[fedora-india] [Fedora- India] : Fedora India meet this sunday 1800 hrs?

sankarshan foss.mailinglists at gmail.com
Mon Jul 13 00:07:52 UTC 2009


On Sun, Jul 12, 2009 at 10:04 PM, susmit
shannigrahi<thinklinux.ssh at gmail.com> wrote:

> Also, for freemedia, one can not charge money.
> He can ask the person if he is ok with it and do it separately.
> But freemedia needs more extensive thinking.

To elaborate on this, the Freemedia program (as it is now) is
completely dependent on the volunteering capacities of those who have
raised their hands for it. Based on the volume of requests and, the
number of volunteers, it becomes fairly hard sooner or later to meet
all the requests. What happens then is that we fail our potential
users - we provide them a way to request a media and yet, we do not
actually end up sending them one.

The alternative model (as PLUG is an example) is a not-free-of-cost
media program. Here, anyone could put up their names as a provider of
media _with_cost_attached_. Whether this cost includes only media
charges plus postage or, whether it also includes a small margin is
left to the volunteer. This ensures that we have two things going into
this - [1] there is accountability built-in (if someone charges for
goods, they'd need to deliver [2] the requests which did not receive a
media now have an option of getting the media via payment.

I took the example of PLUG (PuneLUG) because they seem to be servicing
such requests successfully and, this may just be a way for LUGs (as
well as individuals) to have a way to outreach to a larger community
without having to pay out of their own pocket.

I am more interested to ensure that we are in a position to provide
media than spend time trying to figure out how best to revive
Freemedia.

~sankarshan


-- 
http://www.gutenberg.net - Fine literature digitally re-published
http://www.plos.org - Public Library of Science
http://www.creativecommons.org - Flexible copyright for creative work




More information about the Fedora-india mailing list