[Ambassadors] Need some help on "[Fedora-freemedia-list] What Now James?"

[inode0]

On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 5:19 PM, Frank Murphy (Frankly3D)
<frankly3d at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 05/05/09 21:26, inode0 wrote:
>> Frankly I think we did a very poor job of being ambassadors in this
>> case, but that might largely be the result of our not knowing what our
>> boundaries are in cases like this.
>
> I would disagree here, most of us know,
> that  when we joined the Fedoraproject,
> it was under certain conditons including:
> legal stuff.
>
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Distribution/Download/ExportRegulations
>
> which as Ambassadors, we also have to comply with,
>
> But the unfortunate thing, from a free-media pov they can cause
> personal dilemmas.
>
> Putting my heart on my shirt,
> I personally don't agree with denying legitimate software to anyone.
> Notwithstanding that, as an individaul,
> I cannot put my ideal world, over the harsh reality.
>
> The best they can be done as an Ambassador,
> is to hope for change in the legal\political arena.

I think we can do better than that. We had a fellow ambassador throw
up his hands in frustration and say "I've had enough, I quit." I would
like to learn from this experience so that if and when it happens
again we can be better prepared to work with our fellow contributor to
have it not result in the level of frustration that it did this time.
We clearly have constraints, but we also clearly do not fully
understand the nature and extent of those constraints which makes our
job impossible in a situation such as this.

>From my perspective what happened was we left this ambassador to do
what he wanted which is normally ok. Every time he tried to do
something someone popped up and said to him, "no, you can't do that."
Wouldn't it be better if we knew the scope of the limitations we work
under and could help the ambassador understand those limitations and
find things he *can* do instead?

I intended to discuss this with the board at its public meeting today.
That opportunity was lost but perhaps it can be regained on a mailing
list.

John