[Ambassadors] FADNA 2013

[inode0]

Long overdo but I feel like sharing a bit of what I remember from
FADNA earlier this year.

FADNA (Fedora Ambassador Day North America) 2013

The day before FUDCon a nice group of about 10 ambassadors gathered in
Lawrence to get a few urgent things accomplished. At the top of the
agenda was sorting through a plan for what major events we wanted to
commit to attending in FY14 and incorporate that into a proposed
budget for FAmNA for FY14.

Thirteen major events were identified and owners were found for 10 of
those. We looked some at historical data for the costs of most of
these events so we could develop a reasonable baseline for each in the
coming year. One good thing about doing this at FADNA was early
identification of the ambassadors who will be responsible for
organizing each event. One disappointment to me was that we again did
not really identify any strong candidates for new conferences/events
to focus attention on in the coming year. We do have a brainstorm
list. I hope over time we can focus in on a few of those ideas.

We spent a considerable amount of time working on the proposed budget
once we had a handle on events. In addition to the cost of our regular
events we proposed $2,000 of new funding to allow us to try a
non-traditional event yet to be determined. We also added a new
specific category of expense for helping out at smaller local events
including Software Freedom Day events, LUGs, release parties, etc.
which have always just been funded in an ad hoc nature in the past. A
bit was requested for infrastructure expenses. These include mostly
things that travel from event to event. So event boxes, hardware,
posters, banners, and such. We do need to refresh and update these
items over time.

With our major goals attended to we decided to attack some smaller
items including rewording some things on a variety of ambassador
related wiki pages and designing some SOPs for specific work
ambassadors do but still get confused about in North America. That
needs to be an ongoing process and more work remains to be done in the
area of SOPs.

Looking back there are parts of this work that I think could be done
remotely in the future if we are a little more disciplined about doing
them. Some things are simply easier to do when gathered in one room.
All in all I thought we got more accomplished this year than we did at
our last FADNA. I'm looking forward to perhaps having another
gathering at the next FUDCon where we can continue some of this work.

I want to mention that it was really great to meet Jon Disnard, Dan
Mashal, and Sarah White for the first time at FADNA (or the night
before in one case). Happy to spend time with the rest of the gang as
well.

John