A little belated reaction... have been very busy recently with arranging stuff for my move to China. On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 1:36 AM, Paul W. Frields <stickster@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Your goal statement is perfect, Gerard. The goal of building the > community should definitely be to give them the tools, and help them > become self-sustainable. The statement is not perfect in my own opinion as I only geared it towards the western community as being 'leading'. Recently I got in touch with Rahul Sundaram and see how we facing similar challenges and how we can cooperate. The same goes for the other Asian communities... > Fedora has always taken a hit in terms of brand recognition because > our sponsor did not invest in carpet-bombing the planet with discs. Well, for the Asian area it is easier to do carpet-bombing of LiveDVDs. These are generally easy to produce in China and also very cheap. It might be possible to distribute them from here to other places... > Another possibility is to create a more formal document using > Publican, and then use translation infrastructure to provide Chinese > contributors a way to translate it -- and at the same time, any other > locales as well. However, someone would need to pull together all the > content, and convert it into a Publican format (DocBook XML). It does not sound like this is easy to do. A lot of time would be wasted on preparing it, but maybe in the long-term this would allow to better manage our marketing efforts in any language. > I think having someone present in China to bridge the divide is going > to be a very important step for us, Gerard. I've had several email > conversations over the last year trying to find different ways to get > system administrators and other tech contacts to help us find people > in China who want to contribute to free software and Fedora. It's > been very difficult because the language barrier gets even higher over > email. > So your email clearly indicates our outreach needs to be very > proactive to make progress in the Chinese community. It takes time, especially to win trust. I am luckily for having a Chinese partner and understanding the culture... since knowing Chinese language, even just a little, can win this more easily. But I also want it to be their community. The focus should remain on it being a Chinese effort, more than being Western. I would say, give them the means to develop... provide them with a platform... deliver the tools... but don't take direction away from them, just steer them. > What people, > places, or groups do you propose to visit or talk with as a start? I currently have planned to meet up with some people in Beijing. Mostly in different fields of the Open Source community and even hardware and software. As soon as I am in China again I will focus on commitment of the current ambassadors as I said before; shirts and get events planned like participation in SFD 2010. In July I will also give a presentation about Fedora at the BeijingLUG. I haven't settle for a subject yet, but probably a general talk. Introduce Fedora an the project and explain how people can involve. And related to it I wanted to start a Fedora interest group for activities. As you notice most activities currently deal with Beijing. Depending on possible employment I can plan further activities for other cities. Currently this is unknown. I am also trying to see what the other ambassadors can do in e.g. Xi'an, Shanghai, HongKong, etc. Let me first set foot in China as things will be a lot easier being in the same timezone again. Gerard - 吉拉德 -- marketing mailing list marketing@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing
