Contributions to the Fedora Ambassadors Project
This is a first draft and not yet made public. When we on #fedora-ambassadors think it's reached a certain level, it'll go to the mailing list, to the planet, and be linked on the Contribute site.
This page is intended to give you an idea on how you can contribute to the Fedora Ambassadors Project if you'd like to. If you'd rather contribute to another part of the Fedora Project, there's also a page on how to contribute in general.
Thank you for considering to help us out where you can!
Ideas for individuals
The normal way to contribute to the Ambassadors for individuals is by joining the team and helping out where you can. That's a great thing as you're help is very much appreciated and you'll meet and work with lots of great people. You can imagine the other benefits of traveling around a lot and discussing with many people from within and outside the Fedora Project, can't you?
If you don't want to help us with your manpower or simply can't for any reason, you'd be very welcome to help us out with some money. Frankly, every $ makes a difference for us.
Ideas for companies
There's three ways to contribute to the Ambassadors as a company:
- By helping us out on manpower.
- By paying a bill for us or by not billing us for anything we received from you.
- By donating plain money.
Manpower
Well, there's really many ways to help us with some manpower as there's always stuff that needs to be done by an individual. Examples are organizing the booth at an event, the accommodation for the ambassadors staffing the booth or staffing our booth with nice hostesses yourself where needed.
You could also create an event of your own. For example a release party in your city or maybe in your very own conference room. If you're good at giving support, why not do a install party? We don't mind if you make some advertisement for yourself at your own event, anyway.
If you have no employees who could do the job you'd like to contribute manpower to, why not employ one of our Ambassadors? You can offer them a full time position, either to have them contribute to us 100% or to contribute to a certain level and do some business for you in the rest of the time. There's also lots of students in our team, that would also accept part time jobs with only e.g. 20% work load, just to raise some pocket money. You get the idea, there's plenty of great people in our team and many of them would love to make their work for Fedora their paid job.
Paying a bill et al
We have lots of bills to pay. Some are payed with the budget the Fedora Project has reserved for us. But a large amount comes out of our own pockets. That's where you can help us!
Fedora pays most of the swag, even though we try to sell some of it for small profit. Accommodation is also payed mostly and as far as possible, Fedora tries to help with travel costs. But the overall budget is limited and there's still lots of bills left. Examples are travels that Fedora can't sponsor, food, social events, free give-aways like professionally done LliveCDs/DVDs/USB-sticks and many other things.
So you're very welcome to pay a bill or part of a bill for us. Very welcome indeed.
Money donations
Of course, contributing manpower or paying a bill for us is a financial donation too. But you might have your reasons to simply donate plain money. Maybe because you figure we know best what to do with the money, better than you would. Maybe that's true. Still, we have our reasons to ask you to consider one of the options above before just donating some money. One of the main reasons for this request is, that we wish you to know exactly what you spend your money on and that we can't guarantee for this if you don't designate it for a certain purpose.
After all, we prefer plain money over no money.
How to contribute
It was already mentioned, that you best go to the join page, if you want to become an Ambassador as an individual.
For companies, there's three (main) ways:
- Ask the mailing list where exactly your offered help is needed.
- Ask an 'event owner' of one of the events we plan to attend if you can help him in the way you intend.
- Become the event owner of an event, that doesn't have one yet (you're also free to add missing events).
- Become a member of the Fedora EMEA e.V., a NPO registered in Germany, whose goal it is to support the Fedora Project and the Fedora Ambassadors in the EMEA area. They will use the money where they think it is needed and used best.
- Ask Max Spevack, our Treasurer, He's also the main person to help you with further questions.
Again, thank you in advance for your contributions! Be assured, that your help is very much appreciated.