Summary of previous discussions around FOSCo

[Ankur Sinha]

On Tue, 2015-03-17 at 08:15 +0700, Truong Anh. Tuan wrote:
> Thanks Christoph for summarizing all up.

Hi everyone, 

I posted this on the trac ticket
(https://fedorahosted.org/famsco/ticket/373#comment:7) ,but since the
discussion seems to have moved here, I'm posting here too:

So, the problem, as Matthew states in the ticket description is:

"Meanwhile, the project really lacks coordination between various areas
of outreach — Ambassadors, Marketing, Design Team (which is responsible
for branding), and support efforts like Ask Fedora and even
Documentation and Web. This may also include areas of the new
Fedora.next Working Groups which touch on these areas — branding,
marketing, conference attendance in support of a particular product, and
etc. "

I'm slightly at a loss to see how a new body solves this issue - I've
seen the activity on the various lists and tracs and it's not really
clear to me that the goal of FOSCo is to improve the communication
between teams.

For example, I just saw a ticket on the fosco trac that said "Arrange
University install-fests" and another that said "Find pilot university
for Fedora lab deployment" and another that said "FOSS Alternatives
Resource Page". These really appear to be just normal ambassador team
tasks, which they've been doing for quite a long time.

I mean, if you read the problem statement, a simple solution could be:

- regular multi team meets - people from the various teams sit in, say
what's happening, what team A needs from team B, what team C needs from
team A and B and so on?
- if necessary, representatives can be appointed in the various teams,
or we can take turns and so on (this part can be handled by the teams
themselves) 

This still doesn't quite feel like it needs an official new body, with
elections and so on. Each team has active contributors - ambassadors,
which is the largest has famsco + regional leads to spread the word and
co-ordinate them - other teams are much smaller and don't need this
governance model - the simplest solution seems to be to get them to
speak to each other and keep up with each others activities - and this
can be done without major restructuring of
famsco/fosco/ambassadors/other teams.

Also, in the name FOSCo, the word "Outreach" could possibly be
misconstrued as increasing contributors/participation and so on (on the
lines of the gnome outreach programme - ​https://www.gnome.org//opw/).
Is *this* the function of FOSCo? It would explain why the fosco trac has
tickets for install fests and so on it. But, this is completely
different from increasing communication between teams (internal
community outreach vs external outreach?). Even the e-mail that was sent
out with the proposal said:

"The idea is to transform FAmSCo into Fedora Outreach Steering
Committee, representing and coordinating Ambassadors, Marketing, Design
Team (which is responsible for branding), and support efforts like Ask
Fedora and even Documentation and Web. It would also include areas of
the new Fedora.next Working Groups which touch on these areas —
branding, marketing, conference attendance in support of a particular
product, and etc. (Not to _rule_ them, but to coordinate and enable.)"

which doesn't say anything about the gnome style outreach.

So, I guess what I'm wondering is:

-  what is the purpose of FOSCo
-  if it is indeed to increase communication/co-ordination between teams
within the community, do we really need another body?
-  else, if the purpose of FOSCo isn't yet completely clear, we probably
need to take a step back and figure it out before we start working on
things? 

What do you think?

-- 
Thanks,
Regards,
Ankur Sinha "FranciscoD"

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Ankursinha
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