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

[Mathieu Bridon]

On Thu, 2011-03-24 at 11:40 +0100, Gerold wrote:
> > With a centralized approach, you run the risk of receiving the swag very
> > late, much later than if you produce them locally.
> ^^
> not correct, if you have a stock of SWAG which will be hosted by a single
> person or (as we had the idea when we had an NPO) in a dedicated WEBSTORE
> like the cools stuff store from red Hat [1] you will be more than
> effective and fast.

I have to disagree.

If we produce them globally, we have to:
1. spend hours in EMEA meetings discussing about which swag we will
produce
2. spend hours in EMEA meetings discussing about how much of each one we
will produce
3. wait for the swag to be produced and received by the primary point of
contact
4. wait for the primary recipient to ship the swag to you

When we produce them locally, steps 1 and 2 are done within a few emails
between the (less than 10) members of the French NPO board (replace
"French NPO board" by "$local_community leaders"). Then you can stop at
step 3, since there's only one person who will have the swag anyway and
bring it to local events.

Rarely have I had to send swag to other people when I was keeping the
French swag, and every time it wasn't a pressing matter, and was always
for small quantities. The only one I can think of is when I sent 70 live
CDs to Ardian in Kosovo (who I was still mentoring at this moment)
because he would never have gotten them in time from EMEA (EMEA still
didn't have received anything).

For bigger batches (like for the people in Lyon), I would simply hand
the swag to someone going to Lyon, or to a Lyonnais coming to Paris.
Since we are talking about a **local** area, that happens often enough
to not impose any artificial delay on anyone.

> - Webshop
> is dead because of not "getting the shit done" depends on the Trademark
> issue by a legal department located in the US (never got a feedback) and
> so the owner steped back when he saw, how rudimentary we have to work and
> act ;-)

/me makes sure the blanket covers the fedora-fr webshop and whistles as
if he didn't know anything :-^

> > 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.
> ^^
> Indeed Mathieu, I totally agree with you and I asked also yesterday for
> rethinking about the process to get medias. Imho, Medias must be available
> at the GA or not later than one week after; so there must be definitly a
> change of process. But to be honest, as long as other issues
> (Media-Wrangler, money, shipment, storage of medias, quantity etc.) is
> fixed, this is also nonsense.
> We discuss and discuss and again discuss, but nothing happens in many
> cases .-(

The solution is simple: discuss less and get it done.

This works very well when doing it locally (less people involved,
discussions are **much** faster).

I mean, this kind of line in the logs scares me:
    #agreed we want Fedora CheatCubes

Come on, if you want some swag, just produce it! I fail to see how so
much red tape can bring anything good.

Again, we usually received our media within one to two weeks after GA,
and that's because the provider asks for 10 working days for producing
them (although they were sometimes faster).

For the past few releases, we have been producing media out of the last
RC. One of us would closely follow the QA/releng meetings, and as soon
as an iso was judged "gold", we would send it to the media producer (we
already had validated the quotes, we had given them the artwork, they
were only waiting for the actual iso).

> >>       * 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.
> ^^
> Ohhhhhhhh no! How can you decide of somebodys other money???? E.g. how can
> my children decide, what I do with my money?? Where now "my children" can
> be seen as "FAmSCo" and me can be seen as "Community Architecture money
> from Red Hat" which will be (maybe) promised by the Leader of that
> Department.

Of course, but that's just another layer. What we were interested in
here (as per Christoph's question) was only the ambassadors/FAmSCo
layer.

Repeat that at every layer (e.g CommArch gets its budget from above,
French ambassadors ask for funding to the French NPO,...) ;)


-- 
Mathieu