Fedora Ambassador Day NA 2008
The FAD 2008 is an event intended to plan the ambassadors' activities in 2009 and to have some fun together.
Organization
Duration
- Friday, 2008-10-10 to Sunday, 2008-10-12
Location
- City: Columbus, Ohio
- Airport: Columbus, OH (CMH)
This is the location for the Ohio Linux Fest - a decent sized midwest open source software conference in Columbus, Ohio. We generally have a good turn out of Fedora folks helping and the timing of OLF coincides nicely with the renewed NA efforts to make a first location for a Fedora Ambassadors Day for North America.
Accomodation
Although we are asking for a budget, its likely we will not be reimbursements for rooms and food for this FAD as we do not have budget money set aside for it. Due to historical turnout for OLF we still expect enough people to be able to make it to be worthwhile and hopefully set the state for future FADs for North America.
Hotel information can be found here:
http://www.ohiolinux.org/hotel.html
Ride Sharing / Car Pooling
People who drive to the FAD by car or get to the airport by car and have some free seats available are asked to help others to get to the FAD. Please add below how many seats you have available, where you start the journey and where you could possibly pick up folks.
| Driver | Seats available | Starting point | Destination | Possible pick up points |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PascalCalarco | 3 | South Bend, IN | Columbus, OH | Indianapolis, IN and Dayton, OH or Fort Wayne, IN |
People who'd like to join one of the drivers above, please ask the driver if he's still got a free seat and where he could pick you up. If you both agree on the terms (e.g. time, location, cost sharing, etc.) add yourself to the list below in order for other people to see which driver still has free seats available.
| Driver | Passenger | Pick up point |
|---|---|---|
Attendees
Please indicate whether or not you will be able to attend. Please add a note if you have no choice but to arrive later/leave earlier (i.e. are not there on Friday and/or Sunday).
Confirmed
| Name | Shirt Size |
| David Nalley | XL |
| Pascal Calarco | XL |
| Shaun Mallette | L |
| John Rose | L |
| Brian Pepple | |
| Ben Williams | |
| Scott Williams | L |
| Clint Savage | XXL |
| Brian Powell | XL |
| Jeffrey Tadlock | L |
| Jon Stanley | XL |
Possible
Agenda
Business
Incomplete - Still in the works. Feel free to add suggestions.
- Interfacing with your local LUGs (IE Help Support / Organize / or even attend)
- It's not all about Linux Conferences - Getting speaking engagements at non-Linux events
- Planning for future FAD events and frequency. Semi-Annually or Quarterly. To be held at specific annual events IE OLF, The Summit?
- Recruiting and involvement effort.
- Discuss the F-A-L topic.
- Utilize Fedora extensions and conferencing capabilities.
Meeting Notes
Action items (NPO)
- do we want to consider doing anything with the NPO right now?
- No, probably not low-hanging fruit enough at this point, at least for this quarter
- each Ambassador should research the laws in their state
Funding planning
- we do not know what level of funding we have currently with events;
- what do we do with left over monies? perhaps add this back to coffers of FAMNA
- 8000 media pieces (DVD & LiveCD) was allocated this year; 2000 of these left
- Herlo has gottent very good pricing for media, about $1/per cheaper than through RH
- Max is open to trying line item for media next year but it is FAMNA responsibility to take this on
- if we worked with the Free Media program folk, we could get pricing lower overall
- Karlie handles all the sponsored media request
- distribution of media is a big issue to handle; probably do this along lines of regional ambassador areas
- probably want to get media purchased twice per year instead of quarterly
- need at least 3k per order
- we are priced to get 12k CDs for $8k
- trend upwards for x86_64; approximately 50% now; ppl in NA getting more new computers; other parts of the world will continue to use i386.
- once media is produced, then how best to distribute to events around the country? Ship directly to events or to regional ambassadors
Key signing
- we discussed keysigning and everyone shared their official govt. IDs to validate identify amongst the group
- we will have the actual keysigning offline for now and do the signing later
Mentoring
- suggest we establish short two week goals to focus on Docs, Art, Bug Triaging, Ambassadors, IRC support group (#fedora)
- short term goal: draft how to join by 2008-10-27 for each group
- DavidNalley & PascalCalarco will take Docs
- ClintSavage & BrianPeeple will take Art
- JonStanley & polecat will take Bug Triaging
- ScottWilliams and BenWilliams will take #fedora
Ambassador Expectations
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ambassadors/NorthAmerica/Expectations
- Must, should, could
- need to establish where there first point of contact is on IRC;
- fedora-mentor has not been used for some time, so this might be a good reuse
- for those who have signed up as owners for groups, you should hang out in those channels for some time each week and help
- if you own an event, you need to blog it or have someone blog it
- if you need a new blog, take a look at wordpress
Recruiting Contributors
- we need to track metrics from events better to show how many new people we convert to contributors at events
- recommend that people get a FAS account so we can track them, but not be pushy with folks
- some events do not have internet connection, but we could add cardbus card to EventBox
- metrics for the number of media we hand out; we handed out 75 respins for example, which is a good indication that people are serious with Fedora
LUGs and Linux events
- join LUG lists in your state and know of all of the events
- can really make an impact having a official Fedora rep at a LUG meeting or local event
- DavidNalley attended a recent event with 6 hrs. driving plus time at the event
- take ownership of state; divide responsibility amongst Ambassadors
- for budget, events need to be listed a month before next quarter starts, in our case, Dec.1
We decided to break for lunch. While we were waiting for pizza, we continued brainstorming.
Measurements
Here are some metrics we can measure success of events for Fedora:
- number of events
- number of disks handed out
- number of contributors gained
- there was value having lots of visibility with having Ambassadors at the meeting, but we can walk around, talk to people and talk
- having Paul at the meeting was great because we could direct questions from others to him, and leverage him to get HP give us laptops
- vendors are starting to learn how to do community; we need to find someone in Acer, since they are using a Fedora respin
- community investment can be much better than marketing
- we need to target some new states: Illinois, Kentucky, North Dakota, etc.
- perhaps target Chicago
Marketing
- What is the group's stance on opening the Fedora Ambassador list to anyone in the community? FAMSCO would like to know
- EMEA is very against this, as they view the list for planning for the work of Ambassadors; this will likely stay as is
- JeffreyTadlock will change config for fedora-ambassadors-list to allow digest mode
EventBox
- one big accomplishment this year was establishing the EventBox
- eventually we will have one of these for each Ambassador region
- the EventBox includes, or will eventually include:
* Banners (l/f/r and four Fs) * Box ($180) * tablecloth/flag would be nice but these are expensive * access point/switch/cables * Powerstrips * OLPC XO laptop * $netbook (HP2113, for example) * AmbassadorKit * stickers - various kinds (big stickers, Powered by, etc.) * temporary tattoos * CD/DVD * t-shirts * box
Fun
Feel free to add your own ideas. Please note, that we most probably won't make this decision public before the FAD has begun - see it as a little surprise. We might or might not take anything that was suggested here. But your ideas are a great help for brainstorming, anyway.
Ideas:
- FADPub :-) Friday Evening
- T-Shirts (Designed by Clint Savage)
Tentative Schedule for Sunday October 12 2008
| Time | Topics |
| 8:00AM | coffee and breakfast, introductions |
| 8:30AM | 'What is an Ambassador' presentation |
| 8:45AM | keysigning party -- bring your government id and your gpg key fingerprint |
| 9:30AM | Discussion of FAmNA's goals and focus |
| 11:00AM | Marketing plans (i.e ambkit, eventbox, regional ambassadors, budget, f-a-l) |
| 12:00PM | Lunch and Discussion of FAD Frequency, meetings, etc |
| 1:00PM | Departure (hack and talk) |
Budget
$500 budget has been put in place. We will have to collect receipts and get reimbursed from Max Spevack.
Current Budget Items
These are estimated costs
- Holiday Inn Express Conference Room - $160
- Consider renting projector and whiteboard
- T-shirts (between 10 and 20 shirts) - $100
- Lunch for FAMNA membership on Sunday - $200
- FADPub on Friday night - $40 (probably one round each)
Totals $500
Remoting the meetings
How to share the meetings for interactions with remote attendees.
Bare minimum
- Everyone with a laptop joins the designated IRC channel
- All documents worked on are done in Gobby as a virtual whiteboard
- Write up notes and post them as you go to the wiki
Good minimum
- Everyone with a laptop joins the designated IRC channel
- All documents worked on are done in Gobby as a virtual whiteboard
- Write up notes and post them as you go to the wiki
- Wiki + gobby + IRC are projected on the wall, showing as much ongoing information as possible
- Single microphone with audio turned down, dialed via softphone to talk.fedoraproject.org
Sweet setup
- Everyone with a laptop joins the designated IRC channel
- All documents worked on are done in Gobby as a virtual whiteboard
- Write up notes and post them as you go to the wiki
- Wiki + gobby + IRC are projected on the wall, showing as much ongoing information as possible
- Speaker phone setup to VoIP room
- Streaming video
- Streaming audio