[Ambassadors] APAC Shipping experience from Bangladesh

[Christoph Wickert]

Am Samstag, den 10.11.2012, 17:35 +0530 schrieb Buddhike Kurera:
> Hello Folks,
> 
> Following is one of the real examples to express how difficult
> shipping is on our region. This comment has posted in related with F17
> media (200 DVD) request from Bangladesh FAms.
> 
> <extract>
> 
> "Those DVD had arrived long ago, but the FedEx? guys didn't dropped
> that package at my address. They gave me papers instead to collect it
> from the government custom warehouse. I went there only to found that
> I have to pay a huge amount (100 US$+) as some wired
> surcharges/duties/fees. I told them these are free gifts and contain
> no commercial value. They asked me to collect a NOC from BCC
> (Bangladesh Computer Council - the Government's computer authority).
> And my application to the BCC got no reply until now. After couple of
> follow up over the phone, they replied, they've collected one DVD from
> the customs warehouse to check the content and will issue me a NOC few
> days later. I called four days later and freaked out, when hared that
> no one knows about my application and asked me to apply again.
> 
> It seems, it would have been better to produce locally as I did
> earlier for ​Fedora 14.
> 
> Anyway, I am closing the ticket. now."
>
> <end of extract>
> 
> Found this when reviewing trac tickets, fedora-apac #36

I think it was wrong to close the ticket and raised some questions
there.
     1. Has this been reimbursed? It's bad that the requester had to pay
        money, but I think Fedora should reimburse him.
     2. It seems Harish shipped the media, right? Was the package
        shipped with the ​customs letter. It clearly states the media
        are non-comercial and have a value of USD 0.15 each. For 200
        media this would be USD 30, so taxes shouldn't be higher than a
        few USD.

> Therefore till we have our next FUDcon please do ask for funds and
> prepare our SWAG locally.

I am not convinced that producing everything locally is better. I mean,
do we have numbers how expensive the local media were and do we know
what quality they had (labels, sleeves etc)? Once we have this
information, we can evaluate what is really better.

Generally speaking need to figure out what went wrong in order to solve
these problems for the future. It seems there was some paperwork needed
to avoid paying import taxes. Do we know what is required and where to
get it?

If we want to improve swag shipping, we need to have all this
information in the wiki, sorted by country. If people request or ship
swag, they should know all technical and legal requirements. 

I think building up a list of countries, their problems and possible
solutions would be a good topic for a hackfest at the next APAC FUDCon
or a (virtual) FAD.

Kind regards,
Christoph

[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Customs_letter_for_Fedora_media