On 28 June 2010 15:35, S.Kemter <buergermeister@karl-tux-stadt.de> wrote:
Hello,
There are things I cant understand, we have more then 30 Ambassadors in India but only 1 Launch Party for 11.3. For 11.2 there was only 3.
Though launch parties are an important part of the visibility process, they cannot be taken as the only indicator of action. In India mostly, Ubuntu and Redhat seem to be the distro of choice for most. This is largely because of aggressive marketing by Canonical and Redhat, in the form of sponsoring large events, college fests, LUG gettogethers, coding competitions and so forth. On this count we are nearly invisible. When asked about Linux, most people around these parts will not have openSUSE pop first to their minds mostly because they have never seen a banner with openSUSE printed across it. Under the circumstances, it is hard to convince people to attend/organise oS LPs, especially when funding is not very forthcoming. Maybe we are trying to start off from the wrong point.
So now I am asking why is that so? Whats the problem in India that 30 people cant do more as 1 party?
Most people are, as Sankar P pointed out, students. Moreover they are often located at places quite far from one another. They find it difficult to coordinate an entire event on their own, more so without a clear set of stuff to do. LPs, by definition mean no official CD/DVD gear is available, meaning the ambassadors have to burn their own, with extra costs from sleeves.covers, etc. Fooding, etc is usually preferable on such events. The numbers needed are also not very forthcoming. So they mostly look at LUG meetings, local LUG/FSUG events, and word of mouth for popularisation of openSUSE. Even the LP by cyberorg, a flagbearer for openSUSE in India, was a joint one for oS 11.2 and Ubuntu 9.10, if I remember correctly, just so that enough people attend and enough press coverage is gained. Maybe even the fact that the funding required is more forthcoming from them. Applications for funding in events like Mukti (a college LUG symposium - 1000+ registrations) and foss.in(India's largest FOSS event) met little or no reaction, and certainly no support. Without visibility and activity in such events, Launch parties alone would be poorly attended and dysfunctional.
Or forgot u only to write ur launch events to
http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_11.3_Launch_Party_Locations ??
The following Ambassadors have no mail address written on her user page in the wiki as is requested in the "what to do to become a Ambassador"
<snipped>
http://en.opensuse.org/User:Roshansingh <snipped> He is an enthusiastic contributor on several FOSS projects and support groups , but I am not very informed of his openSUSE targeted activities in particular.
http://en.opensuse.org/User:Abhradipm Actively trolled lists with the Linux OR GNU/Linux debate, which might have been excusable if there was even a single visible instance of some other useful activity, which, AFAIK is missing.
Give u 10 days to change that, after that I remove u from the list!
I always held the opinion that the list of Ambassadors can not be entirely unmoderated. This is because on the o.o site and other places, it is an official list of people trying to popularise openSUSE. We could always have progress reports or some other way of establishing how hard people are actually trying to help. This would, I feel, help the community to weed out uninterested people, who are trying, I don't know, SEO maybe, or something similar by getting their name into lists, piggybacking on the project popularity/credibility. While I personally feel joining the Ambassador program should not be subject to any approval, remaining might have some sort of moderation, such as a review every quarter/year.
br gnokii
~kknundy -- Koushik Kumar Nundy http://kknundy.blogspot.com http://thinkbiosoln.com http://en.opensuse.org/ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+help@opensuse.org