On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 06:41:47PM -0500, Mel Chua wrote:
Rodrigo and I talked a bit about FUDCon LATAM today, and how the upcoming Events FAD might be able to help it out.
For transparency-ness, here are meeting notes/logs - this was entirely spontaneous/unplanned, but when we realized we were talking about things that should be logged, we move to channel and logged it.
http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fudcon-planning/2009-12-17/fudcon-planning....
This also raises two interesting questions:
(1) Local FUDCons will be planned - and run - in local languages. How can we keep FUDCon planning in sync, given this? How much do we want to worry (at the moment) about translating FUDCons, bringing people from other regions in as guests to a region's FUDCon, etc?
There are really two separate aspects to translation in the context of FUDCon as a global event -- what happens during planning, and what happens during execution. During planning, we need to be able to communicate effectively in English between all planners, as the lingua franca of the Fedora Project. This seems pretty reasonable and, I think, expected by people who work in the project anyway. There's no other way for us to keep in sync other than to speak one language while doing so.
During execution, in past FUDCons I've been to in Europe we've had session days that were split between English and another language such as German. At one FUDCon EMEA the talks were repeated IIRC. We should make an effort to make use of the "FUDCon Live" idea, and have people who are bilingual transcribe talks live into IRC in English, again leveraging the lingua franca to make written material more widely available beyond the borders of the event itself.
As far as travel to another region... This is tricky. To me, an event gets less representative of actual community growth and cultivation in a region, if we're shuttling a mass of people *as a substitute* for bringing in people of that region. That being said, it's always helpful to have one or two notable contributors from other regions there, to provide energy and hike up the interest in the event.
To support a FUDCon event, though, planners in the region need to be looking at the larger scale -- are we growing the base of people at whom the event is targeted, in that region to the extent needed to make it worthwhile to have the event? In other words, I tend to doubt that FUDCon itself generates new community as a primary objective, although it frequently has that effect. The primary objective is to bring the existing community together to have more high-value interactions. Because that's such an exciting occurrence, typically people who are on the verge of contributing, or potential contributors, are drawn in by the gravity of the event.
So travel should be in support of helping the contributor base around that region -- no matter what kind of contributors they are -- get more value out of the FUDCon event.
(2) If we have 4 FUDCons a year (1 per region) and it takes 6 months to plan a FUDCon, planning periods are going to overlap. This may make reading mailing lists confusing. How can we handle this? Will we eventually need fudcon-planning-latam, fudcon-planning-emea, fudcon-planning-na, and fudcon-planning-apac?
I think if the traffic gets to that point, we'll know it quickly. It's easy enough for people to write "FUDCon EMEA" or "FUDCon Cairo" in their subject lines. Our list traffic is light enough that what we can learn during planning phases as a result of synergy outweighs possible confusion. Proliferation of mailing lists is generally something to avoid IMHO.