2009/12/22 Max Spevack
<mspevack@redhat.com>
On Sat, 19 Dec 2009, Mel Chua wrote:
Even easier startup: interview chain. You interview someone, they become the next interviewer and have to interview someone else, and so on down the line. (Note: this only works if it's really easy to set up for making a podcast, so that's something to check.)
This is one of those great ideas that came up once upon a time, and keeps coming up (because it /is/ a great idea), and mostly needs someone to step up and do the first interview. ;)
GUIDING PRINCIPLE: There are a huge number of people in our community, and most contributors probably only really work with a handful of people each day. While they may recognize many names, how much do contributors really know about what others are doing? Does someone who writes for the Docs Team have any idea what it's like to maintain package $FOO? Does someone who participates in Fedora Test Days every now and then have any idea of what it takes to produce the Installation Guide every release? How much does an Ambassador in Germany know about what Ambassadors in Venezuela are doing?
This will be a great complement to the User Research Plan, so we could know the both sides of the coin. What's happening with projects and what's up to ambassadors
GOAL: Our goal is to give two Fedora contributors who might *never otherwise interact* a reason to have a conversation, and to share the most interesting parts of that conversation with the rest of the Fedora community.
Rule #1 -- Don't interview someone you have ever met face to face.
...or someone you talk with everyday.
Rule #2 -- Don't interview someone who lives in the same country that you live in.
question: should all interviews be made in english? might be the easy way to understand us all. Also we could use some translation after the interviews so everyone can reach the content.
Suggestion #1 -- Try to use Fedora Talk, and record the conversation. You can edit it a little bit with Audacity, or just post the raw audio. It becomes a podcast in which Contributor #1 interviews Contributor #2 and has a conversation in which the entire community gets to know about Contributor #2. (There is a wiki page that gives some instructions about this, but I can't look it up because I'm writing this email on an airplane.)
Also we could use some video interview:
a.- contributor#1 send questions over mail to contributor#2 and this one records a video with their answers
b.- contributor#1 send a video with the questions to contributor#2 and this one records a video with their answers. then *someone* joins the both videos with a cute splash :D
maybe is a good idea also, not to only "meet the ambassadors voice" but also "meet ambassadors". if they don't fee confortable with english videos we could use also subtitles.
Suggestion #2 -- If audio recording doesn't work, conduct the conversation over IRC, so that it is more interactive than simply sending a bunch of questions from one person to another over email.
Rule #3 -- Within 2 weeks of the interview, Contributor #1 (the interviewer) posts whatever form your interview/conversation takes to Planet Fedora, and perhaps to a wiki page that can track all of this. We already have an Interviews page on the wiki that we could grow and expand.
I could make this wiki page with the first idea I got from mo of the "meet-fedora" page:
Should/Can I create this wiki page right now?? :D
Rule #4 -- Within 2 weeks of the interview, Contributor #2 (the person who was interviewed) starts off a new interview in the chain.
I can see the value in having multiple chains, but I can also see the value in only having one chain, making it a Big Deal, and thus having a friendly dose of peer pressure on folks to not be the one to break the chain.
I think 2 weeks between interviews is too much. We should put something more like "if the contributor#2 doesn't continue the chain in 2 weeks, a contributor#3 will do it (or something like that)" to prevent the chain of interviews stop
--Max
"Be yourself... Don't be anyone else"