On Sunday 28 May 2006 04:03, Rahul Sundaram <sundaram@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Sat, 2006-05-27 at 20:10 -0700, Karsten Wade wrote: > > From the recent board minutes: > > > > "How do we get more representation from India, South America, Middle > > East? Fedora had an excellent presence at the recent Brazilian show. > > Chris Blizzard was there. Why not think about a FUDCon in that area? In > > comparison, we don't have a community in India at the same level yet. > > Why not? Matthew challenges us to improve in these areas." > > > > Interesting observation, I had a different impression but wasn't in > > either location. How was FUDCon Delhi? I've heard that many FLOSS > > folks in India are into different projects than just distros (GNOME, for > > example), and there are many Debian/Ubuntu users. Is Fedora still a > > whisper there? > > Fedora is pretty popular and got the Linux For You magazine and > LinuxAsia best distribution awards based on user votes. From the LUG > discussions throughout India I see Fedora mentioned pretty often though > not always in a positive light. > Many of the named regions actually have large Linux followings. Linux interest in India, Brazil, Iran and many other nations is growing rapidly. Of course, there's quite a bit of room to foster and even cater to those communities. Really, we're already doing the right thing. By working to shed some of the negative ideas surrounding Fedora and to develop an internationally-friendly distribution, we're already doing the most valuable things we can. > > I'm sure the folks in Brazil have considered a FUDCon, definitely a good > > idea. > > > > What I'm curious about is: > > > > * How do we measure participation in a country/culture? > > Conversations - LUGs, magazine surveys, conference talks, community > (users and developers) presence. When our infrastructure allows us to collect more metrics, that might also give us some valuable information. Measuring participation among our project contributors can be a strong hint about the developer potential. > > > * How much responsibility do we have to intentionally enter new areas v. > > letting the interest grow from within that area itself? > > We can took at tackling specific problems on occasions. Different > regions have somewhat localized requirements at times. For example a > specific piece of obsolete Ethernet or ISDN card might be extremely > popular in Brazil or German. This is one of the key areas the regional > communities can contribute towards. Needs can vary beyond our imaginations. Listening and gathering feedback through our contributors and at conferences can shed some light on areas we can work on. For the most part, we'll find contributors in these regions that will be ready to work on their region's unique needs. > > > * How do we identify what are areas of the world to focus on? > > Whatever the community is willing to work on will get fixed. If we are > focusing on the developers, there is a lot of momentum in the developing > nations that we need to exploit. Just like the contributors we already have, new contributors will step forward from a region when that region has needs. There is a lot of developer potential in India and Brazil that we should certainly tap into. > > > * What are we doing to prepare for e.g. more bugzilla reports in > > Simplified Chinese than English? > > Communication to developers in bugzilla needs to be in English as a > matter of necessity and not because bugzilla has poor localization but > realistically English is a requirement if you need to take part in > direct conversations with the developers. I don't think maintaining most communications in English will really be a problem, but I think we can count on our community to provide middle-men when the language barrier becomes a problem. > > Fedora for low resource systems, local Indian mirrors, a live CD and a > single CD version was the most popular requests in FUDCon Delhi 2006. > Popular requests arent always the right ones for Fedora but those are > data points to consider. > Luckily, these are all areas we're working on. In addition to the normal work of our contributors, programs like the OLPC initiative will help to provide slimmed-down technologies that we can use for lightweight or embedded systems. The local mirrors are something that we generally count on volunteers for. Kadischi continues to progress, and it's only a matter of time before an official live CD becomes available. The continued revisions to Anaconda and the further progress in organizing the installation CDs will hopefully allow for more practical single-CD installations. The community continues to drive Fedora's progress in the right direction. -- Patrick "The N-Man" Barnes nman64@xxxxxxxxx http://www.n-man.com/ LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/nman64 Have I been helpful? Rate my assistance! http://rate.affero.net/nman64/ --
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