What happened in June of 2009 within the Fedora Project?

[Larry Cafiero]

Hey, all --

I'm not sure I'm following this proposal correctly, so I may need a little
help. So maybe a little clarification might help, please.

On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 5:22 AM, Gregory Zysk <gz.int.project at gmail.com>wrote:

> Dear Marketing,
>
> One of the first things I see in order to help in marketing is the
> establishment of measurement systems. Measurement systems allow us
> internally to gauge how we are doing, and what needs to be improved. This is
> true also for the those viewing the community from an external standpoint.
> These measurements will provide us with more legitimacy and provide a
> platform where we are transparent about our results and that our results are
> measurable (and not some abstract way that no one can understand). I can
> see https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing_research that we have begun
> to start an formulate research that will be used to produce these
> statistics, but fail to see any methodologies that are used to base these
> questionnaires off of.
>

OK, that's fine. I'm with you so far, until we get to here:

One thing I would like to start with to help all of you form a marketing
> mindset is to ask the question of "What happened in June of 2009 within the
> Fedora Project?
>
> As you can see: https://fedorahosted.org/fama/wiki/AmbassadorMetrics views
> that we have had a steady increase since measurement began in January of
> 2006. That is until June of 2009.
>
> Once we can answer this question, we can begin to answer these
> sub-questions:
>
> 1) Who were these ambassadors?
> 2) What specific contributor groups were they apart of?
> 3) Where did they go after they left the ambassador group?
>

Joerg can probably help out here -- please do, Joerg -- but wasn't June 2009
when we implemented the mentor program for Ambassadors? Before this program,
basically, the only requirement you needed to be a Fedora Ambassador was
that you had an e-mail address, a regular pulse and steady breathing
(although the breathing part didn't have to be steady, as long as you were
breathing). Now there's a more detailed process to follow, which a.) scares
off those who are not committed to Fedora and only want "free stuff," and
b.) allows us a to cultivate a better quality of Ambassador.

As Joerg may have mentioned also, I believe around this time the Ambassadors
list was purged of non-participants. Messages were sent out and those who
did not respond (or responded that they were no longer interested) were
taken off.

That could explain largely why numbers "dropped," providing a false negative
when you look at the numbers without applying the changes.

I could be wrong about the timing of the mentor project's initiation, but I
would bet that's why numbers dropped.

Please feels free to give me your comments and suggestions regarding this
> issue, so we can start to problem solve some issues to help us provide
> better and more improved results, as we do technically with every release.


Unfortunately, I don't have as much time to participate in the marketing
group as I would like, but I'd be more interested in analyzing external
developments, like why did record numbers of people download Fedora 11 and
what are their experiences (good/bad/indifferent) and build a marketing
scenario around that, rather than use the time and effort to look internally
at how many people participate in Fedora and why.

Maybe I misunderstand your proposal, Gregory, but you asked for comments, so
here are mine.

Larry Cafiero
Regional Ambassador, U.S. West Coast states
Fedora Project
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