[Ambassadors] fedora-fr meeting report

[Francesco Ugolini]

On Fri, 15 Aug 2008, Max Spevack wrote:

> I spent a great day on Saturday August 2nd with a large number of our French 
> contributors, ambassadors, and community leaders.  We had a 12-person 
> meeting/discussion for about 5 hours and then met up with another 8 folks for 
> dinner.
>
> In no particular order, here are my notes:
>
> * Fedora-fr was created to be a central gathering point for French-speaking 
> Fedora users and contributors worldwide, with a non-profit entity (formed in 
> January 2007) backing it up.  It was previously "Fedora France" but changed 
> its name to Fedora-fr to indicate that it is meant to support the entire 
> French-speaking world.  This immediately brought to mind the work that 
> Rodrigo Padula (based in Brazil) is doing to support Fedora in Portugal.  I 
> think it is *critical* that the upstream Fedora Project always work to 
> empower local communities that are solving their own problems, so I fully 
> support all the work Fedora-fr is doing.
>
> * The Fedora-fr website contains forums (15,000 registered users), a 
> Mediawiki instance with almost 300 pages of documentation (in which French is 
> the canonical language), and a French-only planet (which has a fair amount of 
> cross-pollenation with Planet Fedora).  I think it would be interesting to 
> have some of the Fedora Docs Project guys take a look at what the French team 
> has built up, and see if there are any quick wins that we can achieve in a 
> information/toolchain sharing point of view.
>
> * Fedora-fr currently gets funding from their online store, memberships (20 
> EUR/year or 10 EUR for students), and occasional physical sale of swag.  Also 
> from the larger Community Architecture & FAMSCo budget.
>
> * Pierre-Yves Chibon (pingou) and Remi Collet both asked me about the status 
> of the MyFedora project, and I realized that I personally haven't kept up on 
> what's going on with that idea.  Last I heard, J5 was leading it up, but I'm 
> not sure of the current status.  However, there are at least two guys in 
> France who would like to see it become a reality.
>
> * We spoke about the relationships between the current non-profit 
> organizations that exist in support of Fedora, and also about what might 
> happen with any future organizations that are started up.  As I told the 
> French folks, in my opinion the ability to communicate with people in their 
> native language is the most important aspect of forming a local community. 
> To that extent, I think the Fedora-fr organization should clearly be the 
> leader in helping to organize local Fedora community activities anywhere in 
> the world where French is the primary language.
>
> * This led to a brief discussion about some of the Ambassadors that we are 
> trying to support in Tunisia, as well as the opportunity (if we can find the 
> budget) to fund the creation of a Fedora mirror in Africa, which currently 
> doesn't have any mirrors at all (http://fedoraproject.org/maps/mirrors/).
>
> * One of the biggest things that I heard, and that Yaakov Nemoy also heard 
> when he attended the Fedora installfest in Paris, was that our Fedora France 
> team would like a bit of help in establishing stronger relations with the Red 
> Hat employees who are in France (mostly training, sales, consultants, and 
> field marketing folks).  This would start in a very simple fashion -- just 
> having some better communiation in both directions of the Fedora/Red Hat 
> event schedules, and getting some Red Hat people to come to a Fedora event 
> and meet some of the local contributors and users.  Definitely something I 
> will follow up on.
>
> * From an events point of view in France, the biggest things are Linux 
> Solutions in Paris (the largest show in France), and FOSDEM.  Also regular 
> install-fests, meetups.  I promised to try to help with a good Red Hat/Fedora 
> interaction in planning the next Linux Solutions.
>
> * Dinner was fantastic as well, and I want to thank the entire Fedora France 
> team for giving their Saturday to these meetings, and for all of the 
> contributions and work that they do for Fedora.  Some folks I had met before, 
> others I met for the first time.  Everyone is really nice, really smart, and 
> really devoted to free software and Fedora.  It was a great day.
>
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>

Thank you for this report and my gretings with France community.

Regards

Francesco Ugolini