Signature Events Strategy for 2017 (Part II: FUDCon)
by Brian Exelbierd
Warning: This email is long. I don't know how to avoid that. I
debated making this a wiki, but I think we need more discussion that
just editing. There is no tl;dr. If you want a tl;dr perhaps you
should wait a while and participate near the end of the conversation.
Warning: The opening text is the same for both Part I and Part II.
During 2016 I had the privilege of helping to plan and execute Flock
and attended both FUDCon LATAM (Puno) and FUDCon APAC (Phnom Penh).
Talking to people has led to me to believe that these events may not be
meeting all of our goals. Specifically we are spending a lot of time
and money on them and may not be getting our full value. I also heard
a lot of comments about how the events are not equal from people who
thought they should be and not well distributed across the world from
people who thought they should be. This led me to believe that there
is a lot of confusion about why we do these events and what we want out
of them.
In the spirit of it is easier to edit than to create, I am going to
propose some ideas. My goal is less to present this as a polished
proposal ready for a vote and more to allow us to have a discussion
around the finer points of the events strategy. It would be nice to see
this discussion come to an end by the end of March so that it can have
impact this year. The planning for Flock will begin soon (see my
another of my emails today) but the FUDCon processes are not heavily
started, as far as I can tell.
Additionally, while history is important, I think it is equally
important that we consider what we want to accomplish today and in the
next few years, not just what we tried to accomplish in the past.
Therefore, I've written this without too much reference to what is being
changed and instead as an idea of what we should be doing. I look
forward to folks bringing forward suggestions for continuing activities
from the past or better incorporating lessons learned that I may have
missed.
I look forward to your feedback and input.
regards,
bex
# FUDCon
As mentioned above, I attended both FUDCons in 2016. These are the only
two FUDCons that I have ever attended. I was told by attendees at both
events that while every event is different, these two were fairly
typical in the areas I was concerned with.
FUDCons have been described to me as being for Fedora Users and
Developers (hence the name). What is never clear from the people I've
talked to is what kind of users they think are targeted and whether the
developers are "developers who use Fedora" or "people who develop
(contribute to) Fedora." Both events this year were held in partnership
with Universities. Both had large attendances on the first day,
typically when students were incentivized to show up by their faculty
and poor attendance on the non-incentive days. It was unclear that many
people took a lot away from the conference or that there would be
significant follow up activity. These comments are not to single out
the organizers for these FUDCons. They all worked very hard and pulled
off very good events. I just didn't get a feeling that the events had a
lot of impact and changed much in the short or long term.
I believe that for our investment of time, energy, and money in FUDCons
to be successful, the goals of these events must be clarified.
## Structure
I believe we need to remove some of the restrictions we place on these
events, chiefly on where and how often they can be held. Therefore, I
believe we should simply state that FUDCons can be held anywhere in the
world and any number of times that is appropriate. This means that we
can have FUDCons in places like EMEA and NA (which helps to relieve
pressure on Flock).
Additionally, while FUDCons are inherently regional events, I believe
that the Fedora Council should nominally "own" them. This means that
the budget allocation should work like most FADs and be approved by the
budget. I don't think this is a change from current practice.
While I hope that Ambassadors will take the lead in organizing and
running these events, I believe that any contributor should be able to
make a proposal.
Finally, I believe these events do not need to be standalone. I think
they can have greater impact when collocated with other conferences or
run as "+1 days" to other events. While this shouldn't be a
requirement, I think it is a good practice to encourage.
Another challenge for FUDCons that we should remove is to make it easier
to organize them. Once a FUDCon is approved, we need to ensure that we
have enough people and resources engaged to make the event a success.
In the case of Flock we see several core organizers working with the
local organizer to make things happen. FUDCons should be able to rely
on more support from the FCAIC and possibly others to help with
organizational details. We should also see FUDCons being proposed with
robust organizing committees that are appropriate to the size of the
event.
## Goals
It is hard to write a single set of goals for a varied set of events.
Instead, I think that we should consider these in a way that I hope is
similar to how the Ambassadors consider events they attend.
Specifically, I believe that we should be asking the following
questions:
* Who specifically is this event targeting and why? How does this group
align with the target audiences for Fedora?
* What are the specific desired outcomes of this event? How can we see
evidence of achieving these goals? Evidence doesn't need to be
quantitative, it can be qualitative, but you need to have thought
through how you know you were a success.
* Why should we hold a FUDCon in this specific city?
* How will you ensure you attract the right audience and that they are
engaged? What preparatory activities need to happen? How will those
happen? What follow up activities are needed? How will those happen?
* If this FUDCon is collocated, why is this conference or event the
right one to collocate with? If this FUDCon is not collocated, why is
an independent event better?
## Programming
Programming for FUDCons is extremely important. In 2016 one event was
run as a Bar Camp and the other was run as a programmed event at a Bar
Camp. While Bar Camp voting should result in the conference that people
want to attend, that also means that the speakers need to be talking
about topics that matter to the audience. In the case of a programmed
event, this is also critical.
Therefore programming at FUDCons should be based on the goals and target
audience, not just based on which Fedora contributors want to attend.
Ideally the proposal should include the kinds of topics that will be
presented and even a provisional list of speakers who will be
approached.
## Funded Attendance and Costs
To increase the number of activities, we should cleanly divorce FUDCons
from Regional FADs. FUDCons are necessarily a reason to fly in
contributors from all over a region or the world. Let's keep them
locally focused. Depending on the goals and target audience all of the
speakers do not even need to be Fedora contributors. For example, a
non-Fedora contributor speaking about Eclipse (on Fedora) at a developer
focused FUDCon may make a lot of sense.
Therefore I believe that budgets should trend toward the smaller side
with an emphasis on impact being directly related to budget size. To
give some (highly contrived) examples, a +1 day event for FOSDEM may
have a large budget because the event needs good publicity to draw the
huge attendance opportunity from those attending FOSDEM. A +1 day event
for DevConf.cz may have a small budget because we have a friendly
environment for advertising and a ton of local contributors to help with
programming. A +1 day event for FISL may need a medium size budget
because of the need to fly in Spanish speaking presenters for some
sessions. (These are just examples, don't read into them.)
6 years, 8 months
Council Elections - January 2017 - Result announcement
by Jan Kurik
Greetings, all!
The elections for Council - January 2017 have concluded, and the results
are shown below.
Council is electing 1 seats this time.
A total of 260 ballots were cast, meaning a candidate
could accumulate up to 1300 votes (260 * 5).
The results for the elections are as follows:
# votes | name
- --------+----------------------
743 | Robert Mayr (robyduck)
- --------+----------------------
738 | Justin W. Flory (jflory7)
466 | Giannis Konstantinidis (giannisk)
413 | Charles Profitt (cprofitt)
393 | Itamar Reis Peixoto (itamarjp/itamarjp)
Congratulations to the winning candidates, and thank you all
candidates for running this elections!
--
Jan Kuřík
Platform & Fedora Program Manager
Red Hat Czech s.r.o., Purkynova 99/71, 612 45 Brno, Czech Republic
6 years, 8 months
meeting schedule for january
by Matthew Miller
Obviously, no meeting yesterday.
Next week, the 9th, we could either do Tickets & Ongoing *OR*, since
this is the last day of the election campaign period, do a discussion
with any of the candidates for Council who might be available.
Depending on what we do there, the next week will either be Tickets &
Ongoing or Open Floor. (It is a federal holiday in the US, Martin
Luther King Jr. Day, but most people have to work...)
The week after that, I am travelling to Brno for DevConf.cz. The week
after that, I'll be travelling home — I think it'll be similar for a
lot of Council members (hope to see a lot of people in Brno!).
Somewhere in there, we'll get the new seat filled, and we should look
at rescheduling the meetings to better accomodate everyone.
--
Matthew Miller
<mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org>
Fedora Project Leader
6 years, 8 months
Signature Events Strategy for 2017 (Part I: Flock)
by Brian Exelbierd
Warning: This email is long. I don't know how to avoid that. I debated
making this a wiki, but I think we need more discussion that just
editing. There is no tl;dr. If you want a tl;dr perhaps you should
wait a while and participate near the end of the conversation.
Warning: The opening text is the same for both Part I and Part II.
During 2016 I had the privilege of helping to plan and execute Flock and
attended both FUDCon LATAM (Puno) and FUDCon APAC (Phnom Penh). Talking
to people has led to me to believe that these events may not be meeting
all of our goals. Specifically we are spending a lot of time and money
on them and may not be getting our full value. I also heard a lot of
comments about how the events are not equal from people who thought they
should be and not well distributed across the world from people who
thought they should be. This led me to believe that there is a lot of
confusion about why we do these events and what we want out of them.
Since it is easier to edit than to create, I am going to propose some
ideas. My goal is less to present this as a polished proposal ready for
a vote and more to allow us to have a discussion around the finer points
of the events strategy. It would be nice to see this discussion come to
an end by the end of March so that it can have impact this year. The
planning for Flock will begin soon (see my another of my emails today)
but the FUDCon processes are not heavily started, as far as I can tell.
Additionally, while history is important, I think it is equally
important that we consider what we want to accomplish today and in the
next few years, not just what we tried to accomplish in the past.
Therefore I've written this without too much reference to what is being
changed and instead as an idea of what we should be doing. I look
forward to folks bringing forward suggestions for continuing activities
from the past or better incorporating lessons learned that I may have
missed.
I look forward to your feedback and input.
regards,
bex
# Flock
Flock is described by most people to me as the "Fedora Contributor
Conference." Therefore, I'd like to see us put together a structure to
continue to make that statement more and more accurate. If we are going
to have a contributor conference, I think we need to understand why
having one is important. I have been told that we need Flock for these
reason (I am sure I am missing some):
## Goals
* Increased Contributor Bonding - Contributors should meet each other in
person and strengthen their relationships. We are a far-flung remote
community and at times we forget about the person behind the FAS ID.
Fedora works best when we work together.
* Increased Project Cohesion - The Fedora Project is a huge complex set
of moving pieces and fantastic people. At times it can be hard to know
or remember what is going on and what we are working on. Flock should
provide a touchstone to keep all parts of the project interconnected.
* Presentation and Discussion of Large Ideas - Some ideas just aren't
well served by a wiki page and an email thread. When we make major
changes (think rings or editions) we need to talk them over. We need
presentations and forums for face to face discussions.
* Work - Yes, this is what FADs are for, but we can save money and time
if we schedule work sessions in a place where we are already going to
have the right people present (see more later). Flock has been
described by several people as needing to be more of a "do conference"
instead of a "talk conference." I agree that if we are having a
*contributor* conference we should focus on *contribution.*
* Cross-pollination - Having contributors from all over the project in
one place creates the opportunity for a fantastic hallway track
(informal, unplanned conversations and working groups). Problems being
solved in one area may be the answer for problems being discovered in
another. We may find out that we have multiple groups working on the
same problem in different ways and that working together may help (or
conversely allowing them to have a compare/contrast session may help).
## Programming
Moving Flock more toward a "do" conference means that we should change
the way we develop the program. Specifically, I believe that we should
ask people why their talk and workshop proposals should be included in
greater detail.
### Theme
I believe the council should, with community input, set some themes for
each Flock. These themes are not absolutes, but instead should be one
of the many factors considered when looking at programming submissions.
This way we can also help keep Flock focused on doing.
### Talks
Talks will always be part of Flock, however, we can ask a few more
questions to help the committee choose them.
1. How is this talk focused on contributors? Why should contributors
attend it? Which contributors should attend? How will this talk foster
greater contribution to Fedora?
2. If this talk is about a specific piece of software or technology, why
is presenting it at Flock better than presenting it as a Fedora-inspired
talk at another conference?
3. What actions will you be taking as a result of the feedback you
receive on this talk? What actions are you looking for your audience to
take?
### Workshops/HackFests/etc.
We need more focused work and planning sessions. However, for them to
be successful, we need to make sure they are planned for success from
the beginning. Therefore, I believe we should ask questions like this:
1. What specific goals do you have for this session. What is your
specific agenda? What problem(s) are you trying to solve?
2. Who specifically needs to be present in order for the goals of this
session to be met?
3. What activities will be done prior to Flock to ensure success and
that all attendees are ready for this activity?
## Funded Attendance and Costs
I was told by several people that they felt like most non-EMEA and
non-NA contributors were not encouraged to attend Flock. Several people
related stories about how they had been told that because their region
had a FUDCon they should attend that instead. This sentiment was
usually relayed to me during a conversation about funded attendance. I
want to address this through our structure.
I believe that Flock should be explicitly open to anyone and built for
Fedora Contributors. If someone is not a Fedora Contributor they should
recognize they may not get a lot out of attending Flock. That is OK.
We will have other opportunities for them.
The flip side of this is that we had a significant number of registered
attendees for Flock 2016 who did not attend. This cost money in terms
of wasted catering and prepaid expenses. I am told that this year was
exceptionally heavy in terms of no-shows, but that we routinely have a
significant number of no-shows and unregistered attendees. We need to
find a way to ensure that when we budget for someone's attendance that
they really come.
I think that we should consider funded attendance from several angles:
### Tickets
Flock has expenses that are not necessarily part of the "funding" of a
funded attendance. This could be meeting room costs or the costs or a
group lunch or evening activity. Some of these costs are fixed for the
event (e.g. Meeting room rental) and some are per attendee (e.g. Evening
activities). Therefore I think we should set a ticket price equal to
the cost of all per attendee costs. This means that a ticket will cover
the cost of these items, and not make a profit.
However, not everyone should have to pay for their ticket. I believe we
should adopt a strategy similar to OpenStack. OpenStack provides free
admissions for all active contributors. We should define contributor
activity and provide a similar benefit. Defining an active contributor
is hard, but we can probably start with something like "generated X
fedmsg events in the last year" or "acknowledged as a contributor by a
subproject." I think it needs to be more than "cla+1" but flexible
enough to account for work that may not be commit oriented.
If only active contributors attend Flock then no tickets will actually
be sold. This is OK. However, non-contributors who attend will pay the
costs of their attendance. This may help those folks understand that
there are better Fedora events for them to attend. This should also
reduce the issue with no-show non-contributors. It won't help with
no-show contributors[0]. I also believe it is reasonable to have a
refund policy in place for those with a documented reason for not
showing up (illness, etc.). I think we can solve this by adopting a
policy like many other events of offering refund schedules, etc. This
should not be a heavy process and it should actually not be a huge
burden.
### Funded Travel
We cannot afford to cover all of the costs of all of our contributors
for Flock. There is currently no budget probability of this changing.
Therefore we need to figure out a way of choosing who gets funding and
how much more deliberately. I believe we should do this by creating a
more complete funding application.
We can assign points or use some other method to rank applications. I
think that points of consideration should include:
* Is this person an active contributor? (see above)
* Is this person on "people needing to be in the room" list (see above)?
* Is this person a contributor in the general areas of focus of Flock
(we will know this once the program is set)?
* How will the Fedora project benefit through your attendance at Flock?
* How will you benefit (specifically) from your attendance at Flock?
As far as funding levels, I believe our default funding for active
contributors should be the cost of the ticket mentioned above and 0%
travel. After that travel funding can range from partial to full.
I believe we also need to strongly encourage attendees to seek outside
funding. I believe we can do this by explicitly asking some questions
about employment. Note: Employment is not a factor in funding
consideration for anyone. All community members are equal regardless of
employment or lack thereof.
* How does your work in Fedora relate to your work, if you have a
$dayjob?
* Have you spoken with your employer and specifically asked for some
funding to help cover your costs of attending Flock?
* If you are an employee of Red Hat, please provide your Red Hat email
address and your manager's name and email address. This question is
specific to an employer because of the nature of our funding. Almost
100% of Flock is paid for by funding provided by Red Hat. Being able to
accurately demonstrate the costs incurred for Red Hat employees at the
event may allow us to have a stronger case for increased funding for
Flock in future years.
## Geography
Today Flock rotates between NA and EMEA. For now, I think that works,
however I believe that we should look to allow Flock to float "around
the world." I think that we should give consideration to the
distribution of our contributors and the location of likely attendees
when thinking about where too hold Flock. I am not ready to suggest we
commit to having Flock outside of NA and EMEA, but I believe we should
be prepared to think about it when a compelling case is made.
[0]: Having consulted with Fedora Legal recently, it appears that we can
legally maintain a list of people who are not allowed to obtain funding
in advance. This is going to be explored as I work on the reimbursement
and advance purchase policy. However, I suggest we use a similar
mechanism here. If a funded ticket contributor no-shows, they are asked
to pay for their ticket to the next Flock they attend.
6 years, 8 months
FPL's 2016 in Review: Part II (things I wanted from 2016)
by Matthew Miller
Okay, Fedora 2016-look back, part two!
At the beginning of 2016, I listed several things I thought were
important and hoped would make substantial progress. How did that go?
It went okay. :)
Let's start with "Fedora Atomic becomes a top-level Edition." So,
https://getfedora.org/atomic/ — Ahah! A success. This is particularly cool
because it's a whole new way for Fedora to deliver software, both with the
ostree concept and with the two-week (mostly) automatic release process.
Thanks and congratulations to everyone working on this.
Another thing I emphasized was Fedora Hubs. Background: while Fedora is
incredibly active project with thousands of people contributing every year
and hundreds of people interacting every day, our web presence looks very
static. Hubs is an idea to bring that all to light, to provide a better
modern face for the project and an engagement point for the next generation
of contributors *and* to be a useful tool to existing Fedora subprojects.
There is progress on this, but slowly. With everything we have going on, I'm
told that the Fedora Apps team won't have a lot of time to make this more
than a back-burner project for 2017. If you're a web developer and
would like to help with a major project, let's talk and see what we can make
happen. Otherwise, this is going to remain a future dream. (I have some
short-term ideas... but that's for the next message.)
Next: initiatives for Project Growth. I had hoped to see a new "FOSCo"
organization and revamped ambassadors and marketing. Despite some heroic
efforts, this didn't happen. At the end of the year, we decided that the
incoming FAmSCo should not worry about the wider picture, and instead focus
on restructuring the Ambassadors program — with a broad charter from the
Council to change whatever needs changing. The Council will take up the
bigger issue of tying together marketing and strategy, and we'll look at how
Ambassadors fit into that.
And finally, modularization — now "Modularity". This is ... well, mostly
sucessful and on track. We'll have some more demos at DevConf.cz, and the
plan is still on track for an experimental branch of Fedora Server composed
in this way. That will give us something people can really kick around, and
that's when it's going to get interesting.
Next up (and, at this point, next week!): things I think are important
in 2017. (And I'd really like to hear all of your thoughts on this
too.)
--
Matthew Miller
<mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org>
Fedora Project Leader
6 years, 8 months
