[fedora-india] FOSS.IN 2009 retrospective

[Aanjhan R]

On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 5:03 PM, susmit shannigrahi
<thinklinux.ssh at gmail.com> wrote:
> The problem was we didn't get new faces who were interested to get
> started. Otherwise, it went well. My observation is that big events
> are fine for meeting old friends and get ongoing works done. But these
> are not very suitable for getting new contributors q(plenty of choices
> for them?) or starting a new work.

I shall disagree here. May be you will get a hall filled with students
in a not so *large* conference. But what is the turnover number at
such places? Consider the number of Fedora Activity days / Fedora
awareness campaigns having been conducted all over India and the
number of *active* Fedora contributors we have. Turnover is bad in
terms of numbers for sure otherwise this list would have been already
hitting 1000's

At conferences such as FOSS.IN you have a selective set of people
coming in. The majority (say even *vast* majority) have a specific
target when they come in, and these are folks who have not been forced
to sit in any talks. They came in voluntarily. So I would expect the
turnover to be much higher which is atleast true wrt RTEMS this year
and KDE over the past few years.

KDE - Shanthanu tushar who lead the PoTD this time attended FOSS.IN
2008 first time. So did so many folks who are now active KDE
contributors. I am sure Pradeepto will agree with me that FOSS.IN has
produced more KDE contributors than any other random talks he has
given all over India.

RTEMS - I already have 2 new contributors and several requests are
coming through email. Definitely in teh past of all teh lecturing I
have done, people used to be enthusiastic but very few held on and
actually contributed. But getting 2 new contributors in just 5 days
who actually contributed patches is a good accomplishment.

So there is something else that has gone wrong. We need to dig deeper.
And oh, new work has always been started at large conferences. At
FOSSDEM I kicked off some work, at FOSS.IN 2009 I started playing
around with Adruino. So again I disagree :)

What needs to be looked into is, given plenty of choices why did
people not chose Fedora PoTD or becoming a Fedora Contributor? Where
did the mistake happen?

Still open...

Regards,
Aanjhan