[Ambassadors] Fedora-Fr vs The World (Was: Re: [EMEA] - Cheat Cube decission was Re: EMEA ambassadors meeting 2011-03-23 minutes)

[Mathieu Bridon]

Changing the subject temporarily, hoping this doesn't create a monster
sub-thread.

On Thu, 2011-03-24 at 23:48 +0100, Christoph Wickert wrote:
> 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

Indeed, but I'll try to answer anyway.

> 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.

That's something we have been working on fixing for the past two years,
though.

So I'll assume good faith and take your message as a friendly « you
failed, try harder » :)

>  The french ambassadors have their own meetings

The meeting is more about the French team than the French ambassadors.
The discussions are about the NPO, the community website/forums, etc.

And of course, we discuss ambassadorial topics. But most of the meeting
attendees are not ambassadors.

One thing worth noting: out of the current 9 members of the board of the
NPO, only 4 are also ambassadors. All are Fedora contributors though.

> and
> I don't recall seeing any of them in the EMEA meetings.

I have been attending those meetings every time I could for the past
year at least. I wasn't always participating actively, but I was at least
there following the discussion, and I would read all the logs of meetings
I didn't participate in.

Obviously, I haven't attended any since I left EMEA (the geographical
region). I don't know if someone is following on, however.

> I don't think
> this is only a problem of the language.

Probably not the only one, but it is a real problem. Lots of people in
France don't speak English at all, but they are still eager to
contribute.

Fedora-Fr provides them a structure. Sure, they end up contributing to
Fedora-Fr instead of Fedora per se. But in turn, they enable other
people to contribute back to Fedora.

Now I will gladly recognize that sometimes, we stop at the « contribute
to Fedora-Fr » and it has always been a pet peeve of mine when I was on
the NPO board.

I guess I didn't do enough (did I actually do anything? :), but I'm hopeful
that the new board members will do better in steering the local community
closer to its global (may I say upstream? :P) project.

> > > , 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.

Not that I remember.

I'm not saying it never happened (I have only been with the NPO for the last
three years), but we have not done it during my mandate at least. The subject
has never even been discussed as far as I can tell.

> > Note that it's why we have always asked for budget annually instead of
> > quarterly.
> 
> Whom have you asked? Red Hat?

We've asked FAmSCo.

And until 2010 FAmSCo members have accepted our budget requests (well, they
accepted it for 2010 as well, but for certain reasons that you are well aware of
we never received the funding ;).

Sorry for making the thread digress towards the French team as this was not my intent.

All I wanted to say was "hey guys, we've been doing things that way for years and
it's been working great. Maybe some of that can apply to other local communities?"

Thanks for having kept the tone of your email friendly though, it would have been very
easy to make it an inflammatory pamphlet. :)

Please continue to assume good faith: we have been trying hard to act less insularly,
and the next team will no doubt go on doing so. If you see areas where they are
lacking, say so. If you have ideas on how to improve things, express them.

Cheers,


-- 
Mathieu