Ambassadors/SteeringCommittee/Meetings/2006-03-13

FAmSCo Meeting Minutes: 2006-03-13

Attending

• lxmaier: AlexMaier
• gregdek: GregDeKoenigsberg
• brz: DavidBarzilay
• mspevack_hm: MaxSpevack
• tchung: ThomasChung
• nman64: PatrickBarnes
• By invitation from tchung: EvilBob: BobJensen

Summary

Item 1: the purpose/mission of famsco

• barz: ***To provide the Fedora Ambassadors worldwide with strategic Marketing guidance, basic promotional material and support their efforts towards the Fedora Project and its sub-projects local promotions.***
• http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ambassadors/SteeringCommittee
• Resolved: Famsco wil create three task groups with membership as follows:

• Budget:
• AlexMaier
• GregDeKoenigsberg
• MaxSpevack
• Responsibilities of Budget group: Forecasting and requesting the budget from Red Hat; wisely approving the spending of the available budget; dealing with the legal/accounting side of things.

• Members Services:
• ThomasChung
• PatrickBarnes
• Responsibilities of Members Services: Guiding new contibutor to become Fedora Contributors/Ambassadors by answering any questions they have.

• Schwag/Events
• ThomasChung
• DavidBarzilay
• GregDeKoenigsberg
• Responsibilities of the Schwag/Events group: Determining amount of monetary and other material support Ambassadors receive for their initiatives, such as, but not limited to Events, LUG meetings, install fests, and other public-facing activities.

• barz: i agree with this or for now, but I wanna suggest for us to get procedures in place, so these will turn into operational work, then famsco can concentrate on mktg strategy, no matter what list ambass or mktg. i don't believe we should spend much time on these, but automate whatever we can

• lxmaier: i have my doubts about how strategic a role in overall fedora marketing famsco should play with our limited manpower and money...but i agree with barz on automation--we need to scale. i think we should learn to do one thing REAL well before we take strategic leadership of others.

• barz: if not us, who?

Item 2: Messaging

• gregdek: We need dead simple messaging. Which means we need to agree on the messaging. And the simpler the proposed messaging, the harder it is to agree to it.  :) So Who's responsible for that simple message? Ambassadors? Marketing Project? Red Hat?

• lxmaier: pardon my disillusionment, but i think it will be red hat

• mspevack_hm: i see no reason why an ambassadors/marketing steering committee made up of community members (and also red hat folks) cannot make a perfectly reasonable proposal that is actionable

• It was resolved that famsco will begin working on the messaging on the list after the meeting--we have more items to cover. famsco will draft-refine and rhat approve the dead-simple messaging.

Item 3: Cooperation with Mentors project

• gregdek: I think we're looking at potential overlap between Ambassadors and Mentors. As I envision Mentors, they have very specific resposibilities: being available at particular times, reliably, to answer questions in their area of expertise.

• nman64: They are distinctly different projects with different goals. There may be some overlap, but they serve unique purposes. The purpose of Mentors is to guide new contributors. The purpose of Ambassadors is to attract new users and contributors. Marketing and Ambassadors should try to bring contributors to Mentors, but the Mentors program is very different from the Ambassadors program.

• barz: I believe mentors should be a separate project, or merged with Ambassadors, havin in this group Marketing, techies and other expertises, then Ambassadors and Marketing can support mentors efforts with messaging and other ideas

• Resolved: we will NOT bring in mentors into the Ambassadors project, but we will work closely together with them, and try to have some bleed-over between the two projects

Item 4: Procedure for approving expenditure

• Suggested procedure:

1. Ambassadors request funding/goods, and forecast the expected cost
2. Famsco Events/Schwag group approves the spending
3. Requestor spends the money
4. Requestor submits expense report (spreadsheet plus receipt scans) and an event report
5. Famsco Budget group reimburses the Ambassador by paypal (or other payment option, where paypal is unavailable)

• barz: we also need to write down these policies and procedures. ambass request funding, event pp approve it internally, budhet pp approve the budget, then event reimbursement is approved. we can work on the event guidelines after we, famsco, agree on the criteria.

• mspevack_hm: i hope to have definitive answers about ambassador/marketing budget by the end of this week. so let me follow up with famsco either Friday or Monday. and by that i mean budget for the next 12 months.

• nman64: I strongly encourage involving Bob, Clair, and Tejas in early discussions. I'd like to see their feedback with regard to attention to smaller events. They have some very important points with regard to our focus.

Resolved: next meeting: Monday, March 20, 23:00 UTC 19:47:29: adjourned

Next Meeting

• 2006-03-20 23:00 UTC
• Channel: TBA