On Wed, Nov 28, 2012 at 3:24 PM, Paul W. Frields <stickster@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I wonder if the tenor of this
conversation at numerous points would have been inhospitable to a
newcomer.
IMO, yes. I've found parts of this thread to be discouraging toward contributing to the Fedora project and community. If I were new to the community, I'd now be hesitant to write any marketing materials, documentation, wikipages, etc. because if I make a mistake - technical, grammatical, or historical - I'm going to be personally disparaged in public and my apologies ignored. Putting such pressure on community members to be perfectly right all the time is going to bottleneck participation and suck the enthusiasm out of contributors.
I joined this community because I met passionate and compassionate Fedora contributors at a FUDCon who didn't discount my ideas even though I don't have a degree in computer science and can't remember more than two vi commands at a time. Since then numerous Fedora community members have patiently nudged me through the Ambassador process (after I made tons of mistakes trying to contact them). I've mucked up expense tickets - the FPL and others, once again, patiently helped me sort those out. When manning the Fedora booth at events I've been unable to answer tons of questions (is Ubuntu faster than Fedora? Is version x of y in F17? How is a release name voted on? What packages does Fedora contain relating to cloud services? Why does maven make me want to start shooting bees?) but fellow community members have happily stepped in to educate me. No one has ever told me that I'm not a 'real' community member because I don't know about every feature in Fedora, how the community operates, or the milestones in the project's long history.
Please, please don't judge another community member's 'realness' or dismiss their value to the project because you've never personally interacted with them or because they make a mistake.
I hope this community can continue to be the welcoming, patient, and fun learning environment that I know it as.
As for the issues, questions, and possible solutions regarding marketing the Fedora OS that have been brought up in this thread - AWESOME! I've compiled them in a list for the marketing meeting (every Thursday at 3pm EST (8pm UTC) in the #fedora-meeting channel). List: http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/marketing/2012-November/014678.html
If you have any additional ideas, questions or concerns, please attach them to the agenda and/or come to the meeting. You don't need any experience in marketing or PR to participate, so please don't hesitate to join us!
Cheers,
Sarah
graphite6
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