What happened in June of 2009 within the Fedora Project?

Wed Oct 14 17:56:21 UTC 2009

On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 6:46 PM, Robyn Bergeron <robyn.bergeron at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 6:20 AM, Joerg Simon <jsimon at fedoraproject.org>
> wrote:
> > Hi Gregory,
> >
> > if a FOSS community starts to deal to much with itself it could be, that
> focus
> > gets lost and is not healthy.
> > I think there is a risk to fail if one is trying to succesfully transport
> > business measurement techniques one to one from business world into a
> FOSS
> > Project. Measurement is about control and business controlls will not
> work
> > here. But maybe we can adopt some of it! Please, this is not meant as a
> > discouragement, it is a good idea to learn how things work in FOSS first
> - i
> > know you are very eager to start and that is the reason i try provide you
> an
> > answer for your questions - maybe we can achieve something great by
> combine
> > things from both world.
>
> I would agree that there is definitely not a 1:1 from FOSS to the
> business world. I used to work for a Very Big Processor company, where
> most things came out of a marketing plan, and I would be willing to be
> a very large sum of money (or at least, a coffee for someone!) that if
> employees came to work and started doing something that was not on the
> plan, upper management would have had numerous seizures.  And god
> forbid if people who didn't even work there started showing up and
> doing things.  I'd also bet (now i'm up to two coffees!) that if Linus
> had had a marketing team defining a list of project requirements, we
> would all be typing our emails on a different type of machine right
> now.
>

>>>There have been several articles on places such as CNET and the like
which highlight the deficit of linux/open source looking at the marketing
perspective. I believe that marketing is key to strategy and development in
any organization, anywhere is the world.

>
> That is not to say that Marketing, specifically the strategic
> marketing end of things, doesn't have a role in Fedora or Linux.  FOSS
> simply has a different way of going about things; users see gaps, or
> room for improvements, and they come and fix it, and become
> participants in the overall community.  Many of these community
> members are doing this on their own time

>>> I know, I am one of them.

> , not as part of their jobs;
> if they wanted someone to dictate to them what they should be working
> on, they would probably just go and work longer hours at their jobs.
>
> Strategic marketing, in my opinion, should be a guiding light for the
> engineers.  Imagine if a group of people got together and decided to
> build a road, so they just do it (I'll just ignore the part about how
> the government is totally going to come and slap them around for not
> having permits and whatnot).  These road engineers, who are busting
> their butts doing an awesome job for the greater good, don't want
> people nitpicking them to death on what they aren't doing; they might,
> however, appreciate information like, "Oh hey, you guys are aware that
> 6 miles up the road you haven't built yet is a huge chasm - you might
> want to start thinking about how to build a bridge!" or "Hey guys...we
> just talked to the people in the city, and it looks like you might
> need an additional lane for all the traffic you're going to be
> getting."  And when the road is done, it never hurts to let them know
> that - hey! - 95% of the community thinks that your road is freakin
> awesome.
>

>>>Possibly?

>
> Basically, doing end-user research accomplishes a few things - it lets
> engineering know what is going right, and what is not going so right,
> and maybe what can be done to fix it.  There are also tons of untapped
> potential community members out there; if we present them with a list
> of ways to participate, rather than expecting them to find a niche on
> their own, we can get more participants.
>

>>>EXACTLY!!!! How will anyone new to the area be able to find your "house"
without a map or directions?

>
> I'm pretty sure that was fairly incoherent.  I'll be going to find
> some caffeine now. :)
>

>>>Don't worry. You were pretty coherent :)

>
> -robyn
>
> >
> >
> > On Wednesday 14 October 2009 14:22:11 Gregory Zysk wrote:
> >> One thing I would like to start with to help all of you form a marketing
> >> mindset is to ask the question of "What happened in June of 2009 within
> the
> >> Fedora Project?
> >>
> >> As you can see: https://fedorahosted.org/fama/wiki/AmbassadorMetricsviews
> >> that we have had a steady increase since measurement began in January of
> >> 2006. That is until June of 2009.
> >
> > Just for notice - Fedora is far more than the Ambassadors Group which is
> only
> > a (large) sub-project
> >
> >> Once we can answer this question, we can begin to answer these
> >> sub-questions:
> >> 1) Who were these ambassadors?
> >
> > In the past the Ambassador Group was often used by new Contributors as an
> > entry level Group - which is what the Ambassador Group is definitely not
> -
> > because you have not only to present Fedora as an OS - also the Project
> itself
> > and therefore it is imperative to know the project better than anybody
> else.
> > This is the reason why we have established a strong mentoring process and
> have
> > a new membership process.
> >
> > You can see the result, who they are where they are from ...
> > for the last month's here
> > https://fedorahosted.org/fama/report/6
> >
> >> 2) What specific contributor groups were they apart of?
> >
> > this should be easy to get from FAS by writing a script -  is there a
> > volunteer around ;) ?
> >
> >> 3) Where did they go after they left the ambassador group?
> >
> > You will notice the incursion in Jun 09 this was a big clean up
> > of inactive accounts
> > http://kitall.blogspot.com/2009_07_01_archive.html
> >
> >
> > Hope this helps to clarify a bit
> >
> > cu Joerg
> >
> > --
> > Joerg (kital) Simon
> > jsimon at fedoraproject.org
> > http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/JoergSimon
> > http://kitall.blogspot.com
> > Key Fingerprint:
> > 3691 0989 2DCA 58A2 8D1F 2CAC C823 558E 5B5B 5688
> >
> > --
> > Fedora-marketing-list mailing list
> > Fedora-marketing-list at redhat.com
> > https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-marketing-list
> >
>
> --
> Fedora-marketing-list mailing list
> Fedora-marketing-list at redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-marketing-list
>

-- 
Gregory Zysk

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Gmzysk

Fingerprint: 4643 E1AE 1AAD 85D4 6276
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