2017-08-16 13:05 GMT+02:00 Brian Exelbierd <bex(a)pobox.com>:
I wanted to forward a story I received privately, that I am sharing
with
the permission of the sender: (additional responses inline)
---
Hi, Brian. I was browsing the ambassadors(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
mailing list and saw your thread.[1] Having recently tried to contact
the ambassadors, I thought I had some useful information to share.
I initially found out about the ambassadors under the "Speaking
about The Fedora Project" section of this press material page.[2] The
instructions to contact the ambassadors simply led me to the Ambassadors
page[3] with only the mailing list and IRC channel mentioned as means of
communication.
I wondered whether I should post to the list or not, since it "is a
private list for Fedora Ambassadors."[4] But since the press material
page led me to the list, I attempted to join & post a message. Even
though the site acknowledged the confirmation of my e-mail address, my
message to the list never got posted and I have not received any other
posts to the list.
I finally reached out to the ambassadors on IRC. It took a few
hours for someone to acknowledge my message.
So yes, the process of contacting an ambassador really does need
improved! Kudos to you for starting that conversation!
[
1]<https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/ambassadors@lists.
fedoraproject.org/thread/IMZUGU4TFMD2G2ZMZVX75DT7GK3TZHZE/>
[
2]<http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_press_material#
Speaking_about_The_Fedora_Project>
[
3]<http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ambassadors>
[
4]<https://lists.fedoraproject.org/admin/lists/ambassadors.lists.
fedoraproject.org/>
---
I think we already agreed we need to improve that, although the Press
Material page is rather special and I am not sure how many users go through
it at first.
On Fri, Aug 11, 2017, at 01:57 PM, Robert Mayr wrote:
2017-08-11 1:05 GMT+02:00 charles profitt <fedora(a)cprofitt.com>:
On Thu, 2017-08-10 at 09:40 +0200, Robert Mayr wrote:
[snip]
> A contact form on a one pager can do that, but I'm not sure if the
> process then doesn't get stuck within the list.
I agree that it might still get stuck, but I like making one single
point of contact for the people seeking to work with the community.
Yes, definitely.
Would FAmSCo be the right body to drive this?
Well, I see this as a good example of the Mindshare initiative, where
websites (with Infra) and design can then probably make this happen.
> All ambassadors listed in that page are set as active in the FAS
> account. We have a script which runs at least daily and lists all
> active ambassadors sorting them by country code.
> If they respond or not is another thing.
What determine active in the FAS account?
People can set themselves as inactive, but no subgroup has actually a rule
to deactivate accounts.
FAmSCo runs a script from time to time to remove inactive ambassadors
directly from the FAS group. They will not show up in the list.
Should we set some criteria for marking an ambassador inactive (after some
conversation with them)? I would be in favor of something soft and easy
like, "Every ambassador is emailed every 6 months and asked to reply with
what they've been up to for the last 6 months. If there is no response
received in 2 weeks they are marked inactive. If someone replies within 6
weeks they are automatically moved back to active. If a reply is received
after 6 weeks the person has to petition for reactivation"
1) Can you define active and inactive? It's quite impossible, when speaking
about ambassadors. We discussed this for the last months and even years,
and came up with the following process, which seems to make happy all
ambassador for now:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ambassadors/MembershipService#Inactive_Amb...
It is a first step, we can make this even every 12 months, but I'm not sure
if we should shorten the time period more. We want to have ambassadors and
should not be too severe when removing them.
Generally speaking the requests to become ambassador have decreased.
2) Infra raised many concerns about setting accounts as inactive, and even
the Council didn't approve any general rule to set accounts as inactive,
because this would have many other consequences on other groups. That's
also the reason why we remove people from the FAS group rather than setting
them as inactive. Every person removed from the FAS group can re-apply if
he wants to contribute again (see our rules above).
The idea is that we get an easy process that gives us valuable data about
what is going on. This also avoids having to discuss whether it is
possible to be an active ambassador and never generate a fedmsg. The 2/6
week timeframe is to prejudice toward marking people inactive to give
better customer service to inquiries but make it easy to move people back
to active if by chance they were offline during the two week inquiry
period. The after 6 week you need to be reviewed gives us the chance to
figure out why someone disappeared with seemingly no notice for 6 weeks and
how they approach being an ambassador. The idea is not to create a high
bar for reactivation or to create a lot of administrivia.
Again, ambassadors' activity is not measurable with valuable data. There
are too many ways to do the work, although I agree that if an ambassador
never logs into a Fedora system (fedmsg) for more than 12 months, he will
not be able to make a good job, because his knowledge is probably outdated.
Too many things happen in 12 months in Fedora world.
From a management perspective, I believe we should not poll everyone at
once. Instead, key the 6 month dates off the date someone was added to the
ambassador group. This should make it a manageable workload.
A cool way to do this would be to create a Pagure repo and use issues.
This way what people are doing is highly visible as is whether they
responded or not. Automation could be written to open issues automatically
and assign them to the right people.
I don't think ambassadors will interact much with pagure just for their
state. It is hard already to get any feedback or update even in the
fama-mentors pagure...
> > It would be fantastic to have a system that listed the state,
> > region, etc of an ambassador (assuming they are willing). It would
> > also be helpful if the list could dynamically tie in to the FAS
> > account system to know if an ambassador logged in to their account
> > in the last 'x' period of time to show as active or inactive.
>
> In the past we used to have the ambassadors map [1], and it is still
> active, but people need to set their exact location in the FAS
> account in order to appear on that map. Actually only few ambassadors
> did that. Even this map is updated daily with a script.
>
> [1]
https://fedoraproject.org/membership-map/ambassadors.html
>
That map is fantastic. Do all ambassadors know about the need to fill
out their location?
Well, the map has some issues and is really slow. The script is in the
FAmA pagure repo, but I don't have actually ideas how we can make it better.
And no, specially new ambassadors probably are not aware of the existence
of this map.
I made a proposal some years ago to make this like mozilla (we have some
mozilla ambassadors between us)
https://reps.mozilla.org/people/#/
I also tried, as the repo is on github, to rebuild it locally in order to
make something similar for Fedora, and because I made this question to
myself 5 years ago...
There is a map, you can easily make researches or just look on the map who
is nearest to you. Not only that, you will get all information of the
ambassador, like contact, events, activity etc etc...
Unfortunately I was not able to rebuild it, even after some hacks, but I
don't remember why I failed (not really sure, but IIRC it's all django, so
that would be easy).
Could we start with text and not let map be a blocker? I think we could
probably get the map easily once we have a clean list and the data (state,
location, specificity, etc.).
My statement was just to say what I tried to do in the past, and give some
insight where the issues might be, not to declare the map a blocker. Yes,
we can make a map if we have data, but we haven't data at all.
Also, someone needs to write the map application as the actual is not
working well and I wouldn't continue with that script.
It was during FLOCK 2013, and we talked about Hubs and agreed this should
be something we want to have in the ambassador page, but Hubs still didn't
land and so we are in the same situation as 4 years ago.
agreed that we should not wait on hubs but should be ready to use it when
it launches.
That's true, and I think we are ready to use it for many other things too.
I think we could wait after Flock to know where we are with hubs, and see
if we can discuss things in the ambassador session too, probably we are
able to find some helping hands to make happen the things we all are
looking for.
regards,
bex
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Regards.
--
Robert Mayr
(robyduck)