[Ambassadors] Proposal: Fedora European Infrastructure

[Chitlesh GOORAH]

On 3/6/07, Kermorvant Armel wrote:
> I agree with you and I discust about this point with Chitlesh 3 weeks ago and we have the
>same point of view.
> But, after a short discussion with himm we share the same point of view about this
> subjet is :

> 1st Step : Creation of a legal entity in your country (Exemple Fedora-FR in France)
> 2nd Step : After the 1st step I OK

I disagreed having Europe moving in that direction.

Hello, though, I don't remember when that discussion took place, I
think I made it clear that :
- the real work should be done at the Fedora Ambassador's project
  i.e in the other terms Fedora Ambassadors/Marketing Mailing Lists
and its meetings
- Fedora-fr is for "donations" and the "shop". However, I'm NOT for
Fedora-fr being independent from Fedora Ambassador Project.

In general, I don't want local communities to be independent of Fedora
Ambassador Project. I understand that language is a problem. But
should we take language as a blocker for working together ?

We have seen in the past:
- FAD (Fedora Ambassador Day)
- FOSDEM2007
where we had ambassadors and fedora contributors from different
countries. Sure we had at some point converged to english as the
language for communication, but at the same time Fedora isn't a
language contest, but about open-source.

Fedora said and will be saying working "the upstream model" is the
where progress will be.
We have to make sure that Fedora Ambassadors does his job!

And at the same time have a look at our Fedora Ambassador Meeting, it's dying !!
Meetings have loss its sense and ambassadors don't take part on the
project but ready to criticized whenever they feel like.

Having legal entity for each country will lead to :
- everyone will concentrate on his/her country only under the name of
Fedora but not for Fedora
- Fedora Marketing and FAMSCo won't know what is happening in your
country hence our infrastructure that we are working on will not be
useful and someone has to :
  - tell Max that we are not ready for the infrastructure.
  - bear all the critics and flame wars that Red Hat is giving up on
Fedora or whatever because local communities are too weak to be
operating on their own.
  - agree that he/she refused the infrastructure that will make
his/her fedora community better that any other linux project has done
or can do. I know many in this list compare fedora projects to
ubuntu's, but won't you like not to say/do anything and everything is
praising fedora ? Now is the time.

The  different Fedora Projects operate independently and
automatically. But unfortunately each project can't listen and satisfy
each contributor. It is the case of the Fedora Ambassadors project
where contributors want to do things, but unfortunately to do so for
this particular project a minimum budget is required.

A Fedora Ambassador is someone who spread the word for Fedora. But
unfortunately that Fedora Ambassador is weak without infrastructure
and budget to make things for Fedora's advantage.

To make that Fedora Ambassadors' life better in terms of
infrastructure and budget, there are different ways to do so:
- creating local communities and legal entities
- sit and cry
- sit and wait
- use some of the infrastructure and budget that Fedora Marketing has.

The last item in our case today is that Max proposed an extra budget
for Europe and the question is how can that budget be shared and used
appropriately among European Ambassadors ?

Eventually, everyone can opt for the _ultimate_ solution[2], i.e "sit and wait".

MirjamWaeckerlin, ThomasCanniot, GeroldKassube and I proposed "Fedora
European Infrastructure" which is a set of guidelines on what kind of
Executive we are looking for.

But this ultimate solution[2] will lead to someone needs to do that
job and that job will be done according to his/her way. Of course one
or two months, some will "sit and cry" because the guidelines :
- aren't in their favour
- give credit to how hard they worked
- ....

I'm quite sad that those who said that the actual Fedora Ambassador
infrastructure sucks and their requests aren't processed or rejected,
that they didn't step in to propose new but concrete ideas.

Or perhaps you think that MirjamWaeckerlin, ThomasCanniot,
GeroldKassube and I have already done everything. Believe me, we
haven't!

Things like:
- how and on what circumstances the Executive will reimburse a fedora ambassador
- can any ambassador be reimbursed ?
- is the Executive the one who will provide tshirts or dvds to other
european ambassadors
- the delay of reimbursed and how
- ....
needs to be discussed and write as guidelines so that in the future,
we know who has what kind of rights.

Before we all get confused in unrealistic ideas/suggestions for the
future of the "Fedora European Infrastructure", take a short break and
look at the picture from an objective point of view.

Hai it's is all about money !
- If one country has a way to make money ("see RH legal) for
sponsoring their Fedora events, so perhaps don't need that "Fedora
European Infrastructure" we are building.
- it is not only about spending money, but at the same time, try to
bring back some(at least small) amount of money back either from
selling dvds/tshirts as donations at the booth. (I was waiting for
someone to say such thing, but anyway)

JoergSimon and I collected 214€ from Chemnitz Linuxtag and right now,
he kept the money. But if we had already "Fedora European
Infrastructure" we could add it to the Fedora European budget.

This means that if someone is coming from Paris or Copenhague and that
his/her local community doesn't have enough money perhaps that money
of "Fedora European Infrastructure" can be used to pay his/her voyage.

But if everyone sticks to his/her country(local community), and prays
only that local community, then contributors from one european country
will not help fedora contributors of another countries. I'm sorry
then, we are not Fedora.

We will not be that Fedora which cares for:
- upstream
- centralized repository
- its contributors

The Fedora Project is a set of projects where most of the time, in each project
- there is a steering committee and the contributors
- some contributors [1] contributes on other projects.

The steering committee does the communication between the different
projects (some other contributors[1] help also) to make sure that the
final output is professional and of quality.

Right now, we can conclude from a country X the fedora project can
have many contributors on different projects.
E.g. country X may have :
- n contributors on documentation project,
- m contributors on artwork project,
- n+P contributors on the ambassadors project

Perhaps if our mechanisms is being successful "Fedora European
Infrastructure" could pay other fedora contributors(other than
ambassadors) to come and attend a fudcon for example.

I'll stop writing I've a lot to say and will never end.

Here is fedora
- professional contributors
- good looking personals at the booth
- personals at the booth have materials for the events
- professional projects and professional distributions
- keep on being innovative
- has man power to do the job
- community can talk and express

Here are other distributions:
- lack of man power
- boss kills good project
- have only a distribution
- geeks at the booth
- waste events behind computer screens instead of spreading the word.

I think you don't want fedora to be in that "other distributions"
category. I don't. Fedora is special let's keep on making it special
is my wish.

FrancescoUgolini expressed correctly we have to remember we are a Global
Community, that have to work together to solve its problem.

regards,
Chitlesh
-- 
http://clunixchit.blogspot.com