On 29 June 2010 17:31, Andreas Jaeger <aj@novell.com> wrote:
On Monday 28 June 2010 17:55:50 Sankar P wrote:
[...] So, in short, my 2 cents: If we want more student participation from India, we definitely cannot come up with a solution on a mailing list discussion(1). We may have to sit on a FOSS conference stall with limited number of stakeholders, and devise some plans and execute them. May be come over for FOSS.in or in OSC10 (if someone from India comes) or GNOME Asia summit or some such event and we can plan a solution for this. We discussing in mailing list in my opinion will just cause long threads and no results.
Novell has sponsored some FOSS events but this needs to be planned quite some time ahead. We have only a limited budget, so the question is which events to sponsor and how. We should not randomly sponsor events but define a plan on which regions we want to grow the community first and how.
Even without sponsoring a lot of is possible as the German Linuxtag showed where we had no sponsoring, a free booth, banners and a great program. I've never been to India so don't know how e.g. FOSS.in looks like but hope that similar stuff works as well.
I think that one-size-fits-all doesnot always turn out great. In India, as Sankar P pointed out, it is extremely difficult, in terms of time and money, to get people together at one place. Case in point - An Eurail pass costs 400 Euro, that is half a week's pay for an avg german (PCI ~ 35K Euro). A return train ride from Vadodara (cyberorg/ShayonJ) to Bangalore() takes INR 3000 (PCI ~ 80K INR), needs 24 hrs each way. If you fly to save time, cost escalates to 12K INR. That is difficult for even a professional.
From feedback of conference participants, I hear that sponsorship is not really something that makes an effect - what makes an effect are presentations, tutorials and conversations, e.g. at a booth.
Which conference is a pertinent question. While Linux awareness is not abysmally low, it is not strikingly high either in India, with many people preferring Windows just because they have never heard of Linux. How can one think a Launch party to a new version of something one has not heard of will be of interest? Also, there is the issue of inadequate encouragement from employers, and consumers thinking on lines like if I get Windows for free, as also games, s/w, courtesy the high piracy rates here. To them, ideas like freedom, flexibility don't really count. They think of all that in politics not in software.
So, let's not say, we need sponsorship money to this or that - let's discuss what we can do with what we have to do.
As I pointed above, sponsorship will help not despite presence, but along with presence, which in turn it can fund. A booth means you have to pay. Also corporate awareness is lower than Europe, here even Enterprise Linux has a small market.
I'm with Gnokii that Launch events can be very easy to do so wonder why so few do them,
Launch parties are easy when you have numerous volunteers in geographic proximity. 30 Ambassadors and few members in India for 3 million sqkm and 1200 million people is hardly comparable to 9 Ambassadors and numerous members in Germany for 0.3 million sqkm and 80 million people. Even the 9 Ambassadors in Germany are, as far as I can see, in blocks of 2/3 in the same town/area.
Andreas
Do not get me wrong. I am not saying all that can be done has been done by us. It's just that a lot of us are trying in our own humble capacities. In an anti-Linux atmosphere, it is already hard enough for us without the system itself (read, community) turning antagonistic to us. ~kknundy -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+help@opensuse.org