Mindshare

This page is a draft only
It is still under construction and content may change. Do not rely on the information on this page.

Introduction

Fedora Mindshare is our outreach steering committee and represents the outreach leadership in Fedora. Mindshare aims to help outreach teams to reach their targets in a more effective way, by unifying and sharing their working process through an optimized and standardized communication. It consists of mostly appointed, but also elected members.

Responsibilities

Mindshare will take care of some responsibilities hold actually by other teams, adding some more strategical responsibilities to make sure communication and sharing of ideas, actions and projects can be guaranteed. These include:

• Communication between teams (outreach teams rely on the work of other groups). Mindshare will make sure all information from technical teams will get out in time to all outreach teams, working out also a common strategy with Marketing of how to communicate them outside and how to manage them within all outreach teams.
• Ambassadors activity: Mindshare will create templates to help ambassadors to work more effectively. Not only by providing report templates, but also by asking them once a year to compile a short survey. This can help to get real information whether an ambassador is active or not and will not result too binding.
• Motivate contributors to work also in other groups, providing easier access to funding and more autonomy. This challenging part will need some verifying tools (TBD)
• Mindshare will take over all decisional responsibilities left on FAmSCo. Administrative responsibilities will be handled by FAmA, which will consist mainly by treasurers and FAmA admins.
• CommOps will be part of Mindshare and take care of the operations inside Fedora. CommOps will lead the communication between technical and outreach teams.
• Sharing best practices: Mindshare will take down barriers or whatever is blocking sharinf best practices. All teams and all regions can learn from each other and apply successful practices to their local community.
• Mindshare will still drive one of the biggest groups we have in Fedora, Ambassadors. Mindshare's goal will be to unify ambassadors more and more, also by dropping the actual Regions. They are not helping communication and were created mostly for organizational aspects. FAmA (with treasurers) will help to sort out regional aspects and meetings, but having a unique ambassadors group will help in several ways to be more effective again.
• Budget: Without regions also the (ex-)regional budgeting process needs a slight change. Mindshare will, in collaboration with the FCAIC and consequently with the Council, take care of the Fedora outreach budget (sum of the 4 regional budgets). Minor funding requests can be handled directly by FAmA and treasurers, more important expenses will go through Mindshare, in order to be able and track even necessary reports the Council needs.
• Marketing as part of Mindshare will drive the other teams by providing messages, strategies and talking points for ambassadors. A good collaboration with the other teams is necessary.

Why Mindshare

What we are doing well

• Events: Ambassadors are organizing minor events and are present at the main events with talks and booths.
• Budget process: Our regional budget process is working.
• Design & Web: Despite all problems these two groups are working and offer a good user experience.
• Marketing: Marketing is doing a great job with Fedora Magazine and Talking points.
• Docs: We have docs! No kidding, actually it is worth to point that out, because the team is very very very small.

What is going wrong

• Communication: All the pros are done by the single teams, there is no communication, no plan or process that helps contributors to do their job better.
• Best practices: Some practices are very good, but we don’t share them, why?
• Reporting: We are not reporting about events as the Council is expecting, without good reports we won’t get the budget we need.
• Marketing: Unfortunately Marketing is totally disconnected now, its messages should drive outreach teams again.
• Local communitites: We got a lot of people from local communities in the past without helping them. Time has changed, and we should think about helping them to get new contributors again.
• Ambassadors: Ambassadors work per single region, there is no reciprocity with other regions.
• Funding: Regions work country-wise; tickets get approved only by few people and funding requests are granted mostly to the same people.
• Budgeting: Ambassadors are not applying budget.next, they work as before. The Council this year started to fund events if there is a good idea, a plan and a possible outcome. This means also correct reporting and a good event planning. Without inputs from Marketing or Design this is almost impossible.