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?
(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?
--Mel
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.
On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 08:11:28AM -0500, Paul W. Frields wrote:
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.
I think this greatly depends on who is doing the majority of the planning. Will FUDCon LatAm, for instance be planned 50-50 by people in Latin America and people in North America? If so, English may be the lingua franca between the participants. OTOH, if 90% of the planners are from LatAm then it may be that Spanish is a better choice for the language.
In Europe, where there's a multitude of local languages, English may be a good language to standardise on but that's not necessarily the same for all of the regions that will host FUDCons.
-Toshio
On Mon, Dec 21, 2009 at 06:28:32PM -0800, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 08:11:28AM -0500, Paul W. Frields wrote:
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.
I think this greatly depends on who is doing the majority of the planning. Will FUDCon LatAm, for instance be planned 50-50 by people in Latin America and people in North America? If so, English may be the lingua franca between the participants. OTOH, if 90% of the planners are from LatAm then it may be that Spanish is a better choice for the language.
In Europe, where there's a multitude of local languages, English may be a good language to standardise on but that's not necessarily the same for all of the regions that will host FUDCons.
If we want this list to serve as a place where we can grow the number of people who can learn from the process of planning a FUDCon, we need to be able to communicate in a singular language. That process isn't as likely to change drastically from region to region, as opposed to the content, which does. The establishment of this list and the opening of the process was a brilliant stroke by Mel Chua to increase the Project's capacity handling in the area of FUDCons. Right now we're in an excellent position to grow the number of people who can take shared responsibility for FUDCon planning, and while the amount of oversight required is still significant, I see it dropping over time, which is just as it should be.
However, that need could decrease quite a bit if a group was able to plan and fund a FUDCon completely without assistance from the Community Architecture team. That is always a possibility of course! So your point is well taken.
On Fri, 18 Dec 2009, Paul W. Frields wrote:
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.
+1 to no more lists :)
2009/12/18 Mel Chua mel@redhat.com:
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 a number of decent online translation systems available. I think linking to them should be enough. We can also mention that it's ok to plan in a different language than English, but it's a good idea to have someone available that can help translate the more nuanced parts into English.
I really don't think we need more than that, and that we should just put faith in the fact that people can self organise a solution here when they need it.
(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?
We have a number of mailing lists available that already handle more than one conversation flow per day. I think a critical part of participating in an open source project is the ability to filter out the information you don't need. One of my pet peeves is people who complain mailing lists are too cluttered because they don't know how to filter.
-Yaakov
fudcon-planning@lists.fedoraproject.org
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Max Spevack -
Mel Chua -
Paul W. Frields -
Toshio Kuratomi -
Yaakov Nemoy