[Ambassadors] Fedora UK Community Website

[Christoph Wickert]

Am Freitag, den 16.01.2009, 00:44 +0100 schrieb JoergSimon:
> Am Freitag, 16. Januar 2009 00:03:18 schrieb Christoph Wickert:
> > I'm pretty sure we are not going to publish a howto about using Skype or
> > playing music in MP3 format. Nevertheless there
> > are people who want/need to do this and they are looking for information
> > we cannot provide at fpo. 
> > Or think about a howto about playing encrypted DVDs on Fedora. We are
> > not allowed to publish this information due to legal restrictions that
> > have absolutely nothing to do with our code of conduct. Nevertheless a
> > lot of people from the Fedora community want this information and there
> > are people from the community that are able to provide it. But not at
> > fpo.
> > I hope now you understand what I was thinking of and why I still think
> > there need to be places besides fpo where people from the Fedora
> > community can participate.
> 
> If you can not have it on FedoraProject for any reason, give it another name.

Site note: How do you expect people to find that info if you are not
allowed to use the name or term "Fedora"?

What about people, who don't want to become Fedora Project contributors,
because the current process is to complicated for them?

Image you are a passionate Fedora user and you have written a howto for
something, that could be published at fpo, at least from the legal point
of view. For example I have a howto about using xmltv together with
tvtime.
But wait: We don't even have xmltv in our package collection, so why
would we want to have a howto for it then? ATM xmltv is only available
from ATrpms, so is the official fpo documentation going to recommend
using the AT repo?

Even if all components are available in our repos, the next question is:
Where at fpo should I publish my howto? Even I as a long time
contributor can not answer that question. Please take a look at one of
the typical howtos from fedorawiki.de and tell me where at
fedoraproject.org you would put them .

A new contributor has no idea where to start, so he would most likely
look at http://fedoraproject.org/join-fedora and decide that "content
writer" fits best.
But wait: The page says that you should know (or at least be willing to
learn) DocBook and XML. The docs are hosted in cvs, so you also have to
learn to use CVS before you can actually start to contribute. You have
to subscribe to several mailing lists in order to coordinate your
efforts with others. But you don't want to lean all that stuff and you
don't want to read a bunch of mails, you just want to publish your
howto, because you think it is useful. And you want to publish it now
and not by the release of F11.

I'm afraid that at this point we already lost 9 out of 10 potential
contributors and their knowledge. Jörg, you are responsible of the
ambassadors membership service, so you should know what I'm talking
about. What was the percentage of people who complete all steps from the
ambassador's 'Join' document?

We have to face the fact that we currently have no offer for these
people. We have to accept the fact that there are people who don't want
to become official members of the Fedora Project, ether because they
don't have enough time or just because they don't want to be dependent
on the project itself. We have to be thankful that the Fedora community
is much larger than the group of FAS account holders.

All these people must be enabled to contribute without the need to learn
to much technical stuff and without all the bureaucracy. They must be
able to contribute on a low level, without all the barriers we (need
to!) have at fpo.

This is why I think that there need to be community sites surrounding
the actual Fedora project. These sites are the places where our new
Fedora contributors are really born long time before we might even
notice them. I can give you a couple of names from people who first
contributed to a community site before they joined Fedora (I am one of
them). Many of them have become real leaders in packaging, SIGs etc.

If only one out of ten people from a community site later joins Fedora
we gain a lot, but if we scare off nine out of ten people with to many
duties ans to much officialism we loose much, much more.

> 
> CU Joerg 

Regards,
Christoph