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

Sat Oct 17 16:28:52 UTC 2015

I can now speak openly. :)

On Thu, Oct 15, 2015 at 3:55 PM, Remy DeCausemaker <rdecause at redhat.com> wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Matthew Miller" <mattdm at fedoraproject.org>
>> To: "Discussions with the Fedora Council and community" <council-discuss at lists.fedoraproject.org>
>> Sent: Thursday, October 15, 2015 10:37:19 AM
>> Subject: Re: Followups from Council phone call monday — Budget discussion for this    year and beyond
>>
>> On Thu, Oct 15, 2015 at 04:23:28AM +0100, Peter Robinson wrote:
>> > I've often wondered why we don't do the "Fedora Meetup" model. It
>>
>> I think this is simply the same reason we don't have a lot of other
>> things we know would be a good idea in Fedora but haven't done — no one
>> really enthused about it stepped up and made it happen.
>>
>> I was actually talking with Remy about this as a community
>> action/impact activity last week. Remy, what are your thoughts?
>
> There are a number of other topics/ideas that came out of that 1x1 with mattdm last week:
>
>  - It'd be nice to track whenever "Fedora" is covered in existing meetups (NLP on descriptions? Some other MeetupAPI grepping?)

We do this at Ansible. I have a contractor who continually trolls
through meetup.com for data. There might be a better solution, but
costs us about $30/wk, which is not bad.

>  - Encouraging Ambassadors to target local meetups (DevOps, Programming Langs, Etc...) as places to give Fedora-specific presentations

Yes.

>  - Awarding Travel Subsidy to international events, based on participation in local/regional events

Depends on how much $$$ you have available.

>  - Developing a trove of general Fedora slide-decks that can be presented at a variety of meetups (Python in Fedora, DevOps in Fedora, etc...)

There's already a trove of Fedora slide decks:

http://www.slideshare.net/search/slideshow?searchfrom=header&q=fedora

You're best suited, I think, by picking out the ones that are good and
encouraging others to emulate them. People don't tend to like giving
generic slides in my experience, but identifying the best good
jumping-off points would be super useful.

>> > 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.
>>
>> Very much yes. I see two main avenues — specific meetups around Fedora,
>> combined with Fedora activity at meetups around other open source
>> projects.
>
> Yes, agreed see above.
>
> Though anecdotal, I'd like to add some more story here:
>
> LUGs have been around since long before Meetup. Rochester has one of the longest-operating LUGs in the US, according to their website. However... membership and attendance has been trending downward year-over-year. Perhaps this is because of differentiation (e.g. you used to go to LUG to talk about sysadmin tools and topics, but now there is a specific meetup for that?) Regardless, our general LUG, that doesn't focus on one single distro, is already struggling to maintain leadership and regular attendance. I cannot imagine having an even more narrowly defined meetup will bear more fruit than having a general LUG, but perhaps I am underestimating the reach/interest/passion of our users?
>
> This is where a user census would come in very handy ;)

LUGs are dead. Don't wait to do a survey to come to the obvious conclusion.

> Finding out *where* we have a critical mass of current users, to decide where to invest in forming a regional meetup.  We /could/ do this by querying FAS membership, but since it is user-reported, it could be suspect, generalized, or just plain incorrect (manual lat/long input can be iffy.) My guess is that we'd like be skewed towards the larger cities having more users (duh), but there are places like Rochester, where I think that our efforts on campuses and with regional events (like FLOCK) we may have incited a slightly larger base as a proportion of the population. What I'd rather avoid is dumping precious budget into a super-saturated market, just because it is "the biggest." We could also look at not just current users, but potential users, to see where we can grown the most? This is a more slippery metric, and I don't have an easy answer, but I'd look at datapoints like: Hackathons per year, Startups per square mile, proximity to a Red Hat office, Number of EDU's in the area, ACS/BLS labor statistics for occupational density of engineers/programmers, etc...

Far too much work for far little benefit. The Ansible meetup strategy
is two-fold:

A. Ansible-created.
* 1. Look at where the top N Docker meetups are.
* 2. Create the Ansible meetups there.
* 3. Wait for people to join.
* 4. Ask the members who wants to lead.
* 5. Hand over the reins.

B. User-created.
* 1. Make it clear that anyone can create an Ansible meetup.
* 2. When someone says "I want an Ansible meetup in x location," say yes.
* 3. Create the meetup and hand over the reins.

The great thing about meetup.com as a platform is that does the vast
majority of the work for you, at a nominal price. Even going with the
most expensive plan, you're looking at $100/meetup/yr (and we
currently pay way less than that). So 50 cities is a $5k investment.
Put meetups in the top 50 cities in the world, and you're done for
year 1. Assess the membership numbers and go from there.

As of right now, Ansible has 110 meetups around the world with almost
12k members. It took a year to get there from practically nothing, and
it took about 25% of my time to do it with a small budget, by myself.

It's not perfect. About 1/3 of those meetups have yet to meet, and may
never meet. Another 1/3 have met once or twice. But that last 1/3 are
very active.

> And lets be honest, sometimes a very small group of engaged and active hackers can be a *more* effective event, than a general meeting of hundreds of disinterested folks just looking for "free stuff." (ask Kushal about his experience with the state of Open Source Ambassadorships in India sometime for more on this...)

Apples and oranges. Meetups are perfect for "recruitment", and to give
people who are interested a local place to go meet other people like
them. Hacking is different, because it requires different skills and
different supporting infrastructure.

> If there were some data, we could make strategic investment. This is a larger commops discussion waiting to be had. I think this question is def worthy of some more research, and we can do a multi-variate analysis to decide if and where to put our time/energy/budget.
>
> I think it is key that we need to recognize that Ambassadors are *not* the only constituency that would need to do local meetup outreach, though they are the most natural. Our ambassador reach is varied by Continental Region, let alone local region, and it could be cost-ineffective to subsidize travel to even smaller events than conferences.

One idea: use the ambassadors to kickstart the meetup strategy
(following strategy B above). It's a natural fit. It also gives
ambassadors a very clear structure to work in. You also get a lot of
data for free: where are the most active events? Who's holding events
most frequently? Who needs help? Data that would be exceptionally
useful for strengthening the ambassadors program as a whole.

--g

> Getting a list of already-existing local meetups and hackathons from each ambassador would be a good start. This could just be a wiki page for now, but eventually, having local Hubs seems like a great place to keep this information, which can then be aggregated into Regional and National Hubs, without information having to be curated at each layer.
>
> /me goes to file a few tickets.
>
> Let's keep this conversation going, I'm going to cc the commops list to get it on the radar over there as well.
> --RemyD.
>
>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Matthew Miller
>> <mattdm at fedoraproject.org>
>> Fedora Project Leader
>> _______________________________________________
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>> https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/council-discuss
>>
>> The Fedora Project's mission is to lead the advancement of free and
>> open source software and content as a collaborative community.
>
>
> --
> Remy DeCausemaker
> <decause at redhat.com>
> Fedora Community Lead & Council Member
> http://whatcanidoforfedora.org
> 308C A504 0B47 1503 C9D9  E670 E633 A79B 0BB0 F6D9
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>
> The Fedora Project's mission is to lead the advancement of free and
> open source software and content as a collaborative community.