Recruiting Students (Campus Ambassadors)

Larry Cafiero larry.cafiero at gmail.com
Sun Jun 29 04:03:16 UTC 2008


Jack --

I think the idea of getting a foothold into colleges is a good one.
I'm not entirely clear how advocating for Fedora in the school setting
differs from what we would normally do as ambassadors, but I'm willing
to be educated. :-)

What I would expect from such a program is, essentially, support for
our evangelism as promote Fedora on campus. Swag is always nice -- it
may not appeal so much to me, a 50-year-old freshman, as it does to
younger students -- and

But bright ideas? Hmmm. I'm open to new ideas, but I can tell you what
we're doing so far at Cabrillo College.

The Cabrillo College GNU/Linux Users Group holds biweekly installfests
during the school semesters (monthly during the summer). During new
releases -- like the Fedora 9 release -- the installfests take on a
"theme," and in the Fedora 9 instance it was "Hats Off to Fedora 9"
back in May.

Generally speaking, there is always a Fedora presence at meetings and
installfests (by me, for one, but we've also had another local
ambassador, Karsten Wade, attend as well). There's no reason why we
couldn't ramp that up to have info sessions and/or tech talk types of
events on campus during the course of the school year.

One of the things we're doing at Cabrillo College is creating our own
distro, called Seahawk GNU/Linux (the Seahawk is the Cabrillo mascot).
Not that the world needs yet another distro, mind you, but we're using
the project as a teaching tool more than an actual distro that will
take the world by storm. Of course, it's based on Fedora.

How that translates into promotional value for Fedora is that those of
us working on the project -- students in the Computer and Information
Systems department primarily -- work specifically with Fedora and, as
a result, gain a familiarity to it. Also, as Fedora is connected to
the distro, those who get introduced to GNU/Linux through the
school-based distro get a sort of introduction to Fedora as well (and,
naturally, they might be inclined -- or urged -- to use Fedora).

For those who have stayed awake up to this point, thanks for reading.

Larry Cafiero
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Lcafiero

On 6/28/08, Jack Aboutboul <jaa at redhat.com> wrote:
> Hey All,
>
>  I appreciate all the enthusiasm, I know you guys are eager to join, but I
> was more curious in what you guys felt about the actual idea and what you
> would expect out of such a program?  I want it to be different than the
> current ambassadors setup.
>
>  I know you guys have some bright ideas--let me hear them.
>
>  Thanks,
>  Jack
>
>
>  Jack Aboutboul wrote:
>
> > Hey All,
> >
> > I'm sorry I missed the marketing meeting earlier today, but I was told
> > that there was discussion of recruiting students to help out with Fedora
> > and Fedora marketing efforts.  I have been working for the past couple
> > of weeks to put together something modeled after the ambassadors which I
> > tentatively call "Campus Ambassadors".  The mission of the campus
> > ambassadors is something similar to what Mozilla does with the Firefox
> > Campus Rep program--to have someone who can speak to the student body
> > about Fedora and represent Fedora at relevant campus events.
> >
> > Also, I am looking to require campus ambassadors to hold one info
> > session or tech talk type thing per semester to make sure that there is
> > constant action and interest in Fedora.
> >
> > There will be a community architecture team meeting in Raleigh next week
> > at which I would like to present the final plan for this and officially
> > launch.  I have already been in contact with a number of students from
> > various universities (Berkeley, Oswego, CMU, Auburn, Texas A&M) and so
> > far there is interest.
> >
> > Just thought I would kick the idea out to the list and see what people
> > had to say.  My plan is to put up a wiki page for this tomorrow or over
> > the weekend, so that it can be presented next week.
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Jack
> >
> >
>
>  --
>  Fedora-marketing-list mailing list
>  Fedora-marketing-list at redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-marketing-list
>




More information about the marketing mailing list