[Ambassadors] FAD Singapore 2015

[sankarshan]

On Wed, Oct 21, 2015 at 12:28 PM, Siddhesh Poyarekar
<siddhesh.poyarekar at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 20 October 2015 at 10:42, Harish Pillay <harish.pillay at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I would be more comfortable if there was an element of technical discussions
>> including quick hacks, doc sprints, 101-type talks to get newbies on board.
>> With the presence of Ambassadors from the region (even if one per city/country)
>> the opportunity for the local enthusiasts to meet and network should not be
>> wasted.
>
> That is a good point but from experience of the budgeting FAD last
> year, it seems difficult to squeeze all of that into two days.
>
> At last years FAD, we had made a list of events that we wanted to
> budget Fedora presence for in advance.  During the FAD we discussed
> each of them to arrive at an amount in USD that we would want to
> spend, including how we want to spend it.  Once we had that, we moved
> on to swag budget allocation and finally we had a single figure that
> we then compared with what we had and spent last year.

When I read through this discussion there are two key items - (1)
assigning ownership and completing the preliminary work leading to a
reasonably complete budget planning session (2) follow-up

The email conversation implies (or, that is what I read) that spending
time at FAD for budget planning is a somewhat pointless exercise. I
disagree in bits. The planning, availability, usage of budget is
important to ensure various activities are well funded. The other part
is, whether these planning sessions are aligned with budget
development cycles upstream. I am not sure if I understood an email
from Matthew but it would seem that there is a slight difference in
budget planning cycles between OSAS and Fedora_APAC. Prior experience
would indicate that such a variance would need to be addressed in some
pragmatic manner.

Follow-up to the planning sessions is important. I'm hoping that the
FUDCon PNQ planning sessions have been followed up over a period of
time with the required issues being addressed.

[snipped]

>>   e) Planning for FUDcon 2016 (and 2017)
>
> +1 as a secondary topic, since we have spent way too much time on it this year.

"FUDCon" as a big-bang event to grow the community is probably not
worth the time-effort-money. It is tempting to continue to think about
FUDCon as a growth serum, but I tend to disagree. Smaller (or, as the
trendy term goes, 'hyperlocal') events with focus on
participation-contribution-making would create a way to take a larger
number of inexpensive risks (small events have smaller outlays). The
presence of strong, well established contributors to the project
across APAC is somewhat geographically lop-sided. It would be worth
our while to address this as one of the important things. In what
would be a paradox, we need more contributor mentors and less
Ambassador mentors (if we are inadvertently creating a high density of
the latter).


-- 
sankarshan mukhopadhyay
<http://sankarshan.randomink.org/blog/>