[FAmSCo] FUDCon APAC 2016: FAmSCo Discussion Thread

Wed Dec 23 23:11:53 UTC 2015

On Wed, Dec 23, 2015 at 12:59 AM, S.Kemter <sirko.kemter at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
>
> Hi,
>
>
> Amit have you anything to say to the topic any issue, argument or are you afraid to put your argument "raining season" forward again?
>
> For the other readers here, Amits concern was that there is raining season during FUDCon, on the question why its a concern for FUDCon in Phnom Penh but not for FUDCon Pune, his answer was that they faced some problems because of it. As Somvannda said that this area is not affected from the rain, Amit said that wikipedia told him otherwise, there would be a lot of rain in this month in Phnom Penh. Well just to correct his fine source wikipedia a little bit, its a little bit stupid to just look to the rainfall rate and not looking to the sunshine hours, that would bring out that the rain falls during night.

My main concern is just that weather does not complicate air or other
travel to and from FUDCon.

> Amit is the best example of Indians and their problematic behaivor, the put so many nonsense "issues" forward that others get the feeling they dont want FUDCon to be in PP. But in the opposite and thats well documented, with their own bid they just went over all concerns, just look to the meeting logfile for that.

I can imagine that this is a long-standing back and forth
conversation, and that frustrations can run high, but as a global
community we must absolutely avoid generalizations. If there are
specific members and logs you can point to, that is useful information
for moving the conversation forward. Lumping everyone in a region
together can distract from the productive parts of the conversation,
and also make entire groups of people feel unwelcome, which is def not
what the "Friends" foundation is all about. We all must be vigilant
and supportive of eachother in this way.

> Thats the general situation we have in APAC, just read some logfiles. If a ticket is issued by another person who is not Indian, there are so many purposes not to grant subsidies but Indians no discussion, they just use there mass power to approve it.
>
> Just look to the decission logfile for FUDCon Pune, clear to see and if you want it more clear look to the logs which persons was present in meetings before.
>
> From 5 FUDCons APAC had so far 3 was in India, if we look to the last year one, in Beijing and that also this team had to bid twice and faced a lot of this "hateful" behaivor with concerns about the smallest things.
>
> So what was the "issues"
>
> * first issue was that FUDCon would be parallel to another event, that would disturb us. It was a nonsense argument anyway, we had good and bad expiriences with that, but we can definitely achieve more to be there as doing it alone. This is always to see from the local side, the suggestion to make more smaller events in Cambodia is just nonsense.

I think that co-locating with Barcamp seems like a good idea. If
possible, having it overlap partially I think would help, particularly
moreso on the front-end than on the back-end. This is just my opinion,
and I'm certainly open to other opinions.

> Why if I do a weekend event here on Saturday/Sunday not many will come Saturday is here a regular working day, they have 28 holidays here and have to work on Saturdays for that. Its also hard to reach here students, normal students here are college students that has another meaning, it means here they work during day and go in the evening from 6pm-10pm to university.

This is a useful bit of regional information that I didn't know about,
and likely others didn't either. This is different from what I'm used
to seeing in the US too. Thank you for sharing this.

> So its hard to recruit them. What the Indians here always do is putting their expiriences over the others..... who talks here about friendship again?

Again, I understand frustrations are high. APAC as a region is a very
diverse and heterogeneous group of communities, and with that comes
both logistical and cultural challenges. We cannot generalize, and we
cannot afford to get fixated on the differences. We must focus more on
what common goals and purposes unite us. I got much love and respect
for you gnokii, and your leadership and perspective in Fedora are very
helpful, but making this into a "big regions versus smaller regions in
APAC" conversation is not. But also know that you are not the only
Ambassador that feels affected by regional differences, we have
similar challenges even here in NA ambassadors too, and this is
something that we all can make a conscious effort to fixate on less
on, and try to bridge in 2016. I know I will.

> * raining season, see above

Noted.

> * October would be same month like FUDCon LATAM, the argumentation was always that somebody from there wants to come. On my argumentation they shall show me whenever somebody from LATAM came over, they switched to the argument that then the FPL or other high level person could not come, as I came with the argument that the FPL was not present in May either, they came up with that it would be a problem for the budget. Harish was present in FUDCon Pune and his argument that, this will not be an issue, if it can be planned before. Well I got the task to speak with Ruth about it and I did on Flock, and exact the same answer from her.

I'm not sure who from Fedora Leadership will be available to attend
FUDCon APAC. I was able to represent Council/Leadership at LATAM this
year, but was not able to make APAC last year. I can look into this at
both the OSAS and Council level and see who is planning to go.

Because these FUDCons are regional, and meant to be regional, I am
less concerned about cross-region attendance. That being said, if we
can book these events on the calendar at not exactly the same time, I
think that would help in case there were members who could do both if
they wanted to. Have there been any FUDCon LATAM bids or dates
publicized yet? Let's coordinate with that region here on the FAmSco
list, and see if we can't find dates that work for everyone.

> * the next issue was that it is not allowed for Cambodians to receive money on paypal. Its documented in logfiles that Somvannda more then one time said, that I have a german one and can receive money, they just stepped over it and said, that they should not rely on me. Well fine, I know a little trick how a Cambodian can get an US bank account and with this account an US paypal and then receive the money, here the argument was then that this is not authorized by RedHat what is funny to me as for RH it is paypal and what bank account there is behind its not of their concern.

This is a logistical issue that is common not just to APAC, but LATAM
as well. Regional issues with PayPal were a major topic of discussion
during FUDCon LATAM organizer's workshop (we tried to brainstorm many
solutions to this problem, even including crypto-currency as a
possible solution.) I'm certainly open to suggestions, particularly
from previous FAmSco and current cardholders on how best to navigate
these logistics.

Historically, there are regional card-holders who handle reimbursement
and purchasing. At the Council level, we are doing our best to improve
the budget reporting, and tie our spending to impact and show metrics.
These metrics can then be used to ask for increased funding in the
future, but also help promote our events and activities regionally,
and make the reimbursement process faster. I would encourage everyone
in this thread to take a look at the Budget.next wiki page:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Budget.next

> * then there was the issue, that there are 100 persons calculated for hotel, well if you look all calculations are done on the base 100. Thats what we did, we just looked for the average participation on FUDCons and choose 100 as base for the calculations. That does not mean we book for 100 people rooms!

I think that this is a reasonable approach, basing future predictions
on past participation. I doubt anyone really thought we were going to
put 100 people into one hotel room though :P

> * next issue why there are just for 12 people travel planned, well thats what we had left after all the usual things was planned 6k for travel and we calculated with an average of 500$ thats what you have normally to calculate. It should be also very clear the each part the get spent lesser on the other parts will flow back into the travel pot and also when more people spending lesser money, then more people can travel.

Travel funding is a difficult issue for our Fedora Premier events.
Part of the reason that Flock alternates between NA and EMEA was to
reduce the amount of travel costs incurred by having two continental
conferences each year.

This is also why we want to encourage regional premier events, so that
we don't spend all of our precious budget on travel.

> Looking back why there is now only a 15k budget for FUDCon, Amit should really shut up, it was not a lot of Asians who travelled to Flock Prague, it was a lot of Indians. What a joke that the RH office Pune found 10k $ for supporting FUDCon there but never finds money to send their people to Flock.

Telling people to shut up in a thread is not very friendly or productive.

Rather than throwing shade about what has happened in the past, we
should be focusing on how to improve the likelihood that Red Hat, and
other Upstream and Downstream organizations, will find value in
sponsoring their employees and community members to attend FUDCon.
This is a big topic of discussion on the flock-planning list, and
there are a variety of strategies to do this (Some Flock specific,
some general to FOSS conferences):

- Targeted track topics for specific technologies that are applicable
in Industry (e.g. containers, DevOps, Cloud, language/environment
specific, etc...)

- Increasing the numbers of tracks increases the number of accepted
speakers. A company is *much* more likely to send an employee if that
employee is speaking at a conference, not just attending.

- Offering Industry leaders keynotes, or other speaking opportunities,
as part of sponsorship.

- Offering training, workshops, certifications, tutorials, hack-days,
or other hands-on, do-stuff type events, in addition to lecture-style
presentations.

- And there is always Increasing the number of sponsorships. Easy to
say, harder to do. The sooner we agree on dates and venues, the sooner
we can put together the prospectus to engage with sponsors and improve
our situation.

> So that was all issues and you can see nothing was left out, if there are more issues, Somvannda or me will answer to it. We spent several months in nonsense discussions already, time which could have been used more useful.

Time is of the essence, and we need to pick a direction and move
forward. I will keep an eye on this thread, and my inbox is *always*
open, and my bouncer (almost) always online. If there isn't already a
regular FUDCon planning meeting established, I think getting one onto
the books would be a good idea for January after the Holidays.

I understand there is frustration here, but I know that underneath it
all it comes from an urgency to make decisions and organize a
successful event. Let's focus on keeping the conversation positive and
constructive.

Any other input or perspectives on the APAC bid will be helpful moving
forward. Anyone who hasn't already, please chime in with any info or
concerns, so we can make this bid, and any other bids, stronger, and
address any concerns as quickly as possible.

 Looking Forward,
--RemyD.

> 2015-12-22 11:19 GMT+07:00 Amit Shah <amit.shah at redhat.com>:
>>
>> Hello,
>>
>> On (Wed) 16 Dec 2015 [12:11:41], Remy DeCausemaker wrote:
>> > FAmSCos,
>> >
>> > It came up during the council meeting this week that there have been
>> > some issues around choosing a venue for FUDCon APAC 2016. Here is a
>> > link to the council ticket: https://fedorahosted.org/council/ticket/49
>> >
>> > The FAMSCo list feels like the natural place to engage with the FUDCon
>> > APAC organizers, and bring the community up to speed on any
>> > questions/comments/issues around choosing a venue. As is mentioned in
>> > the ticket, time is of the essence, and I want to help move this
>> > conversation forward as best I can.
>> >
>> > I've cc'd the stakeholders from the council ticket directly, in case
>> > they are not subscribed to the FAMSCo list.
>> >
>> > Please bear with me, as I am not entirely up to speed on the details
>> > of the conversation up to the point, or issues with the bid. Any
>> > supporting links or conversations that would help shed light on the
>> > conversation are most welcome.
>> >
>> > I want to help get to the bottom of these issues, and quickly, and
>> > make sure that our APAC community members get the best Fedora Premier
>> > event we can muster :)
>>
>> Not sure if the conversation continued on the famsco list (the
>> archives for Dec are empty), and if my input was required.  I haven't
>> seen any replies, and since I was one of the people on the ticket,
>> I'll just state my position here.
>>
>> At the outset, let me say that I don't have a problem with hosting the
>> FUDCon in Cambodia.
>>
>> My only problem is the "Friends" foundation isn't strong, especially
>> with the personal jibes at each meeting some have to face (btw this is
>> only from Gnokii, the Cambodians are fine).  A few of us have told him
>> several times to stop, but that hasn't had an effect on him.  This has
>> spilled into our apac ambassadors meetings as well, and that isn't
>> something I want to deal with Saturday mornings.  So I'm just going to
>> wish the team a good FUDCon, and leave it at that.
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>>                 Amit
>
>
>
>
> --
> make me rich, buy my Inkscape book http://is.gd/yq5OD0 ;)

-- 
Remy DeCausemaker
Fedora Community Lead & Council
<decause at redhat.com>
https://whatcanidoforfedora.org