Status of the Free Media Program

[John Poelstra]

On 11/18/2009 06:35 PM, susmit shannigrahi wrote:
> Hi,
>
>
>> At first I thought the program had ended (as in permanently terminated)
>> because the pages I ended up said the program was closed.  This led me raise
>> this as an issue the board should get status on.  Then Paul Frields told me
>> privately that the program is very much alive and suggested sending my
>> questions to a wider audience who might be interested and able to respond
>> here.
>>
>> 1) What is the state of the Free Media program and how is it going?
>
> It is going great. :)
>
>
>> 2) Do you think the wiki page and the form are getting people to the right
>> place effectively and giving them the right information?  I was little
>> confused when I ended up at
>> https://fedoraproject.org/freemedia/FreeMedia-form.html and it said "Fedora
>> Free Media form is now CLOSED" but there was no mention of when it would
>> open and there are 90 different people to contact in my country :-/  Do we
>> really want random people emailing a random ambassador?
>
> Please note, the page talks about getting availability information
> from ambassadors, not disks. An ambassador knows where the events are
> etc.But this is only a temporary solution.
> I am working on getting an app ready for integrating the whole
> distribution thing and the mockup is here
> http://susmit.fedorapeople.org/freemedia/output.pdf. This will be
> worked on at foss.in (12 days from now) and I hope to solve it once
> and for all.
>
>
>> I also wondered if it was a good idea to be pointing people to something
>> they can't have or even request on our main "Day of Release" page:
>> http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora ?
>
> It is not, but the cycle is different. Freemedia opens at the
> beginning of each month and this does not coincide with release.
>

Can we have a solution in place by the Fedora 13 Alpha release so that 
people have a better user experience downloading the Fedora 12 Release? 
  I understand that you do not provide media for the test releases, but 
it is a natural milestone.

>> 3) Realizing that all the people giving their time and money to the Free
>> Media program are doing this out of their own resources (which I think is
>> amazing), do the Free Media project leaders feel that free media is getting
>> to the right people--people that can't get it any other way?
>
> The app I talked about can solve this problem to some extend. If
> required, we sometime challenge some requests for verification, but
> given the volume of the requests, we can not do it for each and every
> request. We have to trust people to some extend, no other way and no
> way to be cent percent sure about the media reaching right people or
> not.
>
>
>> 4) Lastly, how can the board help drive more participation and involvement
>> in the great work that you do in the Free Media program?
>
> Yes, thanks for bringing this up.
>
> My initial though was to integrate freemedia with ambassadors project
> and get it under FAmSCo. On a second thought, I think we can do well
> with a elected body for exclusively distribution. Entry into
> ambassadors group is no longer low-barrier and those who want to send
> only two dvds/month need not go through all the formalities of it.
>
> But notwithstanding the ease of job, we need dedicated people who can
> take care of the freemedia and distribution process, get new vendors
> and contributors signed up, work with LUGs and magazines to carry
> fedora and work on other things to ensure availability. In short, I am
> thinking of an elected body to take care of distribution process.
> Also, we have started receiving donations[1]once again and I have
> requested Max to take charge of the donations (only if he agrees). An
> elected body will be able to decide on the best way to spend the
> donations.
>
> However, I am yet to take this discussion to the freemedia list, and
> once that is done anf if the proposal is agreed upon, we can come up
> with a formal proposal to the board. This we will talk about in
> details after getting the app ready.
>
> [1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Distribution/FreeMedia/Donation#Donation_History
>
> Thanks.
>

Thanks for all of your detailed information. I understand that right now 
the board cannot help you and that you will submit a proposal to the 
board once you have discussed with the team.

Thank you,
John