[Ambassadors] Broadening how we empower community action - opening a dialog for change

[Heherson Pagcaliwagan]

On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 2:03 AM, inode0 <inode0 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Fellow ambassadors,
>
> As one of a large group of ambassadors and non-ambassadors who is
> committed to empowering Fedora contributors to achieve their goals and
> who has been working to make budget available to them to help them in
> their endeavors I think it is time to rethink how we are trying to
> accomplish this.
>
> During the time I've been involved what might be thought of as
> discretionary Fedora budget has been the province of the Red Hat
> Community Architecture team and FAmSCo as portions of those funds have
> been delegated in the past. There has been a consistent and I think
> very positive direction of pushing budget decisions closer and closer
> to those who need the funds throughout my years with the project.
> There are still issues involving paying for things (who can, what is
> needed, getting reimbursed, etc.) and those issues are being worked on
> currently. I want to be clear those aren't the issues I am now
> concerned about.
>
> After much discussion with new and old friends from around the world
> at FUDCon Tempe I've concluded that FAmSCo probably isn't going to be
> the best place for non-ambassador budget decisions to happen as we
> expand our efforts at increasing funding of various new events (FADs
> with explicit work product to be achieved for example) as well as
> non-event funding of efforts as they might arise.
>
> While FAmSCo has done a superb job with budget issues and I expect
> will continue to do so, as more budget decisions move from the Red Hat
> Community Architecture team into the Fedora Project proper, to many
> people it just feels wrong for it to flow through an ambassador group
> to the rest of the community. As an example, for a packager who isn't
> engaged with the ambassador community but who wants to organize a FAD
> asking FAmSCo makes no more sense than asking the Documentation team
> or QA. Some people are quite offended by this and while I don't think
> they should be the reality is that they are, it just doesn't feel
> right to them.
>
> There was a subtle suggestion at FADNA last year that we consider a
> new organization. I was resistant to this, I thought FAmSCo has stuff
> in place and has experience dealing with budgets, etc. Now after
> talking to more people, especially non-ambassadors, I think I was
> wrong to be resistant. Now I think that if we can modify our structure
> a bit to encourage more engagement from more contributors and have
> those contributors be comfortable asking for funds we should do it.
> There are lots of ways this could be done, I'm going to suggest one
> possibility here.
>
> We could create a budget or finance specific group but I think we
> might want to consider one with a broader community mission. I'm
> tempted to suggest a Fedora Community Architecture group, but I'm not
> sure that really captures what I want. I don't want another elected
> body and would like to see this group grow in a way similar to the
> packaging committee (if my understanding of that one is correct).
> Perhaps the Red Hat Community Architecture team (who will necessarily
> be working with whoever is making budget decisions) could seed the
> team with one or two people from wherever in the project. Those folks
> could expand the team to include representatives from various areas
> within the project. They or a subgroup they designate can be tasked
> with helping solve funding issues for the Fedora community at large (I
> think of this as non-ambassador event/swag/media sorts of things).
>
> The benefits I see of doing this are that it helps the Red Hat
> Community Architecture folks continue to move more funding decisions
> into the Fedora Project proper. It gives contributors a place to go to
> get funding for their events or other needs that isn't tied to a
> specific group within the project, having a neutral nature by its
> composition. If and when we get to the point that hard decisions need
> to be made about whether to fund FAD X or FAD Y, I hope this body as
> constructed will have diverse enough understanding of the issues
> related to the work proposed to make informed decisions for the
> benefit of us all.
>
> Projects grow, sometimes that natural growth leads to problems no one
> intended. It just happens. I think this is an opportunity to fix one
> problem by taking a small step back and empowering others.
>
> Flame away :)
>
> John
> --
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I believe we can enable ALL groups to facilitate their own budgets (if
they are so inclined) and put in place reporting guidelines for the
use them - report to Fedora Board and to group's mailing list at the
very least. Since FAmSCo has a wealth of experience handling budgets
and organizing things on a global scale, I believe they'll be more
than willing to provide pointers on how things are set up.

Two things comes to mind though, how will the pie be sliced and who
will do the slicing?