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

[Ankur Sinha]

Hey,

On Sun, 2010-04-04 at 10:51 +0530, sankarshan wrote:
> 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

I'm afraid I see no way of doing this. 

/me adds to agenda

> * 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

We can start a feedback system, but looking at the number of replies we
get to free media tickets, I don't expect much input.

/me adds to agenda

> * the current form of Freemedia has no means of bringing the
> recipients into the mainline communication channels followed by the
> project

/me adds this to agenda

> * there are far too many duplicate requests or, requests from similar
> postal code regions which indicate a lack of a collaborative framework
> 

One reason for this is that people who successfully get media are not
converted into contributors who can at least share their media. Hence,
we end up sending media to neighbours at times.

> 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.
> 

We can point the tickets to vendors, request users to provide feedback
on the concerned vendor. We can set up a system to rank vendors or
something similar to provide some sort of incentive to vendors?

for eg, we can announce a 6 month period where we will direct equal
number of requests to each vendor. Based on their service, price,
feedback, we will direct media after the 6 month period to the best
vendor. Sort of releasing a "tender" I guess?

/me adds to agenda

> 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.

I send media using speed post at rs 25 around India. My costs are high
because i purchase dvds and burn media on my laptop :$. 

> 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.
> 

Speaking for myself, I wouldn't like to set up a business because
burning media on our desktops/laptops isn't economical at all. I can
charge per media delivered, but that won't cover the number of media
wasted, for which I pay from my pocket. 

> 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 ?

Again, speaking for myself and MIT, Manipal here. The trouble is very
plainly stating, the lack of usage. Our labs still stick to windows,
faculty is still ill informed about Linux/Fedora. Apart from that, the
wifi infra is still not in place, call it beta if you want. At this
stage, the college refuses to set up a mirror. It's the same thought
stream as we had for the FUDCon -> they want to see "definite results",
which cannot be given. All we say is that its better for students and
will improve placements, decrease costs etc, but this seemingly isn't
enough compared to the infra required to set up the mirror. 

/me adds to agenda

> 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 ?
> 

/me adds to agenda

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

As always, I request more Ambassadors to join the discussion. I'm only
seeing a bunch of folks interested right now. Discussion is one of the
*major* duties of an Ambassador. Please at least reply to the mailing
list. The discussion currently doesn't require any prior coding
knowledge or anything of the sort so everyone should be able to
participate.

The agenda for the meet currently is:

* How do we track/follow up fulfilled requests w.r.t free media?
* How do we collect feedback on installation etc ?
* How do we get the requestees closer to the project ?
* How do we convert more requestees to providers ?
* How do we get more vendors working with us ?
* How do we improve service and decrease vendor costs ?
* How do we encourage students/LUGs to provide media, even for profit ?
* How do we encourage more institutions to mirror for us?
* Check up on current mirrors
* How do we get more ambassadors to reply to the lists and join
discussions ?

It's quite an agenda and needs a lot of minds to pitch in with ideas. 

The time stands at 1930 UTC on Saturday, April the 10th. Please mark
your calendars :)

-- 
regards,
Ankur 
- FAS : ankursinha ; franciscod @ Freenode
- gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 5E9BF638

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 490 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/india/attachments/20100404/55975f97/attachment.bin