On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 9:44 PM, Leonardo Menezes Vaz
<leonardo.vaz(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> Great Idea Leo!
>
> I think we have to do it urgently!
I'll be starting it as soon as I can.
Any idea/suggestion for name at the wiki?
> The mentoring program and direct interviews proposed by us at FAMSCO
> last year improved the Ambassadors Program but the level of direct
> contributions to Fedora (mainly in Latam) are very low.
IMHO we need try to understand the reasons for this kind of behavior
and define strategies to change it.
Indeed. But you do need to realize, contributions do not come out of
the woodwork, a significant bit of heavy-lifting (sometimes
behind-the-scenes too) is involved. I am sure that with a proper plan,
stunning outcome can happen.
I agree with Padula. Many people here think that being an Ambassador
means just giving talks once while and/or redistributing free media
sponsored by the project. We know that's a great effort, but doing
just it they'll not bring valuable things to the project as people in
other parts of the world do.
If you meant the Ambassador community in general when you wrote
'here', you'd be surprised. It has been a general trend in Fedora that
the initial group of Ambassadors have always been those who "get it"
or, have been doing things the FOSS way for a longer period of time.
With newer Ambassadors one has to slowly ease them into the project
and, let them figure out a place to get involved. Having direct
involvement in a project allows them to tell their own stories when
they are presenting. Audiences love personal experiences - it makes a
boring speech real.
To build up good Ambassadors one has to work with all contributors to
Fedora within a region. Pooling in experiences help a lot.
> Guillermo Gomes from Venezuela, Juan M.(Mexico), Matias
> Maceira(Argentina) and many guys from Brazil are creating a tech group
> in Latam (RPMDEV) to create documentation and learn/teach about
> Packaging. The idea is to create a strong packaging group in Latam. By
> now we have ~10 packagers from Brazil and that number are very small
> compared with the number of ambassadors in Latam.
The above is a nice start. Having such focus groups around other parts
of the Project like Websites, Infrastructure, Artwork would go a long
way in letting potential contributors feel that "yes ! I too can do
something". Creating videos from the sessions would help make things
easy too. However, the trick is to push the contributors upstream into
Fedora as a whole. It is always a good thing to start small and local
with mentors-at-hand, but once there is a level of confidence, going
on to the big stage helps things a lot.
--
sankarshan mukhopadhyay
<
http://sankarshan.randomink.org/blog>