Followups from Council phone call monday — Budget discussion for this year and beyond

[Matthew Miller]

On Tue, Oct 13, 2015 at 06:08:23PM -0400, Máirín Duffy wrote:
> Fwiw, I agree w this point too and hope we can have some more
> strategy around events? I think this was part of the thinking Spot
> had around our presence at SXSW - reaching out to an audience we
> don't normally hit at the lug/linux cons. (Does that sound right?)
> 
> First hand impression of being at the Fedora booth at SXSW is that
> the vast majority of people we spoke with had little knowledge of
> Fedora and were genuinely being introduced to both Fedora and floss
> tools for the first time (we focused on designer-centric tools like
> Inkscape, given the audience makeup.)

Yeah, I think that was very interesting. I wish we had a better idea of
the lasting impact of that — I don't think we've seen a lot of new
visible _contributors_ from that effort, and we don't have a clear way
to measure users or even secondary impact. Dealing with that problem is
key to updating our strategy.

I guess I'm thinking: away from the traditional Linux fests and — let's
be honest, aging — LUGs, there's still a lot of area that's closer to
"home territory" in the worlds of software development, systems
administration, devops/sre, and so on, that we're missing out on. I
mean, look at this: 

  http://www.meetup.com/find/tech/?allMeetups=false&radius=Infinity&userFreeform=Somerville%2C+MA&mcId=z2144&mcName=Somerville%2C+MA&sort=default&eventFilter=mysugg

How many of those have Fedora presence? How many of them _aren't about
Fedora_ but happen to showcase Fedora in some way, either just because
the presenter is running Fedora Workstation, or because Fedora is a
deployment platform?

I've brought up the Stack Exchange Developer Survey¹ before, and I'll
probably keep doing it until someone gives me something better. 20% of
software developers run Linux, but only 6% of those (1.3% overall) run
Fedora as their desktop. There's room to grow both Linux share overall
*and* Fedora's relative position. But we need a strategy to do it — it
won't come by doing what we're doing now.

We definitely need some higher-level metrics (and Remy's working on
it), but also, I'd like to encourage ambasssadors, event planners,
etc., to really focus on how you can measure and demonstrate impact at
the base level.


1. http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2015#tech-os


-- 
Matthew Miller
<mattdm at fedoraproject.org>
Fedora Project Leader