[Ambassadors] Poll: Do you agree to merge Marketing List with Ambassador List ?

[Patrick W. Barnes]

On Thursday 15 February 2007, Francesco Ugolini wrote:
>
> 1) Do you agree to merge Fedora Marketing List with Fedora Ambassadors
> List?

-1

I can't emphasize my objections enough.  These are two, separate lists with 
two, separate purposes.  There are reasons that each was created, and those 
reasons are still valid today.  The Ambassadors program is not the Marketing 
program.

I've heard it argued that Fedora is not something to be marketed at all.  It 
is true that Fedora is not a packaged, commercial product, but it is an idea, 
and ideas can be marketed every bit as well.  Even things that are free can 
pursue market share.  If we want Fedora to be put into the hands of people 
that can enjoy its benefits, then we have to make sure that they know about 
it.  That's marketing.

So, isn't that what Ambassadors do?  No.  The Ambassadors are a grass-roots 
effort to deliver Fedora, not market it.  They also serve as a bridge between 
the Fedora Project and the rest of the world.  They serve as a voice and a 
listener for each side, enabling interaction and communication at a level 
unprecedented in open source projects.

Yes, the Marketing and Ambassadors projects are related.  Their work can be 
tied closely together, but they are not the same and should not try to become 
the same.  Marketing needs only to be a low-bandwidth channel, which may give 
the appearance of death or failure, but is actually all the more reason to 
keep it as a separate project.  I'm not saying that Marketing doesn't suffer 
from the same inactivity that plagues many of the other Fedora projects, but 
it still serves a useful purpose.

For more on this, see Karsten's message to the Marketing list.

>
> 2) FOR AMBASSADORS LIST MEMBERS ONLY: Do you want that the Ambassadors
> List, if it will be not merged with Marketing List, will be open to all?
>

-1

My objections to this are much smaller, but I still don't think this list 
should be cracked wide open.  It was created as a closed list to keep the 
signal-to-noise ratio from getting out of hand and to appropriately limit 
this list to serve its purpose.  We need to keep control of this list or it 
will very quickly fall to become useless and may take the entire Ambassadors 
project with it.  I'd be willing to listen to arguments over an open archive, 
but membership should remain controlled.

Giving up on the tennets that created the Ambassadors project will only assure 
its eventual failure.  Don't let that happen.

-- 
Patrick "The N-Man" Barnes
nman64 at n-man.com

http://n-man.com/

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