On 07/23/2016 05:33 PM, Jeff Abbott wrote:
Saludos de New Mexico!
My name is Jeffery Abbott (Jeff for short) and I live in the state of
New Mexico in the United States of America. My FAS username
is jdabbott5100 and my IRC alias will be #jdabbott5100 (although I
have yet to sign on yet).
I learned about the Fedora Marketing team by reading the /How do
you //Fedora?/ feature on the Fedora website, in which one of
contributors proclaimed to love the Fedora community. Moved by my
own appreciation of Fedora, I too have decided to join and contribute
in any way I can. This will be the first Open Source project of
which I've officially sought to be a part of.
My Skills, which I hope to utilize in Fedora Marketing, include:
* Promotions – I was the assistant director of Circulation
and Audience Development for the Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper
for several years in which I oversaw several promotions to
help expand readership.
* Writing – I have a bachelors of arts in Literature, with
a concentration in Spanish and Latin American literature. I've
had several columns in English and articles translated
to/from Spanish published in the Santa Fe New Mexican Newspaper.
My first writing project out of college was with a small
newspaper in Quito, Ecuador where I worked as an intern for several
months.
* Graphic Design – My three go-to programs are GIMP, Inkscape
and Scribus (a great program I don't think is ever
mentioned enough). I've created advertisements and promotional
materials for both print and web.
* Web Design – I am proficient in HTML/CSS. I've also been an
avid user of the Drupal Content Management System since 2011.
Currently I work for the Special Education Department for Santa
Fe Public Schools as a Coordinator for Parent and Educator Resources.
I am incredibly fortunate to be put in a position to support
students, teachers and families of students who have special
needs. Personally, I have a son who was born with Special Needs,
something which has opened my eyes, I feel, to the incredible wonder that it
is to be a sentient human being. In using Fedora and the vast array of
Open Source offerings, at work I'm known as the guy capable of doing a
lot with little. My heart often breaks when I see such institutions like
public schools pay so much money for the licensing of software of which
I know there is a perfectly good open source alternative. My chief
interest in joining the Fedora Marketing Team is to promote Fedora as a
viable alternative for nonprofits and public institutions. I currently
use Fedora on an eight year old laptop that was discarded and reported
to be “old and broken” but that worked superbly once I put a Fedora Spin
of LXDE on it. I've also spent time with my son navigating the joys of
/Sugar on a Stick/.
Being a father of a child with special needs, a husband to my beautiful
wife Katia, and a coordinator in the public schools often means I can be
a bit busy. I may not be the first to respond to collaboration
initiatives but that doesn't mean I won't be paying attention. I'll
gladly chime in and contribute whenever possible! :)
Thanks so much for the opportunity and please consider including me on
your marketing team!
Kindest regards,
--
Jeffery Abbott
Hi Jeff, welcome to the Marketing mailing list! Glad we got the subscription problems resolved. :)
Firstly, I think it's worth offering a welcome to open source in general! Contributing to your first project is a big deal. I'm happy that you decided to come to Fedora and offer your skills and abilities here. I'll try to do my best to offer some personalized pointers for how you can help us here in Marketing and possibly beyond too. I'll try breaking this email into little sections for readability.
== Welcome to open source! ==For starters, though, I would like to offer a helpful guide for understanding IRC and getting a hang for it. When you first are getting used to it, it can be a little strange and foreign. Fortunately, another Marketeer and general Fedora superstar Paul Frields wrote an excellent beginner's guide to IRC on the Fedora Magazine. I think taking the time to read this over will definitely be helpful for you in getting started with it on the right foot.
https://fedoramagazine.org/beginners-guide-irc/
Another thing worth mentioning too is that the Marketing team, or even
open source in general, isn't as much of a club to be admitted to as it
is a community whiteboard. I mean to say, there's no magic word we have
to say for you to have permission to try doing something or offering
feedback to. Whether it's writing an article or helping work on an idea
or task in a ticket, you can say, "Hey, I want to try working on this!"
and we'll be happy to help offer feedback and guidance towards you
contributing. No special membership pass required. :)
== Contributing to Fedora == ==== Marketing / Writing ====There's definitely ways your writing skills and abilities could be utilized. One of the most powerful tools, I think, is the power of storytelling. Reading your background special education and using open source in the world of education holds a lot of potential for impacting other people. Perhaps the best first step for you to do this would be to consider writing an article for the Fedora Magazine. In Woo's reply, he linked to some great resources for writing a new post for the Magazine, and I'll repeat them again here for consistency's sake.
https://fedoramagazine.org/writing-an-article-for-the-fedora-magazine/
https://fedoramagazine.org/writing-a-new-pitch/
Ideas you could consider starting with based on your intro... how has
open source made your job easier? What are your "top 5 tips" for any
educator interested in open source? What kind of advice or experience do
you have that could help other educators who want to break open source
into their own schools a little more? What about your son and Sugar and
a Stick, what have you found useful and powerful about using it? Maybe
highlighting some specific apps or tools in SoaS could also be useful.
==== Design =====You also mentioned interest and experience in Design. While we do help coordinate some of the planning for design, a lot of the actual design work happens in the Design Team. Perhaps this is also something you would be interested in too. Here's some links to direct you there:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Design
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Join_the_Design_Team
== Questions, comments, concerns? ==
Again, I'd like to welcome you to open source, Fedora, and the Marketing
team. Hopefully some of the above tips can offer an idea or direction
for how you could help Fedora in the marketing department.
If you are free on Wednesday and/or Thursday evenings (in the US, anyways), we have the following meetings at the following times:
* Marketing meeting: Wednesdays, 21:00 UTC (5pm US EST) in #fedora-meeting-1 on freenode IRC * Magazine editorial meeting: Thursdays, 21:00 UTC (5pm US EST) in #fedora-meeting on freenode IRC
You're more than welcome to attend either meeting if your schedule permits, and we'd love to see you there. If those times don't work for you, we always send out the weekly minutes on the mailing list, so it's easy to read up on what was discussed or covered, and add your thoughts back to the mailing list after the meeting.
Hopefully all of this information is helpful and useful to you getting started. I know something like all of this would have been helpful to me when I was getting started. If you have any questions, ideas, or suggestions, you're always welcome to ask here on the list or in our IRC channel.
Hoping to see you around soon, and again, welcome to Fedora Marketing! :) -- Cheers, Justin W. Flory jflory7@xxxxxxxxx
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