> Max's note #7: Solving the inactivity problem and the mentorship problem are
> two different things!!!
>
> ===
>
> Max's note #8: It seems to me that the actions on the table for FAmSCo to
> ultimately deal with are:
>
> (1) Dealing with inactive accounts, either within our sub-project itself or
> within the whole of Fedora Infrastructure.
>
> (2) Reforming our barriers-to-entry and sponsorship process to remove time
> limits, but to require specific actions and a show of progress.
>
> (3) Putting together a mentorship/sponsorship system similar to that of
> Package Maintainers.
Thanks again for this great summary Max. And thanks to everyone on
FAmSCo who takes the time to read and consider the ideas that
percolate up from the community.
John
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45 comments
26 participants
participants (26)
-
A. Mani -
Aaron, Li -
Brian Powell -
Clint Savage -
David Nalley -
Ewan Luca -
Francesco Ugolini -
Heherson Pagcaliwagan -
Indigo196 -
inode0 -
Jason Benedict Low -
Joerg Simon -
Jose Manimala -
Mathieu Bridon -
Max Spevack -
Morpheus . . -
Neville A. Cross -
Paul Mellors -
Rachit Gupta -
Rangeen Basu -
Roy Ong -
Satyajit Ranjeev -
Scott McBrien -
Shakthi Kannan -
Shambo Bose -
susmit shannigrahi