What happened in June of 2009 within the Fedora Project?

[Christoph Wickert]

Am Mittwoch, den 14.10.2009, 17:26 +0200 schrieb Gregory Zysk:


> >> If we interact with people outside the community, then yes we do
> need to have some sort of metrics that reflect what we do. 

I don't think that the number of ambassadors reflects what we do. There
are other ways to measure this: The number of events we do, the number
of talks our ambassadors do or the number of Fedora installs [1] and so
on.

Take a look at Ubuntu, they seem measure their success by the number of
Ubuntu CDs the gave away on an event. I recall talking to a guy from
their community and he said: "It was a very successful event for Ubuntu,
we gave away nearly 3000 CDs." I wasn't really surprised about the high
number because they had big boxes of CDs standing in front of their
booth. People walked by and grabbed 10 or 20 at once while the Ubuntu
people were sitting behind their desk and reading books.
To me this is no success. For me it is more important to have a nice
conversation with somebody. We talk for 5 or 10 minutes and then I give
him a Live-CD before he leaves. I'm sure this person is much more
interested in Fedora and has learned more about the project than
somebody who papers his restroom with Ubuntu-CDs because they bling so
nice. ;)

We must not take numbers as the key to everything. Numbers do not
reflect how well a community is working or how people actually feel as
being part of this community. Is there a way to measure pride or
gratitude?

> Those should, of course, be honest, but also precise. Not just a round
> about figure. The reason being legitimacy.

I think they are precise. The number of Ambassadors has decreased, but
their quality has increased. How would you measure quality by numbers?

> This is one of the largest gauge for an organization which produces
> knowledge as an output. In simple words, these figures can be used for
> external purposes. And why not? The resources are already there (in
> this case)

What kind of external purposes do you think of?

Regards,
Christoph

[1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Statistics

>         P.S.:
>         https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines#No_HTML_Mail.2C_Please