[Ambassadors] What's really needed to be an Ambassador?

[Jesús Franco]

Hi Tatica, i'd like to jump in the sharing of ideas, as your mentee and most 
importantly to me, as a critic, since i really care about them (after all i've 
read a lot of your personal criteria as Mentor, before choosing you as mine). 

> 1.- Applicants must help to one of our 6 top teams [1]

As some have said, there are specific cases, not always someone is
able to contribute (maybe because he/she is _just_ a person people,
not a trained one at translation, documentation, developing, design,
etc.) in another teams, but he/she is a pretty good person answering
questions, helping people to resolve some misunderstandings.

> 2.- Applicants must help their local community, in case his/her city
> doesn't have a local community, she/he should try to build it.

I think this should be stated as an actual goal for every Ambassador *after* 
being approved, not like a prerrequirement, since it's easier to starting a 
regional group if the people "interested in grow the community" are able to 
look for who is near to them, rather than having to rely on third party 
networks like Google Maps, Facebook or others, because we don't want let them 
show in our very own map.

> 3.- Applicants should at least attend to one FOSS event per year. (right now 
> in all the country there are events, so this is not so crazy at all)
> 4.- Applicants should at least organize or help to organize a FOSS event.

Even if the whole list sounds very reasonable to me for someone applying for a 
*paid* job in some enterprise as PR representative, the people applying for 
Ambassadors are not trying to get a job as corporate representatives, but 
volunteers willing to help grow a community (and as side-effect our sponsor, 
but we are *not* RedHat representatives).

Not necessarily all the work needed at Fedora in PR field is "host some 
events", there are another ways to contribute to the Ambassadors outreach. For 
example, my work before applying to Ambassador was contributing to 
translations, because i felt they should be done in order to let more 
monolingual people in LatinAmerica (spanish speakers) to know the project, 
because there was pretty much more than today, just in English.

And i want to emphatize this boldly: i did it because *i felt* this was my job 
to help Fedora communicate with more people, rather than someone imposed these 
tasks to me.

I was looking for Ambassador approval not like a goal itself, but to reach a 
set of tools i'd need to increase my awareness of the project, to learn more 
from another fellows and above at all:

No matter how much you say people they don't need at all acquire any status in 
order to contribute to "just spread the word and talk to people, about our 
goals and methods". Every other Fedora subproject encourages everyone formally 
join to some team in order to accept more easily their contributions: Docs, 
L10N, Desing, Infra, Packaging and so... The wiki itself gives the message 
than you should join Ambassadors in order to help to the PR of the project.

This is the single reason of people asking again and again if they should 
acquire Ambassador status: the wiki itself says something like that, so the 
people wants to "join the team" and applies for membership.

That's the message, and that's fine.

Maybe the proposed requirements would be good for voting or appointing to 
country's/region's coordinators (or Mentors), but i think these are too much 
higher for most of potential contributors.

My two cents, and best regards.

--
"I've not known a man too much ignorant, than i can't learning something from 
him" -- Galileo Galilei
Jesús Franco, Ambassador from Chimalhuacán, México
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Tezcatl