tl;dr: FUDCons should not exist, they are segregating. Take ppl to Flock with the budget instead. At first, I joined Fedora because I wanted to maintain a few packages that were important to some Brazilian government projects. Later I got to meet the Fedora LATAM community. Long story short, I understood that, if I was part of the LATAM community, I would actually be able to understand and help it. When I decided to join the community, I was told that there were no active mentors in Brazil, but since I was already an active contributor, it would be ok. I was then accepted as a Fedora ambassador without reading a single wiki page (or at least, nobody asked me if I did) and without even ever knowing who my mentor was (please, see [1]). A few weeks after that I was chairing LATAM ambassadors meetings. The only reason that happened was because I read supybot's manual, so whenever the chair wouldn't show up, I would start the meeting myself. Long story short: I lead (or led) some of the LATAM meetings. We barely use our budget, as you can find out in our balance, which is not open. The complains here are about the delay on reimbursements, which are caused for lack of training on how to fill tickets, which is understandable, since some ambassadors (like me) do not have mentors. Remember that being a mentor here is pretty much like being a king: the last mentor must make you the next mentor for that country ( that's how it works in LATAM). Sometimes they stop contributing and do not assign new mentors. In my country, the newest ambassador is a Red Hat employee who nobody ever heard about: go figure. As bex said (and maybe was too kind about it), FUDCon is a GREAT event, it DOES bring LATAM community together, but there are no contributions coming out of it. It is pretty much an even to talk about Fedora or other technologies to users OR to students (windows users). OK. These are developing countries and we want to take Fedora there to get a bigger user base and bring new contributors on board. The problem is that, in the end, FUDCon IS a segregating event to keep LATAM and APAC contributors away. Before judging this statement, PLEASE, read [2], [3], [4] and [5]. In the end of the day, FUDCon is not a good event for long term contributors and these contributors are not allowed to get funded to attend Flock. I'd rather see FUDCons extinguished, using the budget to take a few people from LATAM to Flock, who could then transfer knowledge to people here in release parties or FADs, than having people who can NEVER even see the guys who develop koji* or take care of infrastructure i n person. Look at other communities like Debian (that organized a very successful DebConf in Nicaragua in 2012) and OpenSUSE for reference. PS: This is not a post against the LATAM community at all: Some people here like echevemaster, potty, neville, itamar and mayorga are very competent. My point is that they should be spending their time focusing on Fedora problems instead of local community problems (we have other ppl to do that). * Dennis Gilmore loves attending FUDCon LATAM - we love you Dennis ;) [1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ambassadors_Join_start [2] https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/flock-planning@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/message/6RDB2OULZNKDPHCHCMYAVBGV6LWJLHNB/ [3] https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/ambassadors@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/message/V4EEA2Y5UFQ3ICWVDZMGRUQLOYT6EPTJ/ [4] https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/flock-planning@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/message/DDSDG2QCPGUCDHG5LOEQY2OT5QV2NYIO/ [5] https://meetbot-raw.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2015-06-03/latam_ambassadors_meeting.2015-06-03-22.31.html _______________________________________________ council-discuss mailing list -- council-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to council-discuss-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
