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

[Suchakra]

Hi,
I'll share some personal experiences handling lots of guys in
college/university setup. Hope they are helpful.

On Thu, Dec 8, 2011 at 5:45 PM, sankarshan <foss.mailinglists at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 8, 2011 at 5:24 PM, Ankur Sinha <sanjay.ankur at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Why worry you ask? 300 requests per month, 30 serviced, rest 270 are
>> disappointed and say "what a crappy program" => All of fedora freemedia
>> gets a bad name => All of fedora India gets a bad name => Fedora as a
>> whole in India gets a bad name. Isn't it a worrying situation?
>
> It isn't. The current method of handling the requests allows:

It is somewhat worrying but not alarming (as the tone in Ankur's mail
suggests). Worrying because at the gound level - new students trying
to get a knack of GNU/Linux world will take any distro they are given.
If its Ubuntu (admit it - its easily accessible) They generally stick
on to it if they *remain* in the GNU/Linux world. Generally is the
keyword here.

I have two case studies here. One is my lab-mate who uses Ubuntu (as
it was the first distro she got) for all technical needs and Fedora
quite minimally. The other is a Comp Science guy, Rohit - who came to
the Fedora InstallFest we had in COEP and uses Fedora now for all
possible stuff - his studies, experimentation etc. (He was a volunteer
for FUDCon Pune too) We share lots of mails and he surely seems to be
a promising addition to the contributors community shortly.

> - 10% of the requests to be met
> - no way to keep track of those receiving the media to be included
> into the Community

True. But on a one-to-one basis (mentor<-->new guy relationship), its
quite possible to pin point and possibly accumulate new contributors.
There's no mechanism to document the actual path of finding out
whether he/she is in the community now.

> As much of the good it brings about, it is merely a hand-out. And,
> asking more people to hand-out more isn't going to work.
>

True again, but still we can hope. One loyal Fedora guy (as in Rohit's
case above) out of 60+ installs we had [1] is good enough considering
the variety of choices we have in the FOSS world. I actually worked on
what you had commented on [1] (had weekend sessions, organized mini
events) and surely it yielded results with people like [2] doing
awesome stuff with Fedora + other FOSS technologies if not
contributing directly.

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

[1] http://suchakra.wordpress.com/2010/08/02/report-on-installfest-at-coep-31st-july-2010-pune-india/
[2] http://www.chetanpatil.info/blog.html

My opinion on this thread : Its good to keep all avenues to spread
Fedora open - be it Freemedia, direct distribution of ISOs, mailing
lists, mentoring or whatever. We can only tell someone about
awesomeness of Fedora as an OS at least if he/she has a Live ISO to
try :) I personally keep a pendrive ready with F15/F16 to
demonstrate/install anytime ,anywhere.

I'd say choose your own means to spread Fedora, but do choose at least one asap.

Suchakra