[Ambassadors] Manual for new ambassadors

[sankarshan]

On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 9:44 PM, Leonardo Menezes Vaz
<leonardo.vaz at 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>