Fedora Council Meeting Summary

[Máirín Duffy]

Hi folks :)

So here are the meeting minutes from our presentation to the Fedora Council. Both myself
and riecatnor were there to represent:

https://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/teams/council/council.2015-11-05-18.00....

Here's sort of a quick summary of what we discussed (I basically used what we talked
about a couple of meetings ago as the agenda - 
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/design-team%40lists.fedorap...
but I rearrnaged the points from the log here to be more coherent than I was. :) )

1. Current State of the Fedora Design Team
=========================================

We talked about the FAD we held in January of this year and what we accomplished, and how
we've sustained it - cleaning up the ticket queue and coming up with a workable ticket
process, re-establishing regular meetings and doing regular ticket triage. riecatnor and
threebean also redesigned the new badge ticket submission pro9cess and the resulting badge
request tickets have been more useful.

We are talking about doing a schedule review during our meetings since we missed at least
one deliverable for F23 (media art.) A cool idea from langdon was to auto-script ticket
creation for release deliverables so they were in our trac and we could just track them
the same way we track any other ticket and have assignees / etc. We would need help with
writing such a script, though (and we might want to eventually move our ticket system to
pagure.io.) 

2. Future Plans
==============

- We talked about Maria's project to organize and fill out our swag designs. 

- We talked about how Marie has been mentoring newcomers in creating badges and ran a
successful Badge Workshop at Flock and that we'd like to do more Badge
workshops/hackathon kind of events. 

- We talked about the Fedora Hubs project. We also talked about upcoming internship
positions (including a UX summer internship for summer 2016 in Boston) for working on
Hubs.

3. Things the Design Team Needs from the Rest of the Fedora Project
==================================================================

A. DESIGN TEAM FAD

- We'd like to do another Design Team FAD in 2016, in July, in the Boston area. It
would involve both a Badge Hackathon as well as a day to work on print design materials in
preparation for Flock EMEA the following month.

- We'd like to integrate some kind of newcomer recruitment into the event too - maybe
some kind of student participation - although July is a bad month to do this as many
university students have left campus for the summer. :(

- We'd also like to try to engage remote attendees. We had issues at our Jan 2015 FAD,
but the situation may be better in July 2016, particularly if we use Red Hat's Boston
area office as it is getting a video / conference system upgrade.

- Our cheapest option is going to be hosting at Red Hat's office in Westford MA; we
have better potential for engaging new folks if we head closer to Boston but lodging in
Boston in the summer tends to be quite expensive. Another option is arranging transport
for students from universities up to Westford.

- To move forward with this we need a draft proposal, which mizmo took as an action item.

B. SHOW ME THE CONTENT

- Made mostly as a PSA - we frequently get last-minute design requests that do not include
actual (text) content to use. Sometimes we as designers come pu with the content even
though it's not our thing. Please be kind to your designer friends and don't ask
us to design stuff until you have your content / goals / vision to share with us so we can
make you a nice design. 

C. NEED SPECS / PRINTER INFO / REASONABLE TIME

- The integrity of our design work should be treated as seriously as the integrity of
Fedora's code, so please provide us specs and info on printers / vendors so we can
make sure our design work reflects Fedora's brand correctly (and in enough time to get
the job done.)

4. Recruiting and Retention
==========================

- This is something we have room for improvement on.

- We think our recent hyperkitty list migration might help in lowering the barrier to
participate on our mailing list.

- We had some ideas to do virtual event like office hours at regular intervals so newbies
could show up for hands on help.

- We think our retention rate is pretty typical. Usually when we lose folks it's
because of a changing life situation - new job, graduate from school, etc.

- We need to focus more on recruitment; don't put a lot of active effort into it.
Mostly folks come to our mailing list and volunteer and we try our best to follow up; only
a few continue to engage.

- Some of our recruits are technical and want to learn more about design; some of our
recruits have a strong design background but don't know as much about the technical
bits.

5. Swag Strategy
================

- Maria's project to clean up our swag assets is going to help.

- Traditionally our swag has been very haphazard without (seemingly) much centralized
organization. 

- Should we consider some bounds on swag production to help manage it (example would be
T-shirts for FUDcons/Flocks but not for FADs as a policy - as they are more impactful
environmentally / cost-wise.)

- Could we consider alternatives to T-shirts?

- There are significant regional differences in swag production that should be righted.

- Discussion lead to a suggestion of creating a draft swag policy to try to organize
thoughts around this.



~m

[Sylvia Sánchez]

Alternatives to t-shirts like what? Should be only in the sense of
clothes/outfit? Or is in a wider sense?
Hope is meaningful what I'm writing...



Cheers,
Sylvia

[Máirín Duffy]

Well, for example, sometimes we give out T-shirts to thank contributors for their work as
sort of a one-off thing. Maybe instead of T-shirts (which do wear out over time) we could
give them some nice metal pins or a sweatshirt or some other type of apparel. 

~m

[Sylvia Sánchez]

Metal pins... Love that idea!


Thanks for your quick reply. Cheers
Sylvia

[Matthew Miller]

On Tue, Nov 10, 2015 at 07:28:22PM -0000, Máirín Duffy wrote:
>  - Could we consider alternatives to T-shirts? 
I'm all for alternatives. However, it's worth mentioning that a _lot_
of people at LISA were disappointed that we didn't have Fedora shirts.

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

[Máirín Duffy]

Did it seem like they really wanted t-shirst specifically and would be willing to
purchase, or were they generally looking for freebies? 

(This might come across badly, but I feel like if you can afford to go to LISA you can
afford to buy a t-shirt.)

~m

[Sylvia Sánchez]

I guess it's all about the price, but I agree that if you can afford
one thing, you can afford the other.



My thought.
Sylvia

[Matthew Miller]

On Tue, Nov 17, 2015 at 05:48:34PM -0000, Máirín Duffy wrote:
>  Did it seem like they really wanted t-shirst specifically and would
>  be willing to purchase, or were they generally looking for freebies? 
Specifically t-shirts. We had USB keys and stickers. And there were
plenty of CentOS and Atomic shirts and hats — people were asking for
Fedora and it made me a little sad to say no. 

>  (This might come across badly, but I feel like if you can afford to
>  go to LISA you can afford to buy a t-shirt.) 
Probably. Most attendees are funded for travel by work — I don't think
many people go on their own dime. And I suppose most sysadmins'
salaries have room for a shirt purchase or two.


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