[Fedora-India] Queries regarding the Free media project in India

[Ankur Sinha]

On Wed, 2009-07-08 at 09:48 +0530, sankarshan wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 9:36 AM, Rangeen Basu<sherry151 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > Very true. Local contacts can serve requests which originate from
> > within a rang of a few kilometres. Anything beyond that boils down to
> > the same postage issue. Even the next city is out of reach for local
> > contacts. People are not willing to travel and collect the media
> > themselves. It is much easier for them to obtain a pirated Windows CD.
> 
> I tend to think that I have had enough talk about "Windows CD"
> (pirated is a singularly unfit term to use for software) or, "other
> Linux distributions". From what I recall, the LocalContacts was an
> experiment to ensure the following:
> 
> [1] local outreach happens
> [2] a locally available support system is incubated
> 
> I am yet to see a positive outcome of either goals. Which is why I had
> the query about whether it is possible for the local contact to get a
> geographic profile of requests.
> 
> If we do not have enough local contacts to be present across every
> city we are receiving requests from, our question should be "why not"

This is because everyone that requests a media does not turn into a
local contact. The media is not following the "receiver becomes donor"
scheme that we want it to. 

> and, we should start thinking about what can be done. If we have
> existing LocalContacts not providing media at-cost, our questions
> should be "why can't they" and, we should start a conversation about
> how they could be doing this.

Local contacts are usually students who have a fixed pocket money. You
can do the math :)

> 
> > One alternative is to use VPP [1] .
> 
> As much as I like everyone to receive a media. I guess that just bulk
> producing media to continue shipments is not going to be a good thing.
> There should be ways and means to outreach. For example, there are
> UserGroups a plenty - can we figure out a way to tie into them as well
> as have them accountable for shipping the media. I know PuneLUG does
> an awesomely good job of doing so, how about other UGs ? The UGs at
> institutes for example - does their charter allow them to ship media
> at-cost ?
> 
> 

As Rangeen mentions in his reply, UGs are merely students. Again , same
equation. Another variable that messes this up is that Fedora isn't the
only distribution around. Since they are Linux UGs and not Fedora UGs,
getting people to distribute fedora dvds is difficult. They all support
their different distributions and fundamentally want the same thing we
do, for them. There's a hefty discussion as to which distro we are going
to use in the install fest. Its not always Fedora. 

A query: Are all the local contacts members of the free media list,
rather, do they all check to see if there are requests that they can
service or is this done by somebody (who assigns such media requests to
local contacts)??

-- 
regards,

Ankur