Board question regarding non-software goods.

[inode0]

On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 6:52 AM, Christoph Wickert
<christoph.wickert at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Am Mittwoch, den 22.02.2012, 19:36 -0500 schrieb Máirín Duffy:
>> On Wed, 2012-02-22 at 17:44 -0500, David Nalley wrote:
>> > Need for swag is discussed and agreed to by regional groups such as
>> > FAmNA, EMEA Ambassadors, in public. Designs either generated or
>> > proofed by Fedora Design (or are designs that have been generated or
>> > approved in the past) and are then ordered
>>
>> FWIW there has been more than a trivial amount of swag that has not gone
>> through design team approval
>
> Such as? I doubt that anybody but the design team has produced designs
> for our swag and I wonder if something that was produced by the design
> team needs an explicit approval from the very same team.

Please let's not enumerate mistakes that have been made. The fact is
that mistakes have been made by both community produced and by Red Hat
produced merchandise. Sometimes the error is our fault, sometimes it
is the fault of the vendor. In every case where a mistake has been
made we can learn to do our work better. But this surely is not the
point of the proposed change to the guidelines so I think it is a
digression, although it is important for us to all do better.

>> and print-ready artwork has not been
>> proofed with the design team, resulting in incorrect colors (RGB instead
>> of correct CMYK colorspace)
>
> Incorrect colors are a problem indeed. We are facing it nearly every we
> produce something, because most companies acceppt neither RGB nor CMYK
> but want Pantone. Is there anything we can do about this?
>
>> and the wrong usage of fonts (usually due to
>> not flattening fonts to paths) in the final product. For the most part,
>> logo manipulations do go through either the logo queue or the Design
>> team, but I have been disappointed in the past by designs with errors
>> that could have been prevented.
>
> Again, I am not aware of any swag design that did not come from the
> design team. Maybe some new team members need better knowledge of the
> guidelines or we need a more formal approval process there?

I am and I don't consider that a problem. The policy is that
merchandise and any other use of the trademarks follow the usage
guidelines. That does not require working with the design team to
accomplish although that is often a good practice to follow, but it
should not be a policy in my opinion.

Here is a recent example of a new contributor trying to produce a new
piece of promotional merchandise for the project in the early stages
and the advice I gave him.

http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/ambassadors/2012-February/018993.html

I had two suggestions for his frisbee idea. Get quotes and FAmNA will
decided whether to proceed by approving funding and if that happens
then I suggested having the design used checked by the design team to
help us be confident it was compliant with the usage guidelines.

The point though is that we comply with the usage guidelines, not that
we check with the design team who are mostly other community members
and who mostly aren't legal authorities. If tomorrow Mo proposed this
and were no longer a member of the design team I think it would be a
waste of time to tell her to go get her artwork approved by the design
team and I would not have asked her to do that because I already have
great confidence she knows what she is doing.

I have issues with just about every point in the new policy draft
related to ambassador produced promotional merchandise but I am eager
to hear the legal reasoning behind them. I can make points now
regarding workflow and the likelihood of our continued production of
materials under the new guidelines (which I have great concerns about)
but mostly I think I should wait to hear more first.

I will say now that I think it is ridiculous that I be required to ask
the Board permission to make a frisbee. I, along with other
contributors, have been making these decisions for years. Had the
proposed item been something inappropriate (which has never happened
because ambassadors are very keen to represent Fedora in a positive
way) I would have explained that it was inappropriate and why and we
would not have approved funding so that would have been the end of it.