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

[Christoph Wickert]

Am Donnerstag, den 24.03.2011, 20:32 +0800 schrieb Mathieu Bridon:
> On Thu, 2011-03-24 at 13:17 +0100, Christoph Wickert wrote:
> > Am Donnerstag, den 24.03.2011, 17:59 +0800 schrieb Mathieu Bridon:
> > > 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. 
> > 
> > Yes, because you (=the French ambassadors) are doing it on your own
> 
> As I said somewhere else, I personally sent media to Kosovo because EMEA
> couldn't do it yet.
> 
> So no, we are not trying to do it on our own as in "we are the only ones
> who matter".

This doesn't really belong here but now that you mention it: Sometimes I
feel there is a "We don't care about the rest of the world"-attitude in
the French community. The french ambassadors have their own meetings and
I don't recall seeing any of them in the EMEA meetings. I don't think
this is only a problem of the language.

> We are trying to do it efficiently and have the media in due time. We
> are trying to minimize contention points: if we screw up, then Zoltan in
> Hungary doesn't suffer from it, we are the only ones affected.

These are fair points, but who pays for this media? France is a special
situation because of their NPO. It doesn't work for others and it
doesn't scale. I already gave you the example of the Cheat Cubes
pricing, but we have the same with the media:

1000 CDs are 1170 EUR, but only the master is already 490 EUR. This
means that you pay 490 EUR before you have a single media. Larger
batches are way cheaper and therefore we cannot have every country
produce their own stuff.

> > , you don't care about approval from the board
> 
> What approval do we need? We are only producing already approved media.

I was told that in the past the French ambassadors also handed out
updated respins and these were not approved. Respins are generally not
approved because they violate the GPL (at least in our current setup
where the updates repo only holds 2 versions of a package).

> Plus, we had an (unwritten unfortunately) approval for producing swag
> with the Fedora trademark on it.

IIRC we even had a written one but that didn't help us. Red Hat revoked
it.

> See, I think we are getting to the crux of the problem:
>     The only sane way to produce swag and have it in due time is to have
> local NPOs to handle budget, orders and shipping. [1]

I don't think so. It depends on the money or an efficient payment
method, but not necessarily on an NPO. Don't get me wrong: I'd like to
have our "Fedora EMEA e.V." back, but this wont happen.

> No, I'm not saying that Ardian and Gent should have an NPO just for the
> two of them, that doesn't make any sense.
> 
> But let's say, if there was an NPO in Greece, which is (kind of) close
> to Kosovo, then they could work with that local NPO to have their swag.

It doesn't make a difference if I ship something from Germany to Kosovo
or from Greece, the time is the same.

> Cheatcubes are not release specific. One local community can easily
> produce lots of them and distribute them along 3 or 4 releases. Think of
> it as an investment.
> 
> We did that for Fedora-branded USB sticks. That cost a lot of money to
> produce more than 2 years ago, but we still are distributing them.
> 
> So you can produce big quantities locally.

Sure, if you have 'big money', you can make big quantities.

> Note that it's why we have always asked for budget annually instead of
> quarterly.

Whom have you asked? Red Hat?

> > > but that is the only sane way to have swag to distribute in a reasonable
> > > delay (i.e as soon as possible after GA)
> > 
> > I distributed ~ 2500 media within a week. I don't think this is a
> > reasonable delay. 
> 
> I guess you mean "unreasonable"?
> 
> My point is not how fast you can distribute them, but how fast you can
> get them.

As long as you have an efficient payment, there shouldn't be a
difference. Therefore I am very optimistic that things will change once
we have the credit cards and fortunately there has been some progress
recently.

Regards,
Christoph