[Ambassadors] [EMEA] - Cheat Cube decission was Re: EMEA ambassadors meeting 2011-03-23 minutes

[Mathieu Bridon]

Disclaimer: I am not speaking for the French guys, since I'm not with
them any more, having moved much further east.

On Thu, 2011-03-24 at 10:08 +0100, Christoph Wickert wrote:
> Am Donnerstag, den 24.03.2011, 09:21 +0100 schrieb Joerg Simon:
> >  and that we should decide together where to invest
> > money, i have to say that with the situation right now in EMEA the
> > shipping of centralized SWAG is no optimal. And therefore we encourage
> > the people to produce SWAG localy and get reimbursed or payed by PayPal
> > this is the working way right now.
> 
> I feel the opposite is true: Swag should be centralized, because with
> the local approach causes more work and higher shipping costs.
> 
> Imagine you are doing an event and need media, shirts, buttons and
> cheatcubes. You have to write mails to 4 different ambassadors.
> I then send media from Germany and you send shirts from Germany, too.
> Pierros sends buttons from Greece and Zoltan cheatcubes from Hungary - 4
> people have work and pay shipping.

Why would you ask Zoltan for a German event? What Joerg is saying is
that you should produce cheatcubes for Germany instead.

With a centralized approach, you run the risk of receiving the swag very
late, much later than if you produce them locally.

Why do you think we produce our swag in France? Because (for example)
that's the only way we could have Fedora 13 media in time for our
release party. 

Another example, you just received some Fedora 14 media, but Fedora 15
is about to be released. How is that useful?

We have usually received our media within two weeks after GA. I remember
the EMEA media for Fedora 13 were received almost a month after we had
started distributing ours. And that was only the first central
recipient, who then had to ship them over EMEA, adding more delay before
people can have their swag.

This is not efficient.

Sure, doing everything locally costs a bit more money (or not, one has
to consider the shipping costs that don't exist if you produce locally,
and the fact that it can be cheaper in some countries than others), but
that is the only sane way to have swag to distribute in a reasonable
delay (i.e as soon as possible after GA)

> > Decissions by FAmSCo are done by quorum and every FAmSCo Member has the
> > same rights if it is comes to making decissions. But there is a
> > agreement with CommArch that FAmSCo Members can decide and agree a
> > ammount of budget themselves if it is under a fixed ammount - 400€. This
> > happened here and Zoltan had every right to take care for his region.
> > And Pierros had the right to decide without asking FAmSCo because the
> > ammount was low enough.
> 
> Thanks for your clarification Jörg, but I still don't understand. One
> the one hand you say that decisions are done by a FAmSOc quorum, on the
> other you say that individual FAmSCo members can make a decision.
> 
>       * What happens if the quorum does not agree?

Indeed, I was wondering the same after reading Joerg's email.

>       * What happen if the ambassadors do not agree?

Ambassadors have voted and elected FAmSCo for that. We can't hold a
referendum for each and every decision. If you don't like the decisions
made by FAmSCo members, get them out by not voting for them next time
(just like with any elected body).

>       * Why are we discussing voting on things in the regional meetings
>         if a single FAmSCo member can make a different decision?
>       * Does that mean that FAmSCo can make different decisions than the
>         local groups?

We can decide whatever we want in local groups, but when it comes to
budget, FAmSCo will have the final word anyway.

So why couldn't FAmSCo "make different decisions than the local groups"?


-- 
Mathieu