Followups from Council phone call monday — Budget discussion for this year and beyond

[Matthew Miller]

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?


-- 
Matthew Miller
<mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org&gt;
Fedora Project Leader

[Máirín Duffy]

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(a)fedoraproject.org&gt; 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  
-- 
Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On 13 October 2015 at 15:12, Matthew Miller <mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org&gt; 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.

-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.

[Neville A. Cross]

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(a)fedoraproject.org&gt; 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 
>

[Matthew Miller]

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 the
>  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. 
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. :)

-- 
Matthew Miller
<mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org&gt;
Fedora Project Leader

[Matthew Miller]

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&...

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


-- 
Matthew Miller
<mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org&gt;
Fedora Project Leader

[Josh Boyer]

On Wed, Oct 14, 2015 at 12:19 PM, Matthew Miller
<mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org&gt; 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.

[2] https://twitter.com/mattdm/status/632677958956752896

[Máirín Duffy]

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

[Máirín Duffy]

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...

http://asmarterplanet.com/blog/2011/03/sxsw-interactive-part-4-what-did-t...


Fedora Penguin Refs
===================

- http://www.flickr.com/photos/davidmckelvey/5527328237/

- http://twitpic.com/4aeq8u


Run down of booth setup + logistics
====================================

https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/ambassadors/2011-March/017205.html

~m

[Matthew Miller]

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.

-- 
Matthew Miller
<mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org&gt;
Fedora Project Leader

[Peter Robinson]

> > [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

[Greg DeKoenigsberg]

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(a)gmail.com&gt; 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(a)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.

[Matthew Miller]

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.



-- 
Matthew Miller
<mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org&gt;
Fedora Project Leader

[Joe Brockmeier]

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 | Community Team, OSAS
jzb(a)redhat.com | http://community.redhat.com/
Twitter: @jzb  | http://dissociatedpress.net/

[Bill Nottingham]

Joe Brockmeier (jzb(a)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

[Joe Brockmeier]

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
-- 
Joe Brockmeier | Community Team, OSAS
jzb(a)redhat.com | http://community.redhat.com/
Twitter: @jzb  | http://dissociatedpress.net/

[Remy DeCausemaker]

----- Original Message -----
>  From: "Matthew Miller" <mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org&gt;
>  To: "Discussions with the Fedora Council and community"
> <council-discuss(a)lists.fedoraproject.org&gt;
>  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(a)fedoraproject.org&gt;
>  Fedora Project Leader
>  _______________________________________________
>  council-discuss mailing list
>  council-discuss(a)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(a)redhat.com&gt;
Fedora Community Lead & Council Member
http://whatcanidoforfedora.org
308C A504 0B47 1503 C9D9  E670 E633 A79B 0BB0 F6D9

[Greg DeKoenigsberg]

I can now speak openly. :)

On Thu, Oct 15, 2015 at 3:55 PM, Remy DeCausemaker <rdecause(a)redhat.com&gt; wrote:
>  ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "Matthew Miller" <mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org&gt;
> > To: "Discussions with the Fedora Council and community"
> <council-discuss(a)lists.fedoraproject.org&gt;
> > 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(a)fedoraproject.org&gt;
> > Fedora Project Leader
> > _______________________________________________
> > council-discuss mailing list
> > council-discuss(a)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(a)redhat.com&gt;
>  Fedora Community Lead & Council Member
>  http://whatcanidoforfedora.org
>  308C A504 0B47 1503 C9D9  E670 E633 A79B 0BB0 F6D9
>  _______________________________________________
>  council-discuss mailing list
>  council-discuss(a)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.

[Christoph Wickert]

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(a)fedoraproject.org&gt;:
>      - 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_Reimburs...
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

[Matthew Miller]

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(a)fedoraproject.org&gt;:
>  >     - 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:
>  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 
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".




-- 
Matthew Miller
<mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org&gt;
Fedora Project Leader

[Alejandro Perez]

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(a)fedoraproject.org&gt;
Reply-to: Discussions with the Fedora Council and community <council-
discuss(a)lists.fedoraproject.org&gt;
Para: Discussions with the Fedora Council and community <council-discus
s(a)lists.fedoraproject.org&gt;
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(a)fedoraproject.org&gt;:
>  >     - 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:
>  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 
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".