"Are the recipients of the Freemedia program (in India) passive or, do we get to hear back from them about participating in the Fedora community via mailing lists and IRC?"
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+sankarshanmukhopadhyay/posts/ZtHgytv8SQ1
On Sun, 2015-03-29 at 09:09 +0530, sankarshan wrote:
"Are the recipients of the Freemedia program (in India) passive or, do we get to hear back from them about participating in the Fedora community via mailing lists and IRC?"
I can't speak about the recent past, but when I was sending media around a couple of years ago, I didn't see any of the recipients turn into contributors. I don't know why this is, though.
On Mon, Mar 30, 2015 at 2:36 AM, Ankur Sinha sanjay.ankur@gmail.com wrote:
On Sun, 2015-03-29 at 09:09 +0530, sankarshan wrote:
"Are the recipients of the Freemedia program (in India) passive or, do we get to hear back from them about participating in the Fedora community via mailing lists and IRC?"
I can't speak about the recent past, but when I was sending media around a couple of years ago, I didn't see any of the recipients turn into contributors. I don't know why this is, though.
Recently I have joined this program and sent a couple of media three months ago. Tried to communicate with the recipients but could not get any response. On the other hand the there is a good response from the people (mainly students) who got the media during installation camp, SFD and release party that I had organized.
Regards Praveen FAS Name : Gnovi
-- Thanks, Regards, Ankur Sinha "FranciscoD"
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Ankursinha
india mailing list india@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/india
On Mon, Mar 30, 2015 at 10:08 AM, praveen patil praveenkumar103@gmail.com wrote:
On the other hand the there is a good response from the people (mainly students) who got the media during installation camp, SFD and release party that I had organized.
Would it be possible to elaborate a bit more on "good response"?
On 03/29/2015 09:09 AM, sankarshan wrote:
"Are the recipients of the Freemedia program (in India) passive or, do we get to hear back from them about participating in the Fedora community via mailing lists and IRC?"
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+sankarshanmukhopadhyay/posts/ZtHgytv8SQ1
The number of 'Thank You' mails that I get is quite less when compared to the number of media that I ship out. But I take that as part of human nature nowadays. However the few appreciation mails that I get are so heartwarming that they provide me the motivation to go on with the program. A lot of small town entrepreneurs, community self-help projects, and students have written to me appreciating the delivery of the Fedora media.
Since my primary focus is on getting more people to discover, use and love Fedora, rather than in getting folks to contribute *directly* to Fedora, I do not feel a requirement to track the number of recipients of the FreeMedia program who contribute to the Fedora community.
If anyone feels that doing this sort of tracking could be useful for Fedora, I am all for it, but this should not be mixed up with validating the need for the FreeMedia program.
There have been many instances at the fedora-devel list that proposals to stop making CD/DVD media for Fedora have been put up. I have always fought against such proposals, because those take into consideration only the perspective of folks living in the more developed parts of the world. Just as CD/DVD media for Fedora is still relevant, shipping media to those who do not have the means to download them is just as relevant. I experience this first hand every time I go back to my native place, a small town in Kerala, where there is no way I can finish a download (or install) of Fedora from the internet in a sane period of time.
There are still way too many regions in India (and the world) which lack the basic infrastructure that many of us take for granted, and also a large population living even in the cities and large towns not able to afford the download. The Fedora FreeMedia program works as an outreach effort to popularize Fedora among all people.
Rejy, thank you for the response.
On Fri, May 15, 2015 at 8:49 PM, Rejy M Cyriac rcyriac@redhat.com wrote:
Since my primary focus is on getting more people to discover, use and love Fedora, rather than in getting folks to contribute *directly* to Fedora, I do not feel a requirement to track the number of recipients of the FreeMedia program who contribute to the Fedora community.
I agree with the general notion that we tend to take a few things for granted. I consider myself fortunate to have access to the internet (even in its most rudimentary form) well before a larger cross-section of my social circle could.
I am going to ask the question one more time - "What does the FreeMedia program intend to achieve?" The part of your response that I've snipped above (it was a deliberate choice) would indicate that there is an element of charity involved in it. The program seems to be a clearing-house or, a single-window to distribute printed media to anyone who writes in (except, of course, the duplicates).
A part of my original post was around whether the FreeMedia program is indeed helping the recipients to "discover, use and love Fedora". For what it is worth, we do not have any idea if the media is being used to create installations. To gauge whether the program/effort is actually leading to discovery, usage and love we need to figure out a way to be able to state with a degree of accuracy that it is so. The process of participation by the recipients into the community is a method of contribution. And I am not so sure that we see a lot of those. Not even on users@, if not on india@
Asking volunteers to spend time, money and effort in distributing media that might not be aiding the original objective is certainly not the best way to treat volunteers (even if they are content in continuing to do this and aren't complaining). The project itself has a fiduciary reason to seek more detail as to whether this is the most direct, effective, relevant and optimal method to create a community of Fedora users who love the project.
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Ankur Sinha -
praveen patil -
Rejy M Cyriac -
sankarshan