[fedora-india] [Ambassadors] [X-post] Attention: Ambassadors from India

[sankarshan]

On Thu, Dec 8, 2011 at 6:04 PM, Ankur Sinha <sanjay.ankur at gmail.com> wrote:

> I understand what you mean. We really have no way of converting free
> media requesters into contributors at the present. However, in order to
> get more contributors, I feel it necessary to have more and more people
> using fedora. As more people use fedora, more people will try to get
> involved in the community. One cannot contribute to a project they
> haven't used or aren't aware of :/

New contributors would require individuals they can look up to, get
inspired by and in general aspire to be. Your initial thread about the
Ambassadors in India paints such a dismal picture that it is a bit
difficult to believe that contributors can be inspired by the
Ambassadors.

There is always a trade-off between when you want to expand your bases
and when you'd like to spend time re-learning things and building up
expertise in new things. The way I look at it, doing the latter would
help more. At least in India. Spending time within the Ambassadors and
existing contributors in order to build up expertise, become better
(for example, how many of the Ambassadors keep themselves updated with
the current features and upcoming features ? Is there a way that
regular knowledge sharing sessions can be arranged to help them
present the technological breakthroughs of the project in a more
comprehensive way ?) would be something that needs immediate
attention.

> As of now, all the freemedia program does is try to improve the  fedora
> user base in India.

As of now, the Freemedia program manages to address only 10% of the
requests. To be able to ramp up in scale for it to make a significant
contribution it would require to address at least 40% of the requests.
The number of volunteers required would be exponentially more. Since
the current group of "folks doing Fedora" in India aren't doing enough
(or, are being unable to do enough because of being overwhelmed) in
Freemedia, expecting that the number of volunteers would increase
dramatically is not pragmatic. Improving the user-base requires a
manner of outreach and dialogue that is absent currently. For various
reasons. Which is why I'd suggest to stop looking at Freemedia as a
means to expand user base and look at a better cadre of Fedora
representatives to do so.

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