[fedora-india] Fedora Freemedia India, A plan.

Siddharth Upmanyu siddharth at techbugs.org
Wed Apr 1 06:13:30 UTC 2009


On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 10:17 PM, Ankur Sinha <sanjay.ankur at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Tue, 2009-03-31 at 22:39 +0530, susmit shannigrahi wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > There are a lot of requests for fedora freemedia.
> > What I did last month for kolkata was I provided a few DVDs to
> > Dipanjan and asked people to collect personally.
> > Of the 19 requests we got, only 5 collected personally.
> > After tomorrow, I am going to flag them invalid. The current system is
> > such that even if they request DVD next month, they will be flagged as
> > duplicate.
> >
> > What we can do is to make it compulsory to collect the DVD personally
> > if there is an ambassador in locality.
> > I guess this way, we may cut down the "I-request-whatever-I-get-free"
> people.
> >
> > Your thoughts?
> >
>
> hi,
>
> The collecting bit is the trouble.
>
> For example, I've had a lot of requests under the local contact scheme,
> even phone calls. People just sort of forget about it once they apply.
> (You receive no blank media etc.)
>
> regards,
>
> Ankur
>
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Susmit,

Although we have our justifications for the way FreeMedia works and not
works.. but during last many months I have got a lot too many unhappy
mails.. people dont understand the Freedom stuff.. they dont care much about
the efforts put in by Fedora community .. for majority of them Ubuntu
packaged media that is shipped always in time is the benchmark.. and we
happen to be not around anywhere in comparrision.

Fedora FreeMedia (India to begin with) needs a professional look and in
enough supply to match the demand.. is when we will see happy users (who
incidently still dont care much about freedom then getting work done.)

Here is what I suggest.. we have a local contact program which is quite good
in decentralizing the effforts but we lack strong efforts (which is
justifiable, everyone cant be expected to put efforts for Fedora while
leaving other important stuff aside).. what we can do is , we can create a
better communication channel (IRC too has failed because
same-time-everyone-is-free does not happen.)

How about mail reminders containing city wise pending requets and sent to
local contacts.. (or a desktop widget displaying this information :-) )

There are two aspects of a not functional FreeMedia India program..
1. one is the funding.. (put  ~50INR/Request X 200Requests/Month =  INR 10K
in one place, figure out a vendor who can do burning and packaging and ship
from one location. Which we dont have)
2. and two is difficulty in decentralizing the efforts.. (people dont like
to buy media and get it burned from LocalContacts after filling the
MediaForm which is not very understandable but true.. and we cant/dont want
to force our contacts to put in money for all the requests because few
locations produce most of requests)

to solve this we need voluneers who are commited to dig out the FreeMedia
program and make it functional..

So guys. this is what i can think of ..lets make a team out of us.. everyone
who is a part of it has to follow certain formal equations like meeting on
time, being reachable, being able to put in efforts when needed (we'll
figure out the money part later) and will be responsible for the larger free
media program.

what do you think?

Siddharth
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