On Tue, Nov 24, 2015 at 12:36 PM, Siddhesh Poyarekar siddhesh.poyarekar@gmail.com wrote:
On 24 November 2015 at 09:45, sankarshan foss.mailinglists@gmail.com wrote:
All these locations receive the DVD and thus roughly 2000 individuals (not all new/unique) receive F23 media. What happens next?
I personally consider DVDs to be smarter stickers, buttons or flyers, i.e. promotional media that has digital content. In that context, the impact of DVDs is similar to impact of stickers: they help improve brand awareness at conferences and meetups. There is the other aspect of enabling individuals who may otherwise not have the bandwidth to download the distirbution and try it themselves. The freemedia program tries to reach out to such people, but like you, I am not very convinced about its utility in attracting long term users or contributors.
The "smarter stickers" aspect is something which I find interesting. My question was to try and arrive at the 'what is the outcome we seek when we distribute DVDs?'
I'm not too sure that even 'more people will install and use Fedora' is being met with the production and distribution of DVDs. The absence of any conversation from recipient of the DVDs is obviously not the only evidence of absence.
That said, there seems to be quite a bit of interest in DVDs (from conference attendees and consequently, ambassadors) regardless of our apprehensions and that says something even though we don't quite know what.
This is the part I'd like to understand. There is interest. We ship DVDs, but what happens after that? Do we see more users? Do we see some of these users (perhaps students) figure out how to use the installed environment to do some work with it? Do we know of a group of recipients who have demonstrated an interest to go beyond their usual routine and demand how to use Fedora to contribute to something in upstream(s).
I don't think DVD production is that big a cost that we need to put so much thought into potentially replacing it with something else. If there's an alternative that needs evaluation (like a device that allows people to plug USB sticks in and copy a bootable distribution copy, that sounds like a nice engineering project), we should bring it up first, try it and then decide if DVD production is putting cost pressure on that alternative.
The reason I start the discussion implying that we should stop producing and distributing DVDs is not because I want to strongly advocate that path. The reason is whether by continuing to produce and distribute DVDs we become complacent and not seek to measure the benefit or, think about the actual impact which needs to happen. My opinion is that this "cheap grace" [1] is what is an impediment to thinking around paths which create more contributors within and without the Fedora project space. My contention is that we have enough models around us to think about how we can experiment to achieve those outcomes. My observation is that it is required to do so. If you have been participating in the Fedora project for a while, you'll notice the lack of news from LATAM, APAC, Africa etc - large blocks of nations which seem uniquely poised to derive benefit from contributions, but there's substantially less structure in the activity around the project.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cost_of_Discipleship