RFC : Re-structuring Campus-Am team

[inode0]

On Tue, May 1, 2012 at 10:37 AM, Mohd Izhar Firdaus Ismail
<kagesenshi.87 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Right, I happen to be one of those people myself. Staff access to
>> teachers is different than student access to teachers and honestly we
>> only have a sprinkling of staff/ambassador presence now in educational
>> institutions. This program was simply an attempt to get more buy-in
>> from teachers and it would happen to engage more students as a bonus.
>> I can't see why anyone would resist it in its abstract formulation.
>
> just to be clear .. i agree and support the idea of the initiative :-)
> .. just not the part where its a separate group ..
>
> if the reason why it need a separate group is its more difficult to be
> a full-fledged ambassador (the "Who can join?" and "Eligibility"
> section in wiki looks more lenient, with lower barrier of entry), then
> , imo, it should be made easier :-)

That is not the reason at all. There is no expectation whatsoever that
the student will end up being an ambassador for Fedora although that
would be a nice bonus if it happened. This simply is not about
ambassadors, who is and who isn't an ambassador or how they become
ambassadors.

Campus ambassadors are not some inferior class of Fedora ambassadors.
We should call them Campus Open Source Representatives or something
else if we can't avoid this confusion.

This is about having students who have an interest in open source
engaging their faculty/teachers (and other students as well) about
that interest. Fedora ambassadors are trying to help them do that.
Suppose a student has a keen interest in methods used to provision
datacenters and wants to study that subject. How many high school
teachers have heard of puppet or anything else that might fall into
this interest area? By helping this student work with his/her teacher
we might end up having one more teacher in the world who knows about
open source technologies and who might become interested in teaching
about open source technologies in the future.

This really is the expressed mission of the Fedora Project. "The
Fedora Project's mission is to lead the advancement of free and open
source software and content as a collaborative community." So Fedora
ambassadors would like to reach out to more students who have
interests that overlap our interests. We would like to engage a
broader community to collaborate with, namely the community of
teachers. And the Campus Ambassadors program was intended to be the
vehicle to do this.

John