[Ambassadors] APAC Shipping experience from Bangladesh

[Christoph Wickert]

Am Samstag, den 10.11.2012, 20:42 +0530 schrieb Buddhike Kurera:
> On Sat, Nov 10, 2012 at 6:38 PM, Christoph Wickert
> <christoph.wickert at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > 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.
> 
> Does he noted about any payment ? but if there is any please do
> re-open the ticket and note, we can take care for that for sure.

It is not quite clear to me if he paid or if our media are still stuck
at the customs (which means they are effectively lost).

> >      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.
> >
> 
> For my experience we can achieve same for less money (when tax
> includes with the production cost), it is better to do so with out
> doing the event with no swag :)

I don't think this is funny either way. no matter if we have problems
with customs, if our contributors  have pay for stuff, if we loose media
in customs or if we run an event without swag. All of this costs us
money and frustrates our volunteers, thus we should try to change it.

If producing swag locally is a solution, so be it. I am just not
convinced it is really better or cheaper, we first should evaluate this
carefully. Have a look at the F14 media shown in the ticket, the colors
look horribly off. With producing different batches locally, we will hit
this problem more often.

In Europe we usually don't have any customs problems because if the
European Union. I know we are having a lot of problems in Africa, too,
and usually they boil down to having the right papers for customs, e.g.
a recommendation letter form a politician or otherwise important person.

I don't know what it's like in APAC and I am not to make a decision. But
for me the first thing to do is to try to improve the swag shipping
process before I abandon it in favor of local production (which will
then cause different problems). You can't say something doesn't work if
you haven't tried hard enough.

> > 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.
> >
> 
> This is good if can be done. i tried but no success yet.

Please let me know what the customs requirements for your country are
and where I can find them in our wiki. If I were to send you something,
would I have all the information I need?

Kind regards,
Christoph