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.)
On 01/09/2017 07:07 PM, Brian Exelbierd wrote:
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).
Hi Brain,
IIRC, formerly we have FUDCons all over the four region. Sometime around 2014 FUDCon NA and FUDCon EMEA switched to FLOCK while FUDCon APAC and FUDCon LATAM remain still. So if you really mean add FUDCon back to EMEA and NA, that is clearly an additional of event. With the current budget status, I wonder if it will make some current events hard.
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.
In my experience in China, running events one after another together (let's say, event A is Feb 1st to Feb 2nd, then event B is Feb 3rd ) usually makes the audiences feeling tired, also the organizers/volunteers if they are involving in both. So n+1 day way may not work well.
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.)
I think this really differs case by case. For some areas like Beijing of China, venue are costly, usually a big main hall costs at least USD 1000 per day. For FUDCon APAC 2014 (Beijing) we luckily find some complex workaround to reduce the costs of venue. And by holding together with GNOME in parallel the venue costs is shared, which results in a better condition. If we make it +1 day style, we may not afford the main hall in this specific case.
Just my cents. HTH.
On Mon, Jan 9, 2017, at 01:26 PM, Zamir SUN wrote:
On 01/09/2017 07:07 PM, Brian Exelbierd wrote:
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).
Hi Brain,
IIRC, formerly we have FUDCons all over the four region. Sometime around 2014 FUDCon NA and FUDCon EMEA switched to FLOCK while FUDCon APAC and FUDCon LATAM remain still. So if you really mean add FUDCon back to EMEA and NA, that is clearly an additional of event. With the current budget status, I wonder if it will make some current events hard.
If we have smaller events with less travel we can do more with the same money. Also, if we show impact we may be able to attract additional budget or sponsorship.
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.
In my experience in China, running events one after another together (let's say, event A is Feb 1st to Feb 2nd, then event B is Feb 3rd ) usually makes the audiences feeling tired, also the organizers/volunteers if they are involving in both. So n+1 day way may not work well.
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.)
I think this really differs case by case. For some areas like Beijing of China, venue are costly, usually a big main hall costs at least USD 1000 per day. For FUDCon APAC 2014 (Beijing) we luckily find some complex workaround to reduce the costs of venue. And by holding together with GNOME in parallel the venue costs is shared, which results in a better condition. If we make it +1 day style, we may not afford the main hall in this specific case.
This is where the knowledge of what works in a region should be applied. If +1 days are not good for China, then we shouldn't force them to be done in China. That doesn't mean we should force other regions not to do them though if they work there. This also means that we need to think about China as China and not as the "representation of all things APAC solely because we decided the one and only event will be held there."
regards,
bex
On Mon, 09 Jan 2017 12:07:32 +0100 Brian Exelbierd bex@pobox.com wrote:
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.
I think one of the problems is that FUDCon has been trying to do much. Trying to get collaborators together and get new people on board. My experience is that bringing new people on board takes a lot of time, and it is not feasible during fudco. This is not to say that we should not show case the best talent of the region with open to public talks. But we can reduce that and avoid at all cost preaching to the choir.
FUDCon it is a good opportunity to push people in the pool that has been in the edge for some time. But most important thing like stated for flock ... bonding, planning, cross-pollination.
## 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.
Talking about structure before goals is not the best approach. Having a smaller event as a +1 day to a large conference can be good. But if the event is too big, we can have people tired. Also a big event may dilute fedora event. Not bad, but something to be careful.
## 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?
I thing that it is good to have the best people of a region together to plan how to do better, exchange expertise, and help collaborators to get interested in other areas of the project. It will be a great opportunity if the local team has a group of people that is interested in contributing and give them the final push. This means trying to have people from different part of the project is key. Even bring some people from outside the region if the region do not have participation in one area of the project.
## 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.
Voting usually help to make the schedule, so topics with more votes are not allocated at the same time. FUDCon 2014 got online voting before the event.
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.)
As a local event, it is a problem with how the public will react to an event. It is really difficult to ask a developer to be good at logistic to create a great event. There are challenges to overcome and sadly as local event the experience gained in one place may not be relevant for the next place. What I mean is that we can not expect a continuity with events that are focused locally, because life has challenges.
I am very happy that we are talking about this, I strongly believe that we need to have a clear set of objectives if we want to FUDCon to produce real value for the community and the project.
Neville
Brian Exelbierd píše v Po 09. 01. 2017 v 12:07 +0100:
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.
Hi, while there might some economies of scale and this option always looks very appealing to people, I have almost never seen an event where it brought a lot of benefit. The specialized co-located event never attracted anyone from the larger event and people who came for the specialized event were usually too busy to attend the larger event. And if it's organized as "+1 day" event, it means people have to stay longer to benefit from both, thus lodging costs go up. I think the only exception was GNOME.Asia+FUDCon APAC 2014. Two smaller events got together and created something big enough to attract sponsors and visitors from far away. It also worked because GNOME+Fedora is a combination that makes sense and there is an overlap in contributors. I'm one of those who contribute to both.
Jiri
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.) _______________________________________________ council-discuss mailing list -- council-discuss@lists.fedoraproject.o rg To unsubscribe send an email to council-discuss-leave@lists.fedorapro ject.org
On Wed, Jan 11, 2017 at 11:41:24AM +0100, Jiri Eischmann wrote:
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.
while there might some economies of scale and this option always looks very appealing to people, I have almost never seen an event where it brought a lot of benefit. The specialized co-located event never attracted anyone from the larger event and people who came for the specialized event were usually too busy to attend the larger event. And if it's organized as "+1 day" event, it means people have to stay longer to benefit from both, thus lodging costs go up. I think the only exception was GNOME.Asia+FUDCon APAC 2014. Two smaller events got together and created something big enough to attract sponsors and visitors from far away. It also worked because GNOME+Fedora is a combination that makes sense and there is an overlap in contributors. I'm one of those who contribute to both.
So, this argues against things like "Tack a FUDCon onto FOSDEM", but maybe we can do more combined events with other projects, making bigger-than-Fedora open source conferences where those don't already exist?
Matthew Miller píše v St 11. 01. 2017 v 05:54 -0500:
On Wed, Jan 11, 2017 at 11:41:24AM +0100, Jiri Eischmann wrote:
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.
while there might some economies of scale and this option always looks very appealing to people, I have almost never seen an event where it brought a lot of benefit. The specialized co-located event never attracted anyone from the larger event and people who came for the specialized event were usually too busy to attend the larger event. And if it's organized as "+1 day" event, it means people have to stay longer to benefit from both, thus lodging costs go up. I think the only exception was GNOME.Asia+FUDCon APAC 2014. Two smaller events got together and created something big enough to attract sponsors and visitors from far away. It also worked because GNOME+Fedora is a combination that makes sense and there is an overlap in contributors. I'm one of those who contribute to both.
So, this argues against things like "Tack a FUDCon onto FOSDEM", but maybe we can do more combined events with other projects, making bigger-than-Fedora open source conferences where those don't already exist?
Yes, something like this. But the combination has to make sense. Upstream projects who are important for Fedora and Fedora is important for them are ideal. Organizing events together with for example other distributions IMHO doesn't work. A couple of years ago, they organized LinuxDays (general Linux conference)+openSUSE Conference+Gentoo miniconf in Prague and it didn't really work. The distro tracks didn't really attract anyone from the general audience or from the other distro tracks. Then it's like the quote from Red Dwarf: "Two bodies who share the same space but are unaware of each other's existence." :)
Fedora+CentOS may be a different case, but it also doesn't always have to work, the two audiences also don't naturally melt in as I could observe at DevConf.cz.
Jiri
On Wed, Jan 11, 2017, at 12:10 PM, Jiri Eischmann wrote:
Matthew Miller píše v St 11. 01. 2017 v 05:54 -0500:
On Wed, Jan 11, 2017 at 11:41:24AM +0100, Jiri Eischmann wrote:
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.
while there might some economies of scale and this option always looks very appealing to people, I have almost never seen an event where it brought a lot of benefit. The specialized co-located event never attracted anyone from the larger event and people who came for the specialized event were usually too busy to attend the larger event. And if it's organized as "+1 day" event, it means people have to stay longer to benefit from both, thus lodging costs go up. I think the only exception was GNOME.Asia+FUDCon APAC 2014. Two smaller events got together and created something big enough to attract sponsors and visitors from far away. It also worked because GNOME+Fedora is a combination that makes sense and there is an overlap in contributors. I'm one of those who contribute to both.
So, this argues against things like "Tack a FUDCon onto FOSDEM", but maybe we can do more combined events with other projects, making bigger-than-Fedora open source conferences where those don't already exist?
Yes, something like this. But the combination has to make sense. Upstream projects who are important for Fedora and Fedora is important for them are ideal. Organizing events together with for example other distributions IMHO doesn't work. A couple of years ago, they organized LinuxDays (general Linux conference)+openSUSE Conference+Gentoo miniconf in Prague and it didn't really work. The distro tracks didn't really attract anyone from the general audience or from the other distro tracks. Then it's like the quote from Red Dwarf: "Two bodies who share the same space but are unaware of each other's existence." :)
Fedora+CentOS may be a different case, but it also doesn't always have to work, the two audiences also don't naturally melt in as I could observe at DevConf.cz.
Do we have any experience with adding a Fedora themed event to or on to a non-project focused event, like a developer conference?
regards,
bex
On Wed, Jan 11, 2017 at 6:15 AM, Brian Exelbierd bex@pobox.com wrote:
On Wed, Jan 11, 2017, at 12:10 PM, Jiri Eischmann wrote:
Matthew Miller píše v St 11. 01. 2017 v 05:54 -0500:
On Wed, Jan 11, 2017 at 11:41:24AM +0100, Jiri Eischmann wrote:
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.
while there might some economies of scale and this option always looks very appealing to people, I have almost never seen an event where it brought a lot of benefit. The specialized co-located event never attracted anyone from the larger event and people who came for the specialized event were usually too busy to attend the larger event. And if it's organized as "+1 day" event, it means people have to stay longer to benefit from both, thus lodging costs go up. I think the only exception was GNOME.Asia+FUDCon APAC 2014. Two smaller events got together and created something big enough to attract sponsors and visitors from far away. It also worked because GNOME+Fedora is a combination that makes sense and there is an overlap in contributors. I'm one of those who contribute to both.
So, this argues against things like "Tack a FUDCon onto FOSDEM", but maybe we can do more combined events with other projects, making bigger-than-Fedora open source conferences where those don't already exist?
Yes, something like this. But the combination has to make sense. Upstream projects who are important for Fedora and Fedora is important for them are ideal. Organizing events together with for example other distributions IMHO doesn't work. A couple of years ago, they organized LinuxDays (general Linux conference)+openSUSE Conference+Gentoo miniconf in Prague and it didn't really work. The distro tracks didn't really attract anyone from the general audience or from the other distro tracks. Then it's like the quote from Red Dwarf: "Two bodies who share the same space but are unaware of each other's existence." :)
Fedora+CentOS may be a different case, but it also doesn't always have to work, the two audiences also don't naturally melt in as I could observe at DevConf.cz.
Do we have any experience with adding a Fedora themed event to or on to a non-project focused event, like a developer conference?
We do not.
josh
On Wed, Jan 11, 2017 at 07:19:45AM -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
Do we have any experience with adding a Fedora themed event to or on to a non-project focused event, like a developer conference?
We do not.
Except for FADs.
On Jan 11, 2017, at 7:28 PM, Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org wrote:
On Wed, Jan 11, 2017 at 07:19:45AM -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
Do we have any experience with adding a Fedora themed event to or on to a non-project focused event, like a developer conference?
We do not.
Except for FADs.
Can you share some details?
-- Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org Fedora Project Leader _______________________________________________ council-discuss mailing list -- council-discuss@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to council-discuss-leave@lists.fedoraproject.org
On Wed, Jan 11, 2017 at 07:51:18PM +0100, Brian (bex) Exelbierd wrote:
On Wed, Jan 11, 2017 at 07:19:45AM -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
Do we have any experience with adding a Fedora themed event to or on to a non-project focused event, like a developer conference?
We do not.
Except for FADs.
Can you share some details?
Someone else can probably do it better than me, since the only one I went to was the one at SCALE three years ago:
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/ambassadors/2014-January/021953.ht...
but there was also one the year after that:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FAD_SCALE_13x_Sunday_Cloud_and_Atomic
and at least one before:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SCALE_8x_2010_FAD
Looking through https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:FAD, a few more jump out at me:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FAD_SELF_2009 (and 2010, 2011, and 2012) https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FAD_FISL12 https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FAD_FOSDEM_2010 (and 2011 and 2012) https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FAD_LinuxTag_2007 (and 2008)
But all of this was during a period where my Fedora involvement was relatively low, as I had young children and a very busy day job.
On Wed, Jan 11, 2017 at 2:07 PM, Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org wrote:
On Wed, Jan 11, 2017 at 07:51:18PM +0100, Brian (bex) Exelbierd wrote:
On Wed, Jan 11, 2017 at 07:19:45AM -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
Do we have any experience with adding a Fedora themed event to or on to a non-project focused event, like a developer conference?
We do not.
Except for FADs.
Can you share some details?
Someone else can probably do it better than me, since the only one I went to was the one at SCALE three years ago:
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/ambassadors/2014-January/021953.ht...
but there was also one the year after that:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FAD_SCALE_13x_Sunday_Cloud_and_Atomic
and at least one before:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SCALE_8x_2010_FAD
Looking through https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:FAD, a few more jump out at me:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FAD_SELF_2009 (and 2010, 2011, and 2012) https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FAD_FISL12 https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FAD_FOSDEM_2010 (and 2011 and 2012) https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FAD_LinuxTag_2007 (and 2008)
But all of this was during a period where my Fedora involvement was relatively low, as I had young children and a very busy day job.
So lemme put my old man hat on, and let's go back way into the mists of history, when we had our very first Fedora Conferences.
They were, in every case, targets of opportunity. We went where we knew there would already be people who would have interest in Linux, and possibly, by extension, Fedora. We also attached to conferences where people who *were* Fedora-centric could be exposed to lots more stuff as well, so they could get greater bang for their travel buck.
Thus, FOSDEM and LinuxTag and FISL and so forth.
I think that was the right strategy then, and I think it's still the right strategy now. Find conferences where potential contributors are likely to be, and go there and make Fedora visible.
If Fedora wants to be a great cloud OS, co-locate a FAD with a cloud conference.
If Fedora wants to be a great container OS, co-locate a FAD with a container conference.
If Fedora wants to be a great all-around Linux OS, co-locate a FAD with the traditional Linux conferences.
It's up to the leadership to decide where to spend this conference money -- but first, the leadership *must* decide what the *most important goals* are, and align the conferences accordingly. Say yes to the one or two important conferences where there's potential for real impact; otherwise, you're setting money on fire for "goodwill".
I understand why someone would want to put on a Fedora conference in their university town -- but frankly, that's what meetup groups are for. Far less overhead, far less oversight required.
My $0.02.
--g
On Wed, 11 Jan 2017 14:29:52 -0500 Greg DeKoenigsberg greg.dekoenigsberg@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Jan 11, 2017 at 2:07 PM, Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org wrote:
On Wed, Jan 11, 2017 at 07:51:18PM +0100, Brian (bex) Exelbierd wrote:
On Wed, Jan 11, 2017 at 07:19:45AM -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
Do we have any experience with adding a Fedora themed event to or on to a non-project focused event, like a developer conference?
We do not.
Except for FADs.
Can you share some details?
Someone else can probably do it better than me, since the only one I went to was the one at SCALE three years ago:
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/ambassadors/2014-January/021953.ht...
but there was also one the year after that:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FAD_SCALE_13x_Sunday_Cloud_and_Atomic
and at least one before:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SCALE_8x_2010_FAD
Looking through https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:FAD, a few more jump out at me:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FAD_SELF_2009 (and 2010, 2011, and 2012) https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FAD_FISL12 https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FAD_FOSDEM_2010 (and 2011 and 2012) https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FAD_LinuxTag_2007 (and 2008)
But all of this was during a period where my Fedora involvement was relatively low, as I had young children and a very busy day job.
So lemme put my old man hat on, and let's go back way into the mists of history, when we had our very first Fedora Conferences.
They were, in every case, targets of opportunity. We went where we knew there would already be people who would have interest in Linux, and possibly, by extension, Fedora. We also attached to conferences where people who *were* Fedora-centric could be exposed to lots more stuff as well, so they could get greater bang for their travel buck.
Thus, FOSDEM and LinuxTag and FISL and so forth.
I think that was the right strategy then, and I think it's still the right strategy now. Find conferences where potential contributors are likely to be, and go there and make Fedora visible.
If Fedora wants to be a great cloud OS, co-locate a FAD with a cloud conference.
If Fedora wants to be a great container OS, co-locate a FAD with a container conference.
If Fedora wants to be a great all-around Linux OS, co-locate a FAD with the traditional Linux conferences.
It's up to the leadership to decide where to spend this conference money -- but first, the leadership *must* decide what the *most important goals* are, and align the conferences accordingly. Say yes to the one or two important conferences where there's potential for real impact; otherwise, you're setting money on fire for "goodwill".
I understand why someone would want to put on a Fedora conference in their university town -- but frankly, that's what meetup groups are for. Far less overhead, far less oversight required.
My $0.02.
--g
As a business manager I strongly like goals, it is a way to structure activities and measure accomplishment. We set goals, and from there we can chose what events (signature or not) help us reach those goals. Do we want more users? Do we want collaborators? Or do we want convert users into collaborators? Which is more important now?
Neville
On Thu, Jan 12, 2017, at 07:17 PM, Neville A. Cross wrote:
On Wed, 11 Jan 2017 14:29:52 -0500 Greg DeKoenigsberg greg.dekoenigsberg@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Jan 11, 2017 at 2:07 PM, Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org wrote:
On Wed, Jan 11, 2017 at 07:51:18PM +0100, Brian (bex) Exelbierd wrote:
On Wed, Jan 11, 2017 at 07:19:45AM -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
> Do we have any experience with adding a Fedora themed event to > or on to a non-project focused event, like a developer > conference? We do not.
Except for FADs.
Can you share some details?
Someone else can probably do it better than me, since the only one I went to was the one at SCALE three years ago:
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/ambassadors/2014-January/021953.ht...
but there was also one the year after that:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FAD_SCALE_13x_Sunday_Cloud_and_Atomic
and at least one before:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SCALE_8x_2010_FAD
Looking through https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:FAD, a few more jump out at me:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FAD_SELF_2009 (and 2010, 2011, and 2012) https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FAD_FISL12 https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FAD_FOSDEM_2010 (and 2011 and 2012) https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FAD_LinuxTag_2007 (and 2008)
But all of this was during a period where my Fedora involvement was relatively low, as I had young children and a very busy day job.
So lemme put my old man hat on, and let's go back way into the mists of history, when we had our very first Fedora Conferences.
They were, in every case, targets of opportunity. We went where we knew there would already be people who would have interest in Linux, and possibly, by extension, Fedora. We also attached to conferences where people who *were* Fedora-centric could be exposed to lots more stuff as well, so they could get greater bang for their travel buck.
Thus, FOSDEM and LinuxTag and FISL and so forth.
I think that was the right strategy then, and I think it's still the right strategy now. Find conferences where potential contributors are likely to be, and go there and make Fedora visible.
If Fedora wants to be a great cloud OS, co-locate a FAD with a cloud conference.
If Fedora wants to be a great container OS, co-locate a FAD with a container conference.
If Fedora wants to be a great all-around Linux OS, co-locate a FAD with the traditional Linux conferences.
It's up to the leadership to decide where to spend this conference money -- but first, the leadership *must* decide what the *most important goals* are, and align the conferences accordingly. Say yes to the one or two important conferences where there's potential for real impact; otherwise, you're setting money on fire for "goodwill".
I understand why someone would want to put on a Fedora conference in their university town -- but frankly, that's what meetup groups are for. Far less overhead, far less oversight required.
My $0.02.
--g
As a business manager I strongly like goals, it is a way to structure activities and measure accomplishment. We set goals, and from there we can chose what events (signature or not) help us reach those goals. Do we want more users? Do we want collaborators? Or do we want convert users into collaborators? Which is more important now?
My take away is that we want both, however we have to start with getting a steady stream of new users who are likely to be contributors before we can focus on contributor conversion.
To take it back a bit, I see two questions:
1) Are FUDCons working as user attraction events? Are we getting return on our investment? Are they attracting the users we want? If not, why wouldn't we stop doing them?
2) What is a good way to attract our target users?
regards,
bex
On Wed, Jan 11, 2017 at 2:07 PM, Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org wrote:
On Wed, Jan 11, 2017 at 07:51:18PM +0100, Brian (bex) Exelbierd wrote:
On Wed, Jan 11, 2017 at 07:19:45AM -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
Do we have any experience with adding a Fedora themed event to or on to a non-project focused event, like a developer conference?
We do not.
Except for FADs.
Can you share some details?
Someone else can probably do it better than me, since the only one I went to was the one at SCALE three years ago:
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/ambassadors/2014-January/021953.ht...
but there was also one the year after that:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FAD_SCALE_13x_Sunday_Cloud_and_Atomic
and at least one before:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SCALE_8x_2010_FAD
Looking through https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:FAD, a few more jump out at me:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FAD_SELF_2009 (and 2010, 2011, and 2012) https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FAD_FISL12 https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FAD_FOSDEM_2010 (and 2011 and 2012) https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FAD_LinuxTag_2007 (and 2008)
But all of this was during a period where my Fedora involvement was relatively low, as I had young children and a very busy day job.
Hm. I had not equated "FAD" with "Event". The connotation of scale between the two words didn't match up in my brain.
josh
On Wed, Jan 11, 2017 at 02:57:10PM -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
Hm. I had not equated "FAD" with "Event". The connotation of scale between the two words didn't match up in my brain.
Ha. We stopped calling them "premiere events" but they are still a kind of event. :)
On Wed, Jan 11, 2017, at 08:07 PM, Matthew Miller wrote:
On Wed, Jan 11, 2017 at 07:51:18PM +0100, Brian (bex) Exelbierd wrote:
On Wed, Jan 11, 2017 at 07:19:45AM -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
Do we have any experience with adding a Fedora themed event to or on to a non-project focused event, like a developer conference?
We do not.
Except for FADs.
Can you share some details?
Someone else can probably do it better than me, since the only one I went to was the one at SCALE three years ago:
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/ambassadors/2014-January/021953.ht...
but there was also one the year after that:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FAD_SCALE_13x_Sunday_Cloud_and_Atomic
and at least one before:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SCALE_8x_2010_FAD
Looking through https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:FAD, a few more jump out at me:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FAD_SELF_2009 (and 2010, 2011, and 2012) https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FAD_FISL12 https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FAD_FOSDEM_2010 (and 2011 and 2012) https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FAD_LinuxTag_2007 (and 2008)
A quick look at these links (and I do mean quick!) seemed to show that most of these events were what I think of as a FAD. A place where Fedora Contributors get together to work on a Fedora issue. I understand that some people use the word FAD more expansively, but the only one of those I seemed to see was FISL12.
From a branding perspective we need to think about whether the word FAD is doing too much work by trying to represent two somewhat different concepts (contributors working on Fedora vs user oriented events).
Do we have any other examples of Fedora user oriented activities being colocated with a larger event/activity to draw in new users?
regards,
bex
But all of this was during a period where my Fedora involvement was relatively low, as I had young children and a very busy day job.
-- Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org Fedora Project Leader _______________________________________________ council-discuss mailing list -- council-discuss@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to council-discuss-leave@lists.fedoraproject.org
On 01/11/2017 07:15 PM, Brian Exelbierd wrote:
On Wed, Jan 11, 2017, at 12:10 PM, Jiri Eischmann wrote:
Matthew Miller píše v St 11. 01. 2017 v 05:54 -0500:
On Wed, Jan 11, 2017 at 11:41:24AM +0100, Jiri Eischmann wrote:
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.
while there might some economies of scale and this option always looks very appealing to people, I have almost never seen an event where it brought a lot of benefit. The specialized co-located event never attracted anyone from the larger event and people who came for the specialized event were usually too busy to attend the larger event. And if it's organized as "+1 day" event, it means people have to stay longer to benefit from both, thus lodging costs go up. I think the only exception was GNOME.Asia+FUDCon APAC 2014. Two smaller events got together and created something big enough to attract sponsors and visitors from far away. It also worked because GNOME+Fedora is a combination that makes sense and there is an overlap in contributors. I'm one of those who contribute to both.
So, this argues against things like "Tack a FUDCon onto FOSDEM", but maybe we can do more combined events with other projects, making bigger-than-Fedora open source conferences where those don't already exist?
Yes, something like this. But the combination has to make sense. Upstream projects who are important for Fedora and Fedora is important for them are ideal. Organizing events together with for example other
I totally agree. As you said, we benefit a lot for join GNOME.Asia and FUDCon APAC together in 2014. While recently I also tried to make Fedora involve in some KDE event in Beijing, but it totally makes no sense in the end.
distributions IMHO doesn't work. A couple of years ago, they organized LinuxDays (general Linux conference)+openSUSE Conference+Gentoo miniconf in Prague and it didn't really work. The distro tracks didn't really attract anyone from the general audience or from the other distro tracks. Then it's like the quote from Red Dwarf: "Two bodies who share the same space but are unaware of each other's existence." :)
Fedora+CentOS may be a different case, but it also doesn't always have to work, the two audiences also don't naturally melt in as I could observe at DevConf.cz.
Do we have any experience with adding a Fedora themed event to or on to a non-project focused event, like a developer conference?
In Beijing we tried to join "Code for Fun" organized by Beijing Linux User Group, but it almost attracts no new Fedora contributor. This is not a conference but I think it maybe similar in Beijing.
On Wed, Jan 11, 2017, at 01:32 PM, Zamir SUN wrote:
On 01/11/2017 07:15 PM, Brian Exelbierd wrote:
On Wed, Jan 11, 2017, at 12:10 PM, Jiri Eischmann wrote:
Matthew Miller píše v St 11. 01. 2017 v 05:54 -0500:
On Wed, Jan 11, 2017 at 11:41:24AM +0100, Jiri Eischmann wrote:
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.
while there might some economies of scale and this option always looks very appealing to people, I have almost never seen an event where it brought a lot of benefit. The specialized co-located event never attracted anyone from the larger event and people who came for the specialized event were usually too busy to attend the larger event. And if it's organized as "+1 day" event, it means people have to stay longer to benefit from both, thus lodging costs go up. I think the only exception was GNOME.Asia+FUDCon APAC 2014. Two smaller events got together and created something big enough to attract sponsors and visitors from far away. It also worked because GNOME+Fedora is a combination that makes sense and there is an overlap in contributors. I'm one of those who contribute to both.
So, this argues against things like "Tack a FUDCon onto FOSDEM", but maybe we can do more combined events with other projects, making bigger-than-Fedora open source conferences where those don't already exist?
Yes, something like this. But the combination has to make sense. Upstream projects who are important for Fedora and Fedora is important for them are ideal. Organizing events together with for example other
I totally agree. As you said, we benefit a lot for join GNOME.Asia and FUDCon APAC together in 2014. While recently I also tried to make Fedora involve in some KDE event in Beijing, but it totally makes no sense in the end.
distributions IMHO doesn't work. A couple of years ago, they organized LinuxDays (general Linux conference)+openSUSE Conference+Gentoo miniconf in Prague and it didn't really work. The distro tracks didn't really attract anyone from the general audience or from the other distro tracks. Then it's like the quote from Red Dwarf: "Two bodies who share the same space but are unaware of each other's existence." :)
Fedora+CentOS may be a different case, but it also doesn't always have to work, the two audiences also don't naturally melt in as I could observe at DevConf.cz.
Do we have any experience with adding a Fedora themed event to or on to a non-project focused event, like a developer conference?
In Beijing we tried to join "Code for Fun" organized by Beijing Linux User Group, but it almost attracts no new Fedora contributor. This is not a conference but I think it maybe similar in Beijing.
If we look at FUDCons through the lens of user attraction first and contributor conversion second then does this make sense? Do we need to think about contributor conversion through a strategy not yet mentioned?
regards,
bex
On 01/11/2017 08:52 PM, Brian Exelbierd wrote:
On Wed, Jan 11, 2017, at 01:32 PM, Zamir SUN wrote:
On 01/11/2017 07:15 PM, Brian Exelbierd wrote:
On Wed, Jan 11, 2017, at 12:10 PM, Jiri Eischmann wrote:
Matthew Miller píše v St 11. 01. 2017 v 05:54 -0500:
On Wed, Jan 11, 2017 at 11:41:24AM +0100, Jiri Eischmann wrote:
> 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.
while there might some economies of scale and this option always looks very appealing to people, I have almost never seen an event where it brought a lot of benefit. The specialized co-located event never attracted anyone from the larger event and people who came for the specialized event were usually too busy to attend the larger event. And if it's organized as "+1 day" event, it means people have to stay longer to benefit from both, thus lodging costs go up. I think the only exception was GNOME.Asia+FUDCon APAC 2014. Two smaller events got together and created something big enough to attract sponsors and visitors from far away. It also worked because GNOME+Fedora is a combination that makes sense and there is an overlap in contributors. I'm one of those who contribute to both.
So, this argues against things like "Tack a FUDCon onto FOSDEM", but maybe we can do more combined events with other projects, making bigger-than-Fedora open source conferences where those don't already exist?
Yes, something like this. But the combination has to make sense. Upstream projects who are important for Fedora and Fedora is important for them are ideal. Organizing events together with for example other
I totally agree. As you said, we benefit a lot for join GNOME.Asia and FUDCon APAC together in 2014. While recently I also tried to make Fedora involve in some KDE event in Beijing, but it totally makes no sense in the end.
distributions IMHO doesn't work. A couple of years ago, they organized LinuxDays (general Linux conference)+openSUSE Conference+Gentoo miniconf in Prague and it didn't really work. The distro tracks didn't really attract anyone from the general audience or from the other distro tracks. Then it's like the quote from Red Dwarf: "Two bodies who share the same space but are unaware of each other's existence." :)
Fedora+CentOS may be a different case, but it also doesn't always have to work, the two audiences also don't naturally melt in as I could observe at DevConf.cz.
Do we have any experience with adding a Fedora themed event to or on to a non-project focused event, like a developer conference?
In Beijing we tried to join "Code for Fun" organized by Beijing Linux User Group, but it almost attracts no new Fedora contributor. This is not a conference but I think it maybe similar in Beijing.
If we look at FUDCons through the lens of user attraction first and contributor conversion second then does this make sense? Do we need to think about contributor conversion through a strategy not yet mentioned?
If we only think about user attraction, yes it makes sense ;-) I guess I was little out of topic above, as "Code for Fun" is not big event and maybe I should not compared joining two small events together with, FUDCon onto another similar sized event.
On Wed, Jan 11, 2017 at 12:10:33PM +0100, Jiri Eischmann wrote:
Fedora+CentOS may be a different case, but it also doesn't always have to work, the two audiences also don't naturally melt in as I could observe at DevConf.cz.
Tell me more about your observation. :) To me, there was a lot of interesting CentOS stuff going on, but I couldn't go, because it was all at the same time as the Fedora stuff.
Matthew Miller píše v St 11. 01. 2017 v 13:27 -0500:
On Wed, Jan 11, 2017 at 12:10:33PM +0100, Jiri Eischmann wrote:
Fedora+CentOS may be a different case, but it also doesn't always have to work, the two audiences also don't naturally melt in as I could observe at DevConf.cz.
Tell me more about your observation. :) To me, there was a lot of interesting CentOS stuff going on, but I couldn't go, because it was all at the same time as the Fedora stuff.
That's the thing. I probably would have attended some CentOS talks, too, but I couldn't because I was busy attending the Fedora talks which are personally prefer. I also talked to several local visitors who came to DevConf.cz for the CentOS talks, they were all typical sysadmins that work with CentOS/RHEL at work and they perceive Fedora as too bleeding edge for their focus and were simply not interested in what's going on in the Fedora Project. I'm not saying that Fedora+CentOS events can't work, just saying that even for distributions which are so close to each other it doesn't work easily. In my opinion, to get some benefit out of it, you need to have agenda that would bring both groups together (just a straight-out-of-my-mind example: how Fedora and CentOS can cooperate in EPEL). If both groups bring their own topics that are (mostly) only interesting to their audience it will be two different events that just happen to be in the same location.
Jiri
On Thu, Jan 12, 2017 at 6:23 AM, Jiri Eischmann eischmann@redhat.com wrote:
Matthew Miller píše v St 11. 01. 2017 v 13:27 -0500:
On Wed, Jan 11, 2017 at 12:10:33PM +0100, Jiri Eischmann wrote:
Fedora+CentOS may be a different case, but it also doesn't always have to work, the two audiences also don't naturally melt in as I could observe at DevConf.cz.
Tell me more about your observation. :) To me, there was a lot of interesting CentOS stuff going on, but I couldn't go, because it was all at the same time as the Fedora stuff.
That's the thing. I probably would have attended some CentOS talks, too, but I couldn't because I was busy attending the Fedora talks which are personally prefer. I also talked to several local visitors who came to DevConf.cz for the CentOS talks, they were all typical sysadmins that work with CentOS/RHEL at work and they perceive Fedora as too bleeding edge for their focus and were simply not interested in what's going on in the Fedora Project. I'm not saying that Fedora+CentOS events can't work, just saying that even for distributions which are so close to each other it doesn't work easily. In my opinion, to get some benefit out of it, you need to have agenda that would bring both groups together (just a straight-out-of-my-mind example: how Fedora and CentOS can cooperate in EPEL). If both groups bring their own topics that are (mostly) only interesting to their audience it will be two different events that just happen to be in the same location.
I agree with this. Another common topic could be community CI infrastructure. Why are the two projects doing it entirely separately, etc. I think there is a lot of common ground between Fedora and CentOS but just putting them at the same conference and hoping magic happens isn't working.
josh
On Thu, Jan 12, 2017 at 12:23:41PM +0100, Jiri Eischmann wrote:
In my opinion, to get some benefit out of it, you need to have agenda that would bring both groups together (just a straight-out-of-my-mind example: how Fedora and CentOS can cooperate in EPEL). If both groups bring their own topics that are (mostly) only interesting to their audience it will be two different events that just happen to be in the same location.
Maybe with a two-day program, have one day devoted to shared topics and one day for splitting up.
I also think that with *user* focus rather than contributor focus, it'll be a lot easier to find immediate overlap.
tl;dr: FUDCons should not exist, they are segregating. Take ppl to Flock with the budget instead.
At first, I joined Fedora because I wanted to maintain a few packages that were important to some Brazilian government projects. Later I got to meet the Fedora LATAM community. Long story short, I understood that, if I was part of the LATAM community, I would actually be able to understand and help it.
When I decided to join the community, I was told that there were no active mentors in Brazil, but since I was already an active contributor, it would be ok. I was then accepted as a Fedora ambassador without reading a single wiki page (or at least, nobody asked me if I did) and without even ever knowing who my mentor was (please, see [1]).
A few weeks after that I was chairing LATAM ambassadors meetings. The only reason that happened was because I read supybot's manual, so whenever the chair wouldn't show up, I would start the meeting myself.
Long story short: I lead (or led) some of the LATAM meetings.
We barely use our budget, as you can find out in our balance, which is not open. The complains here are about the delay on reimbursements, which are caused for lack of training on how to fill tickets, which is understandable, since some ambassadors (like me) do not have mentors. Remember that being a mentor here is pretty much like being a king: the last mentor must make you the next mentor for that country ( that's how it works in LATAM). Sometimes they stop contributing and do not assign new mentors. In my country, the newest ambassador is a Red Hat employee who nobody ever heard about: go figure.
As bex said (and maybe was too kind about it), FUDCon is a GREAT event, it DOES bring LATAM community together, but there are no contributions coming out of it. It is pretty much an even to talk about Fedora or other technologies to users OR to students (windows users). OK. These are developing countries and we want to take Fedora there to get a bigger user base and bring new contributors on board. The problem is that, in the end, FUDCon IS a segregating event to keep LATAM and APAC contributors away. Before judging this statement, PLEASE, read [2], [3], [4] and [5]. In the end of the day, FUDCon is not a good event for long term contributors and these contributors are not allowed to get funded to attend Flock. I'd rather see FUDCons extinguished, using the budget to take a few people from LATAM to Flock, who could then transfer knowledge to people here in release parties or FADs, than having people who can NEVER even see the guys who develop koji* or take care of infrastructure i n person.
Look at other communities like Debian (that organized a very successful DebConf in Nicaragua in 2012) and OpenSUSE for reference.
PS: This is not a post against the LATAM community at all: Some people here like echevemaster, potty, neville, itamar and mayorga are very competent. My point is that they should be spending their time focusing on Fedora problems instead of local community problems (we have other ppl to do that).
* Dennis Gilmore loves attending FUDCon LATAM - we love you Dennis ;)
[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ambassadors_Join_start [2] https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/flock-planning@lists.fedorapro... [3] https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/ambassadors@lists.fedoraprojec... [4] https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/flock-planning@lists.fedorapro... [5] https://meetbot-raw.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2015-06-03/latam_ambass...
I am deliberately not comment on all of the points raised because I feel like a few of the questions raised need more clarification first.
On Sun, Jan 29, 2017, at 06:17 AM, Athos Ribeiro wrote:
tl;dr: FUDCons should not exist, they are segregating. Take ppl to Flock with the budget instead.
At first, I joined Fedora because I wanted to maintain a few packages that were important to some Brazilian government projects. Later I got to meet the Fedora LATAM community. Long story short, I understood that, if I was part of the LATAM community, I would actually be able to understand and help it.
Unrelated - I'd love to see an interview published about your experience joining as it is a great story to publicize.
When I decided to join the community, I was told that there were no active mentors in Brazil, but since I was already an active contributor, it would be ok. I was then accepted as a Fedora ambassador without reading a single wiki page (or at least, nobody asked me if I did) and without even ever knowing who my mentor was (please, see [1]).
A few weeks after that I was chairing LATAM ambassadors meetings. The only reason that happened was because I read supybot's manual, so whenever the chair wouldn't show up, I would start the meeting myself.
Long story short: I lead (or led) some of the LATAM meetings.
We barely use our budget, as you can find out in our balance, which is not open.
The budget is open now. See the budget data in the budget pagure repo. The website to publish the data is also about 80% complete on the first draft and i hope to have it published after FOSDEM.
The complains here are about the delay on reimbursements, which are caused for lack of training on how to fill tickets, which is understandable, since some ambassadors (like me) do not have mentors.
Remember that being a mentor here is pretty much like being a king: the last mentor must make you the next mentor for that country ( that's how it works in LATAM). Sometimes they stop contributing and do not assign new mentors.
This sounds like a great topic to take up with FAmSCo to work on whether we need a better global baselline that each region can modify. It may also be the case that learning what other regions do is helpful.
In my country, the newest ambassador is a Red Hat employee who nobody ever heard about: go figure.
I am not sure what you are getting at here. I will simply say that RH employee status is not something that I would use within this context.
As bex said (and maybe was too kind about it), FUDCon is a GREAT event, it DOES bring LATAM community together, but there are no contributions coming out of it. It is pretty much an even to talk about Fedora or other technologies to users OR to students (windows users). OK. These are developing countries and we want to take Fedora there to get a bigger user base and bring new contributors on board. The problem is that, in the end, FUDCon IS a segregating event to keep LATAM and APAC contributors away. Before judging this statement, PLEASE, read [2], [3], [4] and [5]. In the end of the day, FUDCon is not a good event for long term contributors and these contributors are not allowed to get funded to attend Flock. I'd rather see FUDCons extinguished, using the budget to take a few people from LATAM to Flock, who could then transfer knowledge to people here in release parties or FADs, than having people who can NEVER even see the guys who develop koji* or take care of infrastructure i n person.
Look at other communities like Debian (that organized a very successful DebConf in Nicaragua in 2012) and OpenSUSE for reference.
Can you provide more details on the these conferences and why you think they were successes? This will help readers who are not as familiar with the workings of these two communities.
regards,
bex
PS: This is not a post against the LATAM community at all: Some people here like echevemaster, potty, neville, itamar and mayorga are very competent. My point is that they should be spending their time focusing on Fedora problems instead of local community problems (we have other ppl to do that).
- Dennis Gilmore loves attending FUDCon LATAM - we love you Dennis ;)
[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ambassadors_Join_start [2] https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/flock-planning@lists.fedorapro... [3] https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/ambassadors@lists.fedoraprojec... [4] https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/flock-planning@lists.fedorapro... [5] https://meetbot-raw.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2015-06-03/latam_ambass... _______________________________________________ council-discuss mailing list -- council-discuss@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to council-discuss-leave@lists.fedoraproject.org
In my opinion, just a typical end user, it would be great to get online documentation to get the whole swarm effect going. Down to showing how to maintain stuff to the public. though i guess its a security issue too.
On Sun, Jan 29, 2017 at 4:04 AM, Brian Exelbierd bex@pobox.com wrote:
I am deliberately not comment on all of the points raised because I feel like a few of the questions raised need more clarification first.
On Sun, Jan 29, 2017, at 06:17 AM, Athos Ribeiro wrote:
tl;dr: FUDCons should not exist, they are segregating. Take ppl to Flock with the budget instead.
At first, I joined Fedora because I wanted to maintain a few packages that were important to some Brazilian government projects. Later I got to meet the Fedora LATAM community. Long story short, I understood that, if I was part of the LATAM community, I would actually be able to understand and help it.
Unrelated - I'd love to see an interview published about your experience joining as it is a great story to publicize.
When I decided to join the community, I was told that there were no active mentors in Brazil, but since I was already an active contributor, it would be ok. I was then accepted as a Fedora ambassador without reading a single wiki page (or at least, nobody asked me if I did) and without even ever knowing who my mentor was (please, see [1]).
A few weeks after that I was chairing LATAM ambassadors meetings. The only reason that happened was because I read supybot's manual, so whenever the chair wouldn't show up, I would start the meeting myself.
Long story short: I lead (or led) some of the LATAM meetings.
We barely use our budget, as you can find out in our balance, which is not open.
The budget is open now. See the budget data in the budget pagure repo. The website to publish the data is also about 80% complete on the first draft and i hope to have it published after FOSDEM.
The complains here are about the delay on reimbursements, which are caused for lack of training on how to fill tickets, which is understandable, since some ambassadors (like me) do not have mentors.
Remember that being a mentor here is pretty much like being a king: the last mentor must make you the next mentor for that country ( that's how it works in LATAM). Sometimes they stop contributing and do not assign new mentors.
This sounds like a great topic to take up with FAmSCo to work on whether we need a better global baselline that each region can modify. It may also be the case that learning what other regions do is helpful.
In my country, the newest ambassador is a Red Hat employee who nobody ever heard about: go figure.
I am not sure what you are getting at here. I will simply say that RH employee status is not something that I would use within this context.
As bex said (and maybe was too kind about it), FUDCon is a GREAT event, it DOES bring LATAM community together, but there are no contributions coming out of it. It is pretty much an even to talk about Fedora or other technologies to users OR to students (windows users). OK. These are developing countries and we want to take Fedora there to get a bigger user base and bring new contributors on board. The problem is that, in the end, FUDCon IS a segregating event to keep LATAM and APAC contributors away. Before judging this statement, PLEASE, read [2], [3], [4] and [5]. In the end of the day, FUDCon is not a good event for long term contributors and these contributors are not allowed to get funded to attend Flock. I'd rather see FUDCons extinguished, using the budget to take a few people from LATAM to Flock, who could then transfer knowledge to people here in release parties or FADs, than having people who can NEVER even see the guys who develop koji* or take care of infrastructure i n person.
Look at other communities like Debian (that organized a very successful DebConf in Nicaragua in 2012) and OpenSUSE for reference.
Can you provide more details on the these conferences and why you think they were successes? This will help readers who are not as familiar with the workings of these two communities.
regards,
bex
PS: This is not a post against the LATAM community at all: Some people here like echevemaster, potty, neville, itamar and mayorga are very competent. My point is that they should be spending their time focusing on Fedora problems instead of local community problems (we have other ppl to do that).
- Dennis Gilmore loves attending FUDCon LATAM - we love you Dennis ;)
[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ambassadors_Join_start [2] https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/flock-
planning@lists.fedoraproject.org/message/6RDB2OULZNKDPHCHCMYAVBGV6LWJLHNB/
[3] https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/ambassadors@
lists.fedoraproject.org/message/V4EEA2Y5UFQ3ICWVDZMGRUQLOYT6EPTJ/
planning@lists.fedoraproject.org/message/DDSDG2QCPGUCDHG5LOEQY2OT5QV2NYIO/
[5] https://meetbot-raw.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2015-06-03/latam_
ambassadors_meeting.2015-06-03-22.31.html
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On 01/29/2017 03:04 AM, Brian Exelbierd wrote:
On Sun, Jan 29, 2017, at 06:17 AM, Athos Ribeiro wrote:
Look at other communities like Debian (that organized a very successful DebConf in Nicaragua in 2012) and OpenSUSE for reference.
Can you provide more details on the these conferences and why you think they were successes? This will help readers who are not as familiar with the workings of these two communities.
I do not know too much about openSUSE, but I can say a bit about Debian Conference. It's Debian developers' conference. It's taken place in a variety of places from around the world. They also have Mini-DebConfs which are local meetings organized by Debian project members to achieve similar objectives to those of the DebConf, but on a regional context.
I share the feeling that excluding LATAM and APAC from the possible locations for Flock poses an unfair disadvantage for contributors from these regions to have an impact in the community, and jeopardizes the goals of the Fedora Project because very talented people are left out.
Having Flock only in EMEA and NA does not necessarily mean it's cheaper overall. In fact, given the cost of life in many LATAM countries is significantly lower than in other developed countries, the costs of logistics (apart from travel costs, ie. venue, lodging…) are more favourable. And when it comes to travel grants, I think contributors who really need sponsorship to make it to the conference are very likely to come from LATAM and APAC, and those who can afford to travel are likely to come from NA and EMEA.
I am very disappointed with the current situation of the premier Fedora events. Honestly it discourages me to participate in a project that segregates contributors and treats me like a second-class citizen who has to settle for a second-class conference.
I do not have any objective metrics on DebConf12 Managua's success, but I can say that I am proud of the work that our local free software community in Nicaragua has put into this event and Software Freedom Day that has been awarded twice as best event worldwide (2007 and 2008). I am sure that their goal of Motivate the local community was achieved.
Eduardo
council-discuss@lists.fedoraproject.org
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Athos Ribeiro -
Brian Exelbierd -
Eduardo A. Mayorga -
Greg DeKoenigsberg -
Jiri Eischmann -
Josh Boyer -
Matthew Miller -
Michael Marinovic -
Neville A. Cross -
Zamir Sun