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

[Peter Robinson]

>> [1]  Frankly, I'd like to get rid of the talks.  Or if not remove them
>> entirely, make them extremely focused on problems that need to be
>> solved in Fedora rather than just "here is some cool software I'm
>> working on".  The audience of the talks seems to still be the
>> traditional "introductory/new user" set, and that set isn't even
>> present at Flock.
>
> I think the talks - particularly, prepared talks - can provide good
> focus, and can be a useful way of communicating. So I'd advocate for
> the second approach, of making them more specifically focused on
> contributors, problem solving, project needs and direction, and
> similar.
>
> I also agree that moving Flock away from user outreach leaves a vacuum
> there in NA and EMEA.

I've often wondered why we don't do the "Fedora Meetup" model. It
seems to work very well for the likes of Ansible and ElasticSearch
where they create a meetup group, provide a template for organising a
meetup in the local area that is easy for people to pick up on, if
someone picks up and runs with it they send some swag or similar,
possibly even have some default talk slide decks that some local
contributors can present as a starting point.

The advantage of something likely meetup.com is that you get wider
advertising of your event through the "meetups happening in your area
this week" through the site and it's quite a low barrier for entry for
local people because it's generally a few hours of an evening to
attend in a location that's generally not massively out of the way.

The meetups in London I've been to (Ansible, ElasticSearch, London
DevOps and a few others) generally have a couple of short
presentations and then head off to the nearest pub. Often a local
business might well sponsor the event whether by providing the
location for the presentation, or some pizzas or both.

It would be a great thing to enable the various Ambassadors to get
involved in, It would require a central resource(s) to manage the
meetup group and do some co-ordindation in the organizing of the
meetup group and ensuring a level of quality but seeing how large some
of the other meetup groups grow (I've seen some that are operating
100s of meetup locations) I suspect it might be worth the effort.

Peter