"Red Hat Releases Fedora 18 Beta"

Sarah White graphitefriction at gmail.com
Thu Nov 29 08:51:55 UTC 2012


On Wed, Nov 28, 2012 at 3:24 PM, Paul W. Frields <stickster at gmail.com>wrote:


> I wonder if the tenor of this
> conversation at numerous points would have been inhospitable to a
> newcomer.


IMO, yes. I've found parts of this thread to be discouraging toward
contributing to the Fedora project and community. If I were new to the
community, I'd now be hesitant to write any marketing materials,
documentation, wikipages, etc. because if I make a mistake - technical,
grammatical, or historical - I'm going to be personally disparaged in
public and my apologies ignored. Putting such pressure on community members
to be perfectly right all the time is going to bottleneck participation and
suck the enthusiasm out of contributors.

I joined this community because I met passionate and compassionate Fedora
contributors at a FUDCon who didn't discount my ideas even though I don't
have a degree in computer science and can't remember more than two vi
commands at a time. Since then numerous Fedora community members have
patiently nudged me through the Ambassador process (after I made tons of
mistakes trying to contact them). I've mucked up expense tickets - the FPL
and others, once again, patiently helped me sort those out. When manning
the Fedora booth at events I've been unable to answer tons of questions (is
Ubuntu faster than Fedora? Is version x of y in F17? How is a release name
voted on? What packages does Fedora contain relating to cloud services? Why
does maven make me want to start shooting bees?) but fellow community
members have happily stepped in to educate me. No one has ever told me that
I'm not a 'real' community member because I don't know about every feature
in Fedora, how the community operates, or the milestones in the project's
long history.

Please, please don't judge another community member's 'realness' or dismiss
their value to the project because you've never personally interacted with
them or because they make a mistake.

I hope this community can continue to be the welcoming, patient, and fun
learning environment that I know it as.

As for the issues, questions, and possible solutions regarding marketing
the Fedora OS that have been brought up in this thread - AWESOME! I've
compiled them in a list for the marketing meeting (every Thursday at 3pm
EST (8pm UTC) in the #fedora-meeting channel). List:
http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/marketing/2012-November/014678.html

If you have any additional ideas, questions or concerns, please attach them
to the agenda and/or come to the meeting. You don't need any experience in
marketing or PR to participate, so please don't hesitate to join us!

Cheers,
Sarah
graphite6

>
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