[fab] global growth, balance

[Rahul Sundaram]

On Sat, 2006-05-27 at 20:10 -0700, Karsten Wade wrote:
> From the recent board minutes:
> 
> "How do we get more representation from India, South America, Middle
> East? Fedora had an excellent presence at the recent Brazilian show.
> Chris Blizzard was there. Why not think about a FUDCon in that area? In
> comparison, we don't have a community in India at the same level yet.
> Why not? Matthew challenges us to improve in these areas."
> 
> Interesting observation, I had a different impression but wasn't in
> either location.  How was FUDCon Delhi?  I've heard that many FLOSS
> folks in India are into different projects than just distros (GNOME, for
> example), and there are many Debian/Ubuntu users.  Is Fedora still a
> whisper there?

Fedora is pretty popular and got the Linux For You magazine and
LinuxAsia best distribution awards based on user votes. From the LUG
discussions throughout India I see Fedora mentioned pretty often though
not always in a positive light. 

> 
> I'm sure the folks in Brazil have considered a FUDCon, definitely a good
> idea.
> 
> What I'm curious about is:
> 
> * How do we measure participation in a country/culture?
> 

Conversations - LUGs, magazine surveys, conference talks, community
(users and developers) presence. 

> * How much responsibility do we have to intentionally enter new areas v.
> letting the interest grow from within that area itself?

We can took at tackling specific problems on occasions. Different
regions have somewhat localized requirements at times. For example a
specific piece of obsolete Ethernet or ISDN card might be extremely
popular in Brazil or German. This is one of the key areas the regional
communities can contribute towards. 

> 
> * How do we identify what are areas of the world to focus on?

Whatever the community is willing to work on will get fixed. If we are
focusing on the developers, there is a lot of momentum in the developing
nations that we need to exploit. 

> 
> * What are we doing to prepare for e.g. more bugzilla reports in
> Simplified Chinese than English? 
> 

Communication to developers in bugzilla needs to be in English as a
matter of necessity and not because bugzilla has poor localization but
realistically English is a requirement if you need to take part in
direct conversations with the developers. 

> Mighty, might stuff.
> 
> - Karsten

Fedora for low resource systems, local Indian mirrors, a live CD and a
single CD version was the most popular requests in FUDCon Delhi 2006.
Popular requests arent always the right ones for Fedora but those are
data points to consider. 

Rahul