What happened in June of 2009 within the Fedora Project?

[Robyn Bergeron]

On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 6:20 AM, Joerg Simon <jsimon at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> Hi Gregory,
>
> if a FOSS community starts to deal to much with itself it could be, that focus
> gets lost and is not healthy.
> I think there is a risk to fail if one is trying to succesfully transport
> business measurement techniques one to one from business world into a FOSS
> Project. Measurement is about control and business controlls will not work
> here. But maybe we can adopt some of it! Please, this is not meant as a
> discouragement, it is a good idea to learn how things work in FOSS first - i
> know you are very eager to start and that is the reason i try provide you an
> answer for your questions - maybe we can achieve something great by combine
> things from both world.

I would agree that there is definitely not a 1:1 from FOSS to the
business world. I used to work for a Very Big Processor company, where
most things came out of a marketing plan, and I would be willing to be
a very large sum of money (or at least, a coffee for someone!) that if
employees came to work and started doing something that was not on the
plan, upper management would have had numerous seizures.  And god
forbid if people who didn't even work there started showing up and
doing things.  I'd also bet (now i'm up to two coffees!) that if Linus
had had a marketing team defining a list of project requirements, we
would all be typing our emails on a different type of machine right
now.

That is not to say that Marketing, specifically the strategic
marketing end of things, doesn't have a role in Fedora or Linux.  FOSS
simply has a different way of going about things; users see gaps, or
room for improvements, and they come and fix it, and become
participants in the overall community.  Many of these community
members are doing this on their own time, not as part of their jobs;
if they wanted someone to dictate to them what they should be working
on, they would probably just go and work longer hours at their jobs.

Strategic marketing, in my opinion, should be a guiding light for the
engineers.  Imagine if a group of people got together and decided to
build a road, so they just do it (I'll just ignore the part about how
the government is totally going to come and slap them around for not
having permits and whatnot).  These road engineers, who are busting
their butts doing an awesome job for the greater good, don't want
people nitpicking them to death on what they aren't doing; they might,
however, appreciate information like, "Oh hey, you guys are aware that
6 miles up the road you haven't built yet is a huge chasm - you might
want to start thinking about how to build a bridge!" or "Hey guys...we
just talked to the people in the city, and it looks like you might
need an additional lane for all the traffic you're going to be
getting."  And when the road is done, it never hurts to let them know
that - hey! - 95% of the community thinks that your road is freakin
awesome.

Basically, doing end-user research accomplishes a few things - it lets
engineering know what is going right, and what is not going so right,
and maybe what can be done to fix it.  There are also tons of untapped
potential community members out there; if we present them with a list
of ways to participate, rather than expecting them to find a niche on
their own, we can get more participants.

I'm pretty sure that was fairly incoherent.  I'll be going to find
some caffeine now. :)

-robyn

>
>
> On Wednesday 14 October 2009 14:22:11 Gregory Zysk wrote:
>> 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.
>
> Just for notice - Fedora is far more than the Ambassadors Group which is only
> a (large) sub-project
>
>> Once we can answer this question, we can begin to answer these
>> sub-questions:
>> 1) Who were these ambassadors?
>
> In the past the Ambassador Group was often used by new Contributors as an
> entry level Group - which is what the Ambassador Group is definitely not -
> because you have not only to present Fedora as an OS - also the Project itself
> and therefore it is imperative to know the project better than anybody else.
> This is the reason why we have established a strong mentoring process and have
> a new membership process.
>
> You can see the result, who they are where they are from ...
> for the last month's here
> https://fedorahosted.org/fama/report/6
>
>> 2) What specific contributor groups were they apart of?
>
> this should be easy to get from FAS by writing a script -  is there a
> volunteer around ;) ?
>
>> 3) Where did they go after they left the ambassador group?
>
> You will notice the incursion in Jun 09 this was a big clean up
> of inactive accounts
> http://kitall.blogspot.com/2009_07_01_archive.html
>
>
> Hope this helps to clarify a bit
>
> cu Joerg
>
> --
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> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/JoergSimon
> http://kitall.blogspot.com
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