Here's the rough notes from the call:
- Inside Red Hat, budget is due _way_ early now. We'll need to adjust our planning around that. (Specifically, we need it in by October.)
- This year's budget request is set as same as last year's; we won't know for sure until possibly as late as March what we actually get.
- In the future, we need to do our request planning in the Flock timeframe. (Discussion before Flock, high-bandwidth in-person session at Flock, followup and ratification after.)
- Council (and specifically Remy as community action/impact lead) will work to thoroughly understand budget request, and then act as contact for the finance people. Remy will also help maintain an overall "state of the budget" document as we go through the year.
- Given the long period between request and actual budget, makes sense to also have a second round of planning at the start of the fiscal year (which is March, and years are named after the one in which they end, so we're in FY16 right now, and the upcoming budget is FY17.)
- Right now, all money is allocated to ambassadors through regions, including Flock and FUDCons, and except for FADs. We want to do that differently for FY18 — probably split out at least Flock, and have non-regional budget for marketing and other centralized community activities.
- If we want to do more with our money, and request more as needed, we need to make sure we're spending what we have already — the Council should do a quarterly budget review with ambassadors (and in future any other groups). In the future, "no budget" should mean "no spending".
- NA ambassadors in particular need to get a budget organized. APAC and LATAM need to get better at spending the money that's budgeted.
- We want to ask for more money to grow Fedora. In order to do that, we need to demostrate that the money we do have is being spent well. Need ambassadors to connect spending to results in a a way that _we_ can take to the budget people.
Not mentioned at the meeting, but a thing I'm concerned with and have mentioned before: having a Fedora presence at conferences is good, but is it the best use of Fedora money? Do we grow new users at Linux fests in the 21st century? What things could we do instead?
Fwiw, I agree w this point too and hope we can have some more strategy around events? I think this was part of the thinking Spot had around our presence at SXSW - reaching out to an audience we don't normally hit at the lug/linux cons. (Does that sound right?)
First hand impression of being at the Fedora booth at SXSW is that the vast majority of people we spoke with had little knowledge of Fedora and were genuinely being introduced to both Fedora and floss tools for the first time (we focused on designer-centric tools like Inkscape, given the audience makeup.)
~m
On October 13, 2015 5:12:47 PM EDT, Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org wrote:
Not mentioned at the meeting, but a thing I'm concerned with and have mentioned before: having a Fedora presence at conferences is good, but is it the best use of Fedora money? Do we grow new users at Linux fests in the 21st century? What things could we do
I am sorry to use top posting, but feel awkward to start commenting bit here and there. I completely agree with Máirín.
My feeling is that moving from Linux events where everybody has already engaged with their distro or project has been not that productive. There are few examples brought up to say that we in fact get new contributors at linux fest. To me only shows how little impact we have.
I like how Matthew called these events as token events (I heard him saying that in Flock 2014). Events that Fedora should be present but not make a big investment.
Looking to move out of the box, has been discussed since Marketing FAD in Raleigh 2010 and FUDCon Tempe 2011. Every collaborator that I speak to for about two minutes comes around the same conclusion.
I think that we have been talking a lot about this, but have done too little to bring people on board from ambassadors and other people submitting ideas for participating in events. Convince them that they should look elsewhere to promote Fedora. This is where I think we (me included) have failed.
This does not mean that Fedora should stop participating in events where it can enable upstream collaboration.That is not expanding user base or recruiting collaborators.
So, as a flat organization, it is hard to get a message from one point to another. We need to really push this harder. New people becoming ambassadors have the ideas of what they have seen fedora done in the past, so they expect to do that. We need to tell them to move out of the box.
So, if this is the way to go, we have to budget differently to enable people go to show fedora in other arenas outside our comfort zone.
Neville
On Tue, 2015-10-13 at 18:08 -0400, Máirín Duffy wrote:
Fwiw, I agree w this point too and hope we can have some more strategy around events? I think this was part of the thinking Spot had around our presence at SXSW - reaching out to an audience we don't normally hit at the lug/linux cons. (Does that sound right?)
First hand impression of being at the Fedora booth at SXSW is that the vast majority of people we spoke with had little knowledge of Fedora and were genuinely being introduced to both Fedora and floss tools for the first time (we focused on designer-centric tools like Inkscape, given the audience makeup.)
~m
On October 13, 2015 5:12:47 PM EDT, Matthew Miller < mattdm@fedoraproject.org> wrote:
Not mentioned at the meeting, but a thing I'm concerned with and have mentioned before: having a Fedora presence at conferences is good, but is it the best use of Fedora money? Do we grow new users at Linux fests in the 21st century? What things could we do
On Tue, Oct 13, 2015 at 06:08:23PM -0400, Máirín Duffy wrote:
Fwiw, I agree w this point too and hope we can have some more strategy around events? I think this was part of the thinking Spot had around our presence at SXSW - reaching out to an audience we don't normally hit at the lug/linux cons. (Does that sound right?)
First hand impression of being at the Fedora booth at SXSW is that the vast majority of people we spoke with had little knowledge of Fedora and were genuinely being introduced to both Fedora and floss tools for the first time (we focused on designer-centric tools like Inkscape, given the audience makeup.)
Yeah, I think that was very interesting. I wish we had a better idea of the lasting impact of that — I don't think we've seen a lot of new visible _contributors_ from that effort, and we don't have a clear way to measure users or even secondary impact. Dealing with that problem is key to updating our strategy.
I guess I'm thinking: away from the traditional Linux fests and — let's be honest, aging — LUGs, there's still a lot of area that's closer to "home territory" in the worlds of software development, systems administration, devops/sre, and so on, that we're missing out on. I mean, look at this:
http://www.meetup.com/find/tech/?allMeetups=false&radius=Infinity&us...
How many of those have Fedora presence? How many of them _aren't about Fedora_ but happen to showcase Fedora in some way, either just because the presenter is running Fedora Workstation, or because Fedora is a deployment platform?
I've brought up the Stack Exchange Developer Survey¹ before, and I'll probably keep doing it until someone gives me something better. 20% of software developers run Linux, but only 6% of those (1.3% overall) run Fedora as their desktop. There's room to grow both Linux share overall *and* Fedora's relative position. But we need a strategy to do it — it won't come by doing what we're doing now.
We definitely need some higher-level metrics (and Remy's working on it), but also, I'd like to encourage ambasssadors, event planners, etc., to really focus on how you can measure and demonstrate impact at the base level.
1. http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2015#tech-os
On Wed, Oct 14, 2015 at 12:19 PM, Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org wrote:
I've brought up the Stack Exchange Developer Survey¹ before, and I'll probably keep doing it until someone gives me something better. 20% of software developers run Linux, but only 6% of those (1.3% overall) run Fedora as their desktop. There's room to grow both Linux share overall *and* Fedora's relative position. But we need a strategy to do it — it won't come by doing what we're doing now.
We definitely need some higher-level metrics (and Remy's working on it), but also, I'd like to encourage ambasssadors, event planners, etc., to really focus on how you can measure and demonstrate impact at the base level.
So speaking as a (minor) event planner for Flock, I can tell you right now that Flock will not have a measurable impact in terms of user or contributor _growth_. Which is kind of concerning when you think about it. A refresher on what Flock is:
It started with Robyn's idea for a DoCon. Get people together and actually work on stuff. Accomplish tasks. Produce code (or whatever that groups output is). For the most part, Flock has worked out well for this.
However, it is definitely not user oriented. It is literally an existing Fedora contributor conference, and it is the premier event for both North America and EMEA.
Sure, we have talks[1]. We open registration to anyone. But the _value_ of Flock, as told to the organizers every year and even tweeted about by our illustrious FPL[2], is that is it essentially a gathering of a bunch of different FADs all at the same time in the same location. We call those "workshops" or "hack sessions" in the schedule, but really that is what they are.
So if our premier event for our two most active regions is targeted at existing contributors getting things done, but at the exclusion of new user introduction and contributor growth, then we're kind of shooting ourselves in the foot there. We have no other targeted conference or system for growing contributors in those regions any longer. That seems to have forced us to fall back to the tried and true LUG/installfest/LinuxCon event path.
I'm not suggesting that Flock should change to be user oriented. On the contrary, I'd like to see it change even more towards accomplishing things. I just wanted to point out that Flock isn't going to impact that Stack Exchange survey much.
josh
[1] Frankly, I'd like to get rid of the talks. Or if not remove them entirely, make them extremely focused on problems that need to be solved in Fedora rather than just "here is some cool software I'm working on". The audience of the talks seems to still be the traditional "introductory/new user" set, and that set isn't even present at Flock.
On Wed, Oct 14, 2015 at 12:41:51PM -0400, Josh Boyer wrote:
We definitely need some higher-level metrics (and Remy's working on it), but also, I'd like to encourage ambasssadors, event planners, etc., to really focus on how you can measure and demonstrate impact at the base level.
So speaking as a (minor) event planner for Flock, I can tell you right now that Flock will not have a measurable impact in terms of user or contributor _growth_. Which is kind of concerning when you think about it. A refresher on what Flock is:
In order fulfill our mission, user and contributor growth is necessary, but aren't sufficient. Not everything we spend money on has to go to that specific goal, and in fact not everything should. I focused on it here because it's a core goal of the Fedora Ambassadors subproject. Flock has huge value in a different way. (As you say, so I'm trimming that part from my reply.)
[1] Frankly, I'd like to get rid of the talks. Or if not remove them entirely, make them extremely focused on problems that need to be solved in Fedora rather than just "here is some cool software I'm working on". The audience of the talks seems to still be the traditional "introductory/new user" set, and that set isn't even present at Flock.
I think the talks - particularly, prepared talks - can provide good focus, and can be a useful way of communicating. So I'd advocate for the second approach, of making them more specifically focused on contributors, problem solving, project needs and direction, and similar.
I also agree that moving Flock away from user outreach leaves a vacuum there in NA and EMEA.
[1] Frankly, I'd like to get rid of the talks. Or if not remove them entirely, make them extremely focused on problems that need to be solved in Fedora rather than just "here is some cool software I'm working on". The audience of the talks seems to still be the traditional "introductory/new user" set, and that set isn't even present at Flock.
I think the talks - particularly, prepared talks - can provide good focus, and can be a useful way of communicating. So I'd advocate for the second approach, of making them more specifically focused on contributors, problem solving, project needs and direction, and similar.
I also agree that moving Flock away from user outreach leaves a vacuum there in NA and EMEA.
I've often wondered why we don't do the "Fedora Meetup" model. It seems to work very well for the likes of Ansible and ElasticSearch where they create a meetup group, provide a template for organising a meetup in the local area that is easy for people to pick up on, if someone picks up and runs with it they send some swag or similar, possibly even have some default talk slide decks that some local contributors can present as a starting point.
The advantage of something likely meetup.com is that you get wider advertising of your event through the "meetups happening in your area this week" through the site and it's quite a low barrier for entry for local people because it's generally a few hours of an evening to attend in a location that's generally not massively out of the way.
The meetups in London I've been to (Ansible, ElasticSearch, London DevOps and a few others) generally have a couple of short presentations and then head off to the nearest pub. Often a local business might well sponsor the event whether by providing the location for the presentation, or some pizzas or both.
It would be a great thing to enable the various Ambassadors to get involved in, It would require a central resource(s) to manage the meetup group and do some co-ordindation in the organizing of the meetup group and ensuring a level of quality but seeing how large some of the other meetup groups grow (I've seen some that are operating 100s of meetup locations) I suspect it might be worth the effort.
Peter
As a data point, Ansible has 10k meetup members worldwide. Cost is less than 5k annually. On Oct 15, 2015 5:23 AM, "Peter Robinson" pbrobinson@gmail.com wrote:
[1] Frankly, I'd like to get rid of the talks. Or if not remove them entirely, make them extremely focused on problems that need to be solved in Fedora rather than just "here is some cool software I'm working on". The audience of the talks seems to still be the traditional "introductory/new user" set, and that set isn't even present at Flock.
I think the talks - particularly, prepared talks - can provide good focus, and can be a useful way of communicating. So I'd advocate for the second approach, of making them more specifically focused on contributors, problem solving, project needs and direction, and similar.
I also agree that moving Flock away from user outreach leaves a vacuum there in NA and EMEA.
I've often wondered why we don't do the "Fedora Meetup" model. It seems to work very well for the likes of Ansible and ElasticSearch where they create a meetup group, provide a template for organising a meetup in the local area that is easy for people to pick up on, if someone picks up and runs with it they send some swag or similar, possibly even have some default talk slide decks that some local contributors can present as a starting point.
The advantage of something likely meetup.com is that you get wider advertising of your event through the "meetups happening in your area this week" through the site and it's quite a low barrier for entry for local people because it's generally a few hours of an evening to attend in a location that's generally not massively out of the way.
The meetups in London I've been to (Ansible, ElasticSearch, London DevOps and a few others) generally have a couple of short presentations and then head off to the nearest pub. Often a local business might well sponsor the event whether by providing the location for the presentation, or some pizzas or both.
It would be a great thing to enable the various Ambassadors to get involved in, It would require a central resource(s) to manage the meetup group and do some co-ordindation in the organizing of the meetup group and ensuring a level of quality but seeing how large some of the other meetup groups grow (I've seen some that are operating 100s of meetup locations) I suspect it might be worth the effort.
Peter _______________________________________________ council-discuss mailing list council-discuss@lists.fedoraproject.org Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/council-discuss
The Fedora Project's mission is to lead the advancement of free and open source software and content as a collaborative community.
On 10/15/2015 02:01 AM, _ wrote:
As a data point, Ansible has 10k meetup members worldwide. Cost is less than 5k annually.
Are you doing multiple Ansible meetup profiles/accounts/whatever or one main Ansible profile? IIRC Meetup.com is disallowing new accounts that aren't tied to a specific area.
Joe Brockmeier (jzb@redhat.com) said:
On 10/15/2015 02:01 AM, _ wrote:
As a data point, Ansible has 10k meetup members worldwide. Cost is less than 5k annually.
Are you doing multiple Ansible meetup profiles/accounts/whatever or one main Ansible profile? IIRC Meetup.com is disallowing new accounts that aren't tied to a specific area.
Each meetup is its own group. So you have Ansible-NYC, Ansible-Paris, etc.
Bill
On 10/15/2015 12:16 PM, Bill Nottingham wrote:
Each meetup is its own group. So you have Ansible-NYC, Ansible-Paris, etc.
Ah, hence the $5K figure? Or what else does that encompass?
Best,
jzb
On Thu, Oct 15, 2015 at 04:23:28AM +0100, Peter Robinson wrote:
I've often wondered why we don't do the "Fedora Meetup" model. It
I think this is simply the same reason we don't have a lot of other things we know would be a good idea in Fedora but haven't done — no one really enthused about it stepped up and made it happen.
I was actually talking with Remy about this as a community action/impact activity last week. Remy, what are your thoughts?
It would be a great thing to enable the various Ambassadors to get involved in, It would require a central resource(s) to manage the meetup group and do some co-ordindation in the organizing of the meetup group and ensuring a level of quality but seeing how large some of the other meetup groups grow (I've seen some that are operating 100s of meetup locations) I suspect it might be worth the effort.
Very much yes. I see two main avenues — specific meetups around Fedora, combined with Fedora activity at meetups around other open source projects.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Matthew Miller" mattdm@fedoraproject.org To: "Discussions with the Fedora Council and community" council-discuss@lists.fedoraproject.org Sent: Thursday, October 15, 2015 10:37:19 AM Subject: Re: Followups from Council phone call monday — Budget discussion for this year and beyond
On Thu, Oct 15, 2015 at 04:23:28AM +0100, Peter Robinson wrote:
I've often wondered why we don't do the "Fedora Meetup" model. It
I think this is simply the same reason we don't have a lot of other things we know would be a good idea in Fedora but haven't done — no one really enthused about it stepped up and made it happen.
I was actually talking with Remy about this as a community action/impact activity last week. Remy, what are your thoughts?
There are a number of other topics/ideas that came out of that 1x1 with mattdm last week:
- It'd be nice to track whenever "Fedora" is covered in existing meetups (NLP on descriptions? Some other MeetupAPI grepping?) - Encouraging Ambassadors to target local meetups (DevOps, Programming Langs, Etc...) as places to give Fedora-specific presentations - Awarding Travel Subsidy to international events, based on participation in local/regional events - Developing a trove of general Fedora slide-decks that can be presented at a variety of meetups (Python in Fedora, DevOps in Fedora, etc...)
It would be a great thing to enable the various Ambassadors to get involved in, It would require a central resource(s) to manage the meetup group and do some co-ordindation in the organizing of the meetup group and ensuring a level of quality but seeing how large some of the other meetup groups grow (I've seen some that are operating 100s of meetup locations) I suspect it might be worth the effort.
Very much yes. I see two main avenues — specific meetups around Fedora, combined with Fedora activity at meetups around other open source projects.
Yes, agreed see above.
Though anecdotal, I'd like to add some more story here:
LUGs have been around since long before Meetup. Rochester has one of the longest-operating LUGs in the US, according to their website. However... membership and attendance has been trending downward year-over-year. Perhaps this is because of differentiation (e.g. you used to go to LUG to talk about sysadmin tools and topics, but now there is a specific meetup for that?) Regardless, our general LUG, that doesn't focus on one single distro, is already struggling to maintain leadership and regular attendance. I cannot imagine having an even more narrowly defined meetup will bear more fruit than having a general LUG, but perhaps I am underestimating the reach/interest/passion of our users?
This is where a user census would come in very handy ;)
Finding out *where* we have a critical mass of current users, to decide where to invest in forming a regional meetup. We /could/ do this by querying FAS membership, but since it is user-reported, it could be suspect, generalized, or just plain incorrect (manual lat/long input can be iffy.) My guess is that we'd like be skewed towards the larger cities having more users (duh), but there are places like Rochester, where I think that our efforts on campuses and with regional events (like FLOCK) we may have incited a slightly larger base as a proportion of the population. What I'd rather avoid is dumping precious budget into a super-saturated market, just because it is "the biggest." We could also look at not just current users, but potential users, to see where we can grown the most? This is a more slippery metric, and I don't have an easy answer, but I'd look at datapoints like: Hackathons per year, Startups per square mile, proximity to a Red Hat office, Number of EDU's in the area, ACS/BLS labor statistics for occupational density of engineers/programmers, etc...
And lets be honest, sometimes a very small group of engaged and active hackers can be a *more* effective event, than a general meeting of hundreds of disinterested folks just looking for "free stuff." (ask Kushal about his experience with the state of Open Source Ambassadorships in India sometime for more on this...)
If there were some data, we could make strategic investment. This is a larger commops discussion waiting to be had. I think this question is def worthy of some more research, and we can do a multi-variate analysis to decide if and where to put our time/energy/budget.
I think it is key that we need to recognize that Ambassadors are *not* the only constituency that would need to do local meetup outreach, though they are the most natural. Our ambassador reach is varied by Continental Region, let alone local region, and it could be cost-ineffective to subsidize travel to even smaller events than conferences.
Getting a list of already-existing local meetups and hackathons from each ambassador would be a good start. This could just be a wiki page for now, but eventually, having local Hubs seems like a great place to keep this information, which can then be aggregated into Regional and National Hubs, without information having to be curated at each layer.
/me goes to file a few tickets.
Let's keep this conversation going, I'm going to cc the commops list to get it on the radar over there as well. --RemyD.
-- Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org Fedora Project Leader _______________________________________________ council-discuss mailing list council-discuss@lists.fedoraproject.org Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/council-discuss
The Fedora Project's mission is to lead the advancement of free and open source software and content as a collaborative community.
-- Remy DeCausemaker decause@redhat.com Fedora Community Lead & Council Member http://whatcanidoforfedora.org 308C A504 0B47 1503 C9D9 E670 E633 A79B 0BB0 F6D9
I can now speak openly. :)
On Thu, Oct 15, 2015 at 3:55 PM, Remy DeCausemaker rdecause@redhat.com wrote:
----- Original Message -----
From: "Matthew Miller" mattdm@fedoraproject.org To: "Discussions with the Fedora Council and community" council-discuss@lists.fedoraproject.org Sent: Thursday, October 15, 2015 10:37:19 AM Subject: Re: Followups from Council phone call monday — Budget discussion for this year and beyond
On Thu, Oct 15, 2015 at 04:23:28AM +0100, Peter Robinson wrote:
I've often wondered why we don't do the "Fedora Meetup" model. It
I think this is simply the same reason we don't have a lot of other things we know would be a good idea in Fedora but haven't done — no one really enthused about it stepped up and made it happen.
I was actually talking with Remy about this as a community action/impact activity last week. Remy, what are your thoughts?
There are a number of other topics/ideas that came out of that 1x1 with mattdm last week:
- It'd be nice to track whenever "Fedora" is covered in existing meetups (NLP on descriptions? Some other MeetupAPI grepping?)
We do this at Ansible. I have a contractor who continually trolls through meetup.com for data. There might be a better solution, but costs us about $30/wk, which is not bad.
- Encouraging Ambassadors to target local meetups (DevOps, Programming Langs, Etc...) as places to give Fedora-specific presentations
Yes.
- Awarding Travel Subsidy to international events, based on participation in local/regional events
Depends on how much $$$ you have available.
- Developing a trove of general Fedora slide-decks that can be presented at a variety of meetups (Python in Fedora, DevOps in Fedora, etc...)
There's already a trove of Fedora slide decks:
http://www.slideshare.net/search/slideshow?searchfrom=header&q=fedora
You're best suited, I think, by picking out the ones that are good and encouraging others to emulate them. People don't tend to like giving generic slides in my experience, but identifying the best good jumping-off points would be super useful.
It would be a great thing to enable the various Ambassadors to get involved in, It would require a central resource(s) to manage the meetup group and do some co-ordindation in the organizing of the meetup group and ensuring a level of quality but seeing how large some of the other meetup groups grow (I've seen some that are operating 100s of meetup locations) I suspect it might be worth the effort.
Very much yes. I see two main avenues — specific meetups around Fedora, combined with Fedora activity at meetups around other open source projects.
Yes, agreed see above.
Though anecdotal, I'd like to add some more story here:
LUGs have been around since long before Meetup. Rochester has one of the longest-operating LUGs in the US, according to their website. However... membership and attendance has been trending downward year-over-year. Perhaps this is because of differentiation (e.g. you used to go to LUG to talk about sysadmin tools and topics, but now there is a specific meetup for that?) Regardless, our general LUG, that doesn't focus on one single distro, is already struggling to maintain leadership and regular attendance. I cannot imagine having an even more narrowly defined meetup will bear more fruit than having a general LUG, but perhaps I am underestimating the reach/interest/passion of our users?
This is where a user census would come in very handy ;)
LUGs are dead. Don't wait to do a survey to come to the obvious conclusion.
Finding out *where* we have a critical mass of current users, to decide where to invest in forming a regional meetup. We /could/ do this by querying FAS membership, but since it is user-reported, it could be suspect, generalized, or just plain incorrect (manual lat/long input can be iffy.) My guess is that we'd like be skewed towards the larger cities having more users (duh), but there are places like Rochester, where I think that our efforts on campuses and with regional events (like FLOCK) we may have incited a slightly larger base as a proportion of the population. What I'd rather avoid is dumping precious budget into a super-saturated market, just because it is "the biggest." We could also look at not just current users, but potential users, to see where we can grown the most? This is a more slippery metric, and I don't have an easy answer, but I'd look at datapoints like: Hackathons per year, Startups per square mile, proximity to a Red Hat office, Number of EDU's in the area, ACS/BLS labor statistics for occupational density of engineers/programmers, etc...
Far too much work for far little benefit. The Ansible meetup strategy is two-fold:
A. Ansible-created. * 1. Look at where the top N Docker meetups are. * 2. Create the Ansible meetups there. * 3. Wait for people to join. * 4. Ask the members who wants to lead. * 5. Hand over the reins.
B. User-created. * 1. Make it clear that anyone can create an Ansible meetup. * 2. When someone says "I want an Ansible meetup in x location," say yes. * 3. Create the meetup and hand over the reins.
The great thing about meetup.com as a platform is that does the vast majority of the work for you, at a nominal price. Even going with the most expensive plan, you're looking at $100/meetup/yr (and we currently pay way less than that). So 50 cities is a $5k investment. Put meetups in the top 50 cities in the world, and you're done for year 1. Assess the membership numbers and go from there.
As of right now, Ansible has 110 meetups around the world with almost 12k members. It took a year to get there from practically nothing, and it took about 25% of my time to do it with a small budget, by myself.
It's not perfect. About 1/3 of those meetups have yet to meet, and may never meet. Another 1/3 have met once or twice. But that last 1/3 are very active.
And lets be honest, sometimes a very small group of engaged and active hackers can be a *more* effective event, than a general meeting of hundreds of disinterested folks just looking for "free stuff." (ask Kushal about his experience with the state of Open Source Ambassadorships in India sometime for more on this...)
Apples and oranges. Meetups are perfect for "recruitment", and to give people who are interested a local place to go meet other people like them. Hacking is different, because it requires different skills and different supporting infrastructure.
If there were some data, we could make strategic investment. This is a larger commops discussion waiting to be had. I think this question is def worthy of some more research, and we can do a multi-variate analysis to decide if and where to put our time/energy/budget.
I think it is key that we need to recognize that Ambassadors are *not* the only constituency that would need to do local meetup outreach, though they are the most natural. Our ambassador reach is varied by Continental Region, let alone local region, and it could be cost-ineffective to subsidize travel to even smaller events than conferences.
One idea: use the ambassadors to kickstart the meetup strategy (following strategy B above). It's a natural fit. It also gives ambassadors a very clear structure to work in. You also get a lot of data for free: where are the most active events? Who's holding events most frequently? Who needs help? Data that would be exceptionally useful for strengthening the ambassadors program as a whole.
--g
Getting a list of already-existing local meetups and hackathons from each ambassador would be a good start. This could just be a wiki page for now, but eventually, having local Hubs seems like a great place to keep this information, which can then be aggregated into Regional and National Hubs, without information having to be curated at each layer.
/me goes to file a few tickets.
Let's keep this conversation going, I'm going to cc the commops list to get it on the radar over there as well. --RemyD.
-- Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org Fedora Project Leader _______________________________________________ council-discuss mailing list council-discuss@lists.fedoraproject.org Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/council-discuss
The Fedora Project's mission is to lead the advancement of free and open source software and content as a collaborative community.
-- Remy DeCausemaker decause@redhat.com Fedora Community Lead & Council Member http://whatcanidoforfedora.org 308C A504 0B47 1503 C9D9 E670 E633 A79B 0BB0 F6D9 _______________________________________________ council-discuss mailing list council-discuss@lists.fedoraproject.org Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/council-discuss
The Fedora Project's mission is to lead the advancement of free and open source software and content as a collaborative community.
On 10/14/2015 12:19 PM, Matthew Miller wrote:
Yeah, I think that was very interesting. I wish we had a better idea of the lasting impact of that — I don't think we've seen a lot of new visible _contributors_ from that effort, and we don't have a clear way to measure users or even secondary impact. Dealing with that problem is key to updating our strategy.
I actually do have a write up of all the contacts we made there and the exposure we got (was Spot's idea) - we got a shout out during one of the main SXSW talks by an interaction designer from Mozilla for example, and Guy Kawasaki came to the Fedora booth and hung out briefly - but I didn't put the writeup on the Fedora wiki because it has personal details about people. I can send it to you privately though.
~m
On 10/14/2015 12:47 PM, Máirín Duffy wrote:
On 10/14/2015 12:19 PM, Matthew Miller wrote:
Yeah, I think that was very interesting. I wish we had a better idea of the lasting impact of that — I don't think we've seen a lot of new visible _contributors_ from that effort, and we don't have a clear way to measure users or even secondary impact. Dealing with that problem is key to updating our strategy.
I actually do have a write up of all the contacts we made there and the exposure we got (was Spot's idea) - we got a shout out during one of the main SXSW talks by an interaction designer from Mozilla for example, and Guy Kawasaki came to the Fedora booth and hung out briefly - but I didn't put the writeup on the Fedora wiki because it has personal details about people. I can send it to you privately though.
Here is some stuff I can share that's not sensitive:
Non-personally identifying stories: ===================================
- There was a mom of a 10 year old boy who seemed like she'd died and gone to heaven when she found out what Fedora was; told me her son used a Photoshop trial that ran out, and asked his dad for the full thing. Dad told him to go to bittorrent and get a keygen. The Mom said her boy knew it was illegal and didn't want to do it. I hooked her up with tons of websites for tutorials and the design suite cd and everything else, she was so happy.
- CTO of a school district, part of a collective of school districts in TX that use open source software. Had never heard of OER commons or teachingopensource.com. Told him about them. Wants to trade notes on FLOSS and EDU.
- professor from a technical college, School does not have much money, using FLOSS software in curriculum.
- multiple designers came up, sick of adobe for various reasons, excited to learn about alternative, some interested in helping out open source
- someone from SCAD, thought SCAD would be a great place to do outreach on the tools to designers (Savannah College of Art and Design)
Other booth notes: ==================
- Had maybe three people ask about the difference between Fedora and Ubuntu. One was aggressively pro-Ubuntu. One said Unity sucks and he's getting ready to switch
- There were 3-4 people I talked to who said they used to use Fedora, from 1 - 4 years ago, using Ubuntu, thinking about switching back. - There were at least 3 people who mentioned the Austin-area LUG, one was a Fedora ambassador and knew [name redacted]
- Overall people seemed to have heard about Gimp, a little less so about Inkscape and Blender, and nobody had heard of MyPaint or Scribus. Most were surprised to hear they were cross-platform.
Coverage: =========
- Fedora got a shout out during Chrissie Brodigan's Mozilla UX talk, we got a lot of interest from that talk - 5 came up to me after in the room, 7 contacted us afterwards on twitter,
- Our booth featured on TechCrunch video http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/17/sxsw-sights-and-sounds-tctv/
- TechCrunch interview with Jared Smith (starts at 5:15) http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/17/the-sxswi-trade-show-up-close-with-penguin/
- Spot in a Fedora Tux penguin costume asking IBM's Watson a question (the photo is hilarious) http://asmarterplanet.com/blog/2011/03/sxsw-interactive-part-5-cloud-city-pe...
http://asmarterplanet.com/blog/2011/03/sxsw-interactive-part-4-what-did-the-...
Fedora Penguin Refs ===================
- http://www.flickr.com/photos/davidmckelvey/5527328237/
Run down of booth setup + logistics ====================================
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/ambassadors/2011-March/017205.html
~m
On 13 October 2015 at 15:12, Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org wrote:
Here's the rough notes from the call:
- Inside Red Hat, budget is due _way_ early now. We'll need to adjust our planning around that. (Specifically, we need it in by October.) - This year's budget request is set as same as last year's; we won't know for sure until possibly as late as March what we actually get. - In the future, we need to do our request planning in the Flock timeframe. (Discussion before Flock, high-bandwidth in-person session at Flock, followup and ratification after.) - Council (and specifically Remy as community action/impact lead) will work to thoroughly understand budget request, and then act as contact for the finance people. Remy will also help maintain an overall "state of the budget" document as we go through the year.
I have had some experience with budgets and can help if needed.
- Given the long period between request and actual budget, makes sense to also have a second round of planning at the start of the fiscal year (which is March, and years are named after the one in which they end, so we're in FY16 right now, and the upcoming budget is FY17.)
I would say that this should go with the quarterly budget reviews as sort of review 0. Because budget meetings can become long vast times of "KILL ME NOW." type meetings these are especially good to have an agenda, and someone who is going to run that meeting quickly and cleanly with all sorts of side conversations to be tabled onto mailing lists or ticket systems.
- Right now, all money is allocated to ambassadors through regions, including Flock and FUDCons, and except for FADs. We want to do that differently for FY18 — probably split out at least Flock, and have non-regional budget for marketing and other centralized community activities. - If we want to do more with our money, and request more as needed, we need to make sure we're spending what we have already — the Council should do a quarterly budget review with ambassadors (and in future any other groups). In the future, "no budget" should mean "no spending". - NA ambassadors in particular need to get a budget organized. APAC and LATAM need to get better at spending the money that's budgeted.
Since EMEA isn't mentioned, I am guessing it is running smoothly. Would it help if they went over what they are doing well?
- We want to ask for more money to grow Fedora. In order to do that, we need to demostrate that the money we do have is being spent well. Need ambassadors to connect spending to results in a a way that _we_ can take to the budget people.Not mentioned at the meeting, but a thing I'm concerned with and have mentioned before: having a Fedora presence at conferences is good, but is it the best use of Fedora money? Do we grow new users at Linux fests in the 21st century? What things could we do instead?
Would need to have a longer description of what you are meaning here to be able to say anything.
On Tue, Oct 13, 2015 at 06:02:41PM -0600, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
I have had some experience with budgets and can help if needed.
Thanks! That'd be awesome.
- Given the long period between request and actual budget, makes sense to also have a second round of planning at the start of theI would say that this should go with the quarterly budget reviews as sort of review 0. Because budget meetings can become long vast times of "KILL ME NOW." type meetings these are especially good to have an agenda, and someone who is going to run that meeting quickly and cleanly with all sorts of side conversations to be tabled onto mailing lists or ticket systems.
Good advice.
- NA ambassadors in particular need to get a budget organized. APAC and LATAM need to get better at spending the money that's budgeted.Since EMEA isn't mentioned, I am guessing it is running smoothly.
Yes, roughly. :)
Would it help if they went over what they are doing well?
It's nothing elaborate: they have a planning FAD every year, regularly keep their budget page up to date, and keep close track of spending and reimbursements.
Not mentioned at the meeting, but a thing I'm concerned with and have mentioned before: having a Fedora presence at conferences is good, but is it the best use of Fedora money? Do we grow new users at Linux fests in the 21st century? What things could we do instead?
Would need to have a longer description of what you are meaning here to be able to say anything.
Will respond in Mo's message. :)
Hi,
I'm sorry for the late response, but I'd like to set something straight:
2015-10-13 23:12 GMT+02:00 Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org:
- Right now, all money is allocated to ambassadors through regions, including Flock and FUDCons, and except for FADs.
AFAIK this is not correct. The ambassadors only manage the regional support but not premiere events budget.
Traditionally, the Fedora budget consisted of three parts: 1. premiere events 2. regional support 3. discretionary funds
1 and 3 are managed by the "budget owners", that means OSAS.
1 not only includes FLOCKs and FUDCons but also FADs as they are premiere events, too. See https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Premier_Fedora_Events
Only 2 is managed by the ambassadors and further broken down per region. Depending on the amount, a request is either approved by a peer (famsco member or credit card owner), the regional community (in an IRC meeting) or by FAmSco. For more info see https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Reimbursements#Budget_Request_and_Reimburseme... and the regional guidelines linked there.
We want to do that differently for FY18 — probably split out at least Flock, and have non-regional budget for marketing and other centralized community activities.
Right, and that's exactly what we already have or at least what we used to have before OSAS, see https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Accounting and https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Community_Architecture_expenses
Please let me know is something has changed and I'm mistaken.
Best regards, Christoph
On Mon, Nov 02, 2015 at 02:33:10PM +0100, Christoph Wickert wrote:
I'm sorry for the late response, but I'd like to set something straight: 2015-10-13 23:12 GMT+02:00 Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org:
- Right now, all money is allocated to ambassadors through regions, including Flock and FUDCons, and except for FADs.AFAIK this is not correct. The ambassadors only manage the regional support but not premiere events budget.
Well, Ruth told me that she allocated the money in that way. That may be separate from who _manages_ it.
Traditionally, the Fedora budget consisted of three parts:
- premiere events
- regional support
- discretionary funds
1 and 3 are managed by the "budget owners", that means OSAS.
1 not only includes FLOCKs and FUDCons but also FADs as they are premiere events, too. See https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Premier_Fedora_Events
So, from that page, the label "premier" basically means "an event all about Fedora, run by Fedora". As structured, that means central organization for those, and ambassadors for Fedora presence at non-Fedora events. I'm in favor of a wider scope for Ambassadors, to also include regional premier events (at least to some degree — doesn't mean that we'd throw out assistance from other parts of the project or OSAS). That would include FADs focused on specific regions (like the ambassador planning FADs or a translation sprint), and possibly FUDCon too (but not Flock).
We want to do that differently for FY18 — probably split out at least Flock, and have non-regional budget for marketing and other centralized community activities.Right, and that's exactly what we already have or at least what we used to have before OSAS, see https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Accounting and https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Community_Architecture_expenses Please let me know is something has changed and I'm mistaken.
I think those pages are woefully out of date. I think it most matches the statement "what we used to have before OSAS".
It used to be like that last year, budged for FUDCON and Ambassadors was combine at least for latam.
-----Mensaje original----- De: Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org Reply-to: Discussions with the Fedora Council and community <council- discuss@lists.fedoraproject.org> Para: Discussions with the Fedora Council and community <council-discus s@lists.fedoraproject.org> Asunto: Re: Followups from Council phone call monday — Budget discussion for this year and beyond Fecha: Mon, 2 Nov 2015 08:58:06 -0500
On Mon, Nov 02, 2015 at 02:33:10PM +0100, Christoph Wickert wrote:
I'm sorry for the late response, but I'd like to set something straight: 2015-10-13 23:12 GMT+02:00 Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org:
- Right now, all money is allocated to ambassadors through regions, including Flock and FUDCons, and except for FADs.
AFAIK this is not correct. The ambassadors only manage the regional support but not premiere events budget.
Well, Ruth told me that she allocated the money in that way. That may be separate from who _manages_ it.
Traditionally, the Fedora budget consisted of three parts:
- premiere events
- regional support
- discretionary funds
1 and 3 are managed by the "budget owners", that means OSAS.
1 not only includes FLOCKs and FUDCons but also FADs as they are premiere events, too. See https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Premier_Fedora_Events
So, from that page, the label "premier" basically means "an event all about Fedora, run by Fedora". As structured, that means central organization for those, and ambassadors for Fedora presence at non-Fedora events. I'm in favor of a wider scope for Ambassadors, to also include regional premier events (at least to some degree — doesn't mean that we'd throw out assistance from other parts of the project or OSAS). That would include FADs focused on specific regions (like the ambassador planning FADs or a translation sprint), and possibly FUDCon too (but not Flock).
We want to do that differently for FY18 — probably split out at least Flock, and have non-regional budget for marketing and other centralized community activities.
Right, and that's exactly what we already have or at least what we used to have before OSAS, see https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Accounting and https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Community_Architecture_expenses Please let me know is something has changed and I'm mistaken.
I think those pages are woefully out of date. I think it most matches the statement "what we used to have before OSAS".
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