[Fedora-India] Queries regarding the Free media project in India

[sankarshan]

On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 9:36 AM, Rangeen Basu<sherry151 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Very true. Local contacts can serve requests which originate from
> within a rang of a few kilometres. Anything beyond that boils down to
> the same postage issue. Even the next city is out of reach for local
> contacts. People are not willing to travel and collect the media
> themselves. It is much easier for them to obtain a pirated Windows CD.

I tend to think that I have had enough talk about "Windows CD"
(pirated is a singularly unfit term to use for software) or, "other
Linux distributions". From what I recall, the LocalContacts was an
experiment to ensure the following:

[1] local outreach happens
[2] a locally available support system is incubated

I am yet to see a positive outcome of either goals. Which is why I had
the query about whether it is possible for the local contact to get a
geographic profile of requests.

If we do not have enough local contacts to be present across every
city we are receiving requests from, our question should be "why not"
and, we should start thinking about what can be done. If we have
existing LocalContacts not providing media at-cost, our questions
should be "why can't they" and, we should start a conversation about
how they could be doing this.

> One alternative is to use VPP [1] .

As much as I like everyone to receive a media. I guess that just bulk
producing media to continue shipments is not going to be a good thing.
There should be ways and means to outreach. For example, there are
UserGroups a plenty - can we figure out a way to tie into them as well
as have them accountable for shipping the media. I know PuneLUG does
an awesomely good job of doing so, how about other UGs ? The UGs at
institutes for example - does their charter allow them to ship media
at-cost ?


-- 
http://www.gutenberg.net - Fine literature digitally re-published
http://www.plos.org - Public Library of Science
http://www.creativecommons.org - Flexible copyright for creative work