[fedora-india] Media production -> Meet next saturday?

[sankarshan]

On Sat, Apr 3, 2010 at 7:35 PM, Ankur Sinha <sanjay.ankur at gmail.com> wrote:

> How much is the budget really for free media requests?

I don't recall ever seeing a budget per se for Freemedia given that it
is a volunteer driven activity.

There are two points upon which I'd like to dwell. One, the problem
cannot be solved by throwing "money into the game" and, the second,
the actual need to have Freemedia program in India.

Taking up the second part. Since Freemedia is a volunteer driven
effort, the gates open for a small time-period and, then they close
down. The current method of handling Freemedia opens up a few areas of
concern:

* not all media requests get entertained
* there is no method to track down or, follow-up those who did receive media
* there is no way to keep track of whether receiving the "free" media
and attempting to install and use it led to a happy user ie. did the
install work, was the hardware working and so forth
* the current form of Freemedia has no means of bringing the
recipients into the mainline communication channels followed by the
project
* there are far too many duplicate requests or, requests from similar
postal code regions which indicate a lack of a collaborative framework

Which is why it might turn out to be a good idea to close down
Freemedia for a while and, point all requests to paid media channels.
Creating the stickers for the DVDs (to make it look 'professional')
isn't too costly and, that can probably be arranged. But, putting in a
trail of accountability and, more importantly, feedback between the
request and, the fulfilling of it would be more important.

Now, if you do media in bulk, like we did till F11, a single DVD costs
around 12 INR. Add around 3 INR for the CD mailer envelope and, around
40 INR for courier charges, the total amount required to ship a single
DVD to a recipient is 55 INR. That is over 1 USD at the current rate.
And, if we were to consider a budget of say 1000 USD, you'd be able to
ship an equivalent number of DVDs only. If you look at it
realistically, that is mere drop in the ocean of requests. Which is
why I don't think we can solve this issue with "money" or, budget.
I've been pointed out innumerable number of times that ShipIt was the
contributing factor to Ubuntu's popularity in India. I don't disagree
with that assessment. What I don't feel comfortable is entering into
an escalating budget race that has no clear upside.

I think we are asking the wrong question. It isn't "how much money do
we need to solve the problem of media" but "how much infrastructure
can we help incubate that would allow media requests to be entertained
and fulfilled". If we look at the second question, we end up entering
zone of possibilities - right from college students stepping up to do
small businesses of media retail to colleges and institutes being
looked at as mirrors. And, everything in-between.

Currently, mirrors are a major pain point. We don't have enough of
them. And, yet, we have a growing set of people from institutions who
are contributing to and participating in The Fedora Project. Why are
they unable to convince their college authorities to set up mirrors ?
That might be a part we should be looking at. For the existing
mirrors, do they have a proper set of admins in place ? For example,
GLUG-NITH's mirror has gone down in quality so much that it might
pretty well not exist. I don't know what is happening with
NIT-Durgapur or Agartala or, the other NITs that came up on the list
for discussion. With Shakthi doing his FedEx bit, how much is that
being consumed to have updated bits for participants ?

When we are discussing the issue of media (Freemedia ?), let's think
over all the above bits as well.

-- 
sankarshan mukhopadhyay
<http://sankarshan.randomink.org/blog>