[Ambassadors] calling for backup

[Mel Chua]

 > So from an outsiders perspective, I infer that there must a lot of
 > internal wrangling that occurs, especially for the larger events such
 > as FUDcon.
<snip>
 > That leads
 > me to believe that this internal wrangling has a learning curve that
 > is non-trivial, and that repeating it would be a waste of time and
 > resources. If it takes a month to get someone up to speed, having to
 > repeat it for each FUDcon sounds likely to be an excercise in
 > frustration.

I'll chime in here because FUDCon Toronto was my 2nd-ever FUDCon and the 
first one I helped organize (as a small portion of my $dayjob, so I 
think that if there was "internal wrangling" that occurred I would have 
had to see it).

I learned everything on the fly, right before I needed it; it wasn't 
difficult, it was just constant keeping-up-with-communications. I 
learned by asking questions of prior FUDCon organizers (Paul and Max) or 
by making something up if there wasn't an existing process. For this 
reason, I'd suggest at least a 2-FUDCon term for the position - do a 
FUDCon (while being mentored), mentor someone else to do a FUDCon.

Stuff the community can do:

* Finding and negotiating contracts with hotels, venues, food vendors, 
etc (actually, Chris Tyler did basically all of this, and ended up just 
telling me and Paul "hey guys, is this ok? Yes? Great, here's the 
invoice, you take care of payment.")

* How to run the sponsorship process, which is now documented at 
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Sponsoring_event_attendees. Again, this 
can very much be a "we have decided these people need $X - hey 
$person_with_pursestrings, please take care of <invoice>" sort of thing.

* How to announce FUDCon news to the Fedora community - there's nothing 
special about this, it's all sending mails to list and posting on Planet 
and poking individuals on IRC to register, plan hackfests, get their 
sponsorship apps in, etc. There is no secret magic sauce beyond Lots Of 
Communication.

* Basically, everything at 
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon_organization_process.

Stuff that's harder for the community to do:

* Red Hat expense reports and reimbursements (a.k.a. "I paypalled these 
people the money we owe them, and now I need to submit everyone's 
receipts to the Red Hat system so that Max can tell Finance to give me 
back my money.")

In other words, as far as I can tell, the only "internal" stuff that's 
needed is "Step N: actually apply the Red Hat credit card and pay for 
things"[0] - the rest of it is documented at 
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon_organization_process.

--Mel

[0] and if there was a portion of the bill someone else wanted to pick 
up - for instance, I recall OLPC sponsored... I think it was FUDPub, 
back in the January 2009 FUDCon in Boston - there's no "internal Red 
Hat" stuff needed at all.