[Ambassadors] T-shirt for each F19 release party organizer

[John T. Rose]

On Tue, May 7, 2013 at 7:56 AM, Jiri Eischmann <eischmann at redhat.com> wrote:
> The problem is that we obviously don't have sufficient resources to
> "thank with a gift" everyone who contributed. So you have to make a
> criteria, to make a line and that always will be sensitive. Just look at
> the Fedora 19 Alpha testing heroes. It's just a list of most active
> testers and immediately after they published it, people complained that
> they weren't on the list because they ended up under the line (they
> obviously could list everyone who reported a bug). And now imagine that
> FAmSCo, that should only take care of Fedora ambassadors, would start
> raffles across the whole Fedora Project and make such lines. I just
> don't feel empowered to do it.

I'm sorry but this is frustrating because you keep changing the goal.
Obviously we can't thank everyone by sending them shirts. Obviously
when we give things including just saying thanks to some others will
feel slighted. We can't fix either of those problems so either we stop
dwelling on them or we do nothing.

I disagree with the premise that FAmSCo should only take care of
Fedora ambassadors very strongly. FAmNA did in fact run a worldwide
t-shirt raffle already. I don't recall the requirements, probably
CLA+1 or something similar. It was not difficult and no one complained
about it being unfair. FAmNA felt empowered to do that then and still
does. We give t-shirts away to random people at events all the time
and giving a few dozen to contributors once in a while doesn't seem in
the least offensive to me. By using an open raffle, we have 50
t-shirts to give away to contributors - sign up if you'd like a chance
to win one, we are thanking ALL contributors, not just the ones who
win.

> But let's be more constructive: I'm willing to produce the t-shirts and
> distribute them worldwide if we find a budget for that. But even if I
> feel empowered to do that, I certainly won't have time to do the rest.
> So someone needs to design the raffles, pick teams and projects, set
> criteria, retrieve mail addresses from picked contributors. So far I've
> seen a lot of feedback (and thank you for that) what not to do, what to
> do differently etc., but I haven't seen any offered helping hands.

Again, at least with respect to raffles we are making this
unnecessarily complicated. All the needed infrastructure is in place
and has been used once before. Raffles don't make as much sense to me
unless they are very open. So if we wanted to single out a group like
QA or Infrastructure or Design then some other mechanism probably
would work better. I can easily come up with a criterion for those
groups that makes just as much sense as the one being used for
ambassadors though.

There isn't a lot of time right now so my suggestion is go ahead and
do what you think is good. There is always time to thank people for
helping us. We don't need to jumble my concerns with what you propose
to do in the next couple of weeks. We can think more about this later
when there is time or we can forget about it if FAmSCo doesn't think
it is part of its proper role.

John