On Fri, 2010-07-30 at 14:00 +0900, Satoru Matsumoto wrote:
On Thu, Jul 29, 2010 at 6:44 AM, Andreas Jaeger<aj@suse.de> wrote:
We will have a first ambassador IRC meeting on the #opensuse-marketing IRC channel on freenode on the 3rd of August at 15:00 UTC. You're invited to join this meeting. Details of the meeting are at http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Ambassadors_meeting
Although I'm not an Ambassador yet, I'm interested in this program from the beginning and hope it will be of help both in promoting openSUSE and motivating contributors all over the world (why I haven't become an Ambassador is another story for another day).
I know IRC meeting sometimes is an effective and efficient way for discussing and brainstorming and it might be worthwhile to share the time with other members, but it is not always the best way to collaborate.
* It is very difficult to find the convenient time for everyone.
When we have a project meeting, for example, most of the *important* persons live in Europe or America and they are employees of Novell, so that they can join the meeting during the daytime on weekdays.
But Ambassadors live in different timezones and I suppose most of them are volunteers and it would be difficult to join the meeting during the daytime on weekdays due to their own jobs or schools.
* How much a person can commit the IRC meeting depends on his/her English skill.
Discussions on IRC meeting go along in real time, that is, those wishing to commit the meeting must have certain English skill. There is a very high bar for those who are not good at English - like me ;-) - to take part in discussions.
I don't mean to deny having Ambassador IRC meeting itself. But time and language are always the problems when we really want to bring up a global community.
So, I'd propose to have bi-weekly regular *global* meetings and separate meetings for regions or languages as appropriate.
* Each region and/or language will have its facilitator(s), who are good at English. * The facilitators are going to translate the meeting agenda and what we need to discuss to their languages and organize region/language specific meetings (not limited to IRC meeting - mailing lists or other channels would be OK) if needed. * Once the region/language specific meetings would be held, the facilitators will feed back the result of those meetings to *global* meeting.
You may think this is too much bother, but I think this will be helpful in solving time and language problems.
Best,
-- _/_/ Satoru Matsumoto - openSUSE Member - Japan _/_/ _/_/ Marketing/Weekly News/openFATE Screening Team _/_/ _/_/ mail: helios_reds_at_gmx.net / irc: HeliosReds _/_/ _/_/ http://blog.zaq.ne.jp/opensuse/ _/_/
Note that my discussion below pertains generally to marketing which all Ambassadors are part of the Marketing team by default. Since they're related here, I'm speaking in general terms. Satoru, I agree with you 100% about the issues you face here. And I would definitely *love* to find a way that we can involve people in regions such as Asia and India more effectively. To be clear, the current 15:00 UTC time frame does not always work well. It doesn't benefit the Western Hemisphere that well, especially because 15:00 is very early in the morning for United States. 10 a.m. for me in Chicago and 8 a.m. for folks in California. And for those who cannot use IRC while at work, it shuts them out completely. I sent out a mailing in the past to see if we could come up with a special meeting time that was more convenient for people in the Western Hemisphere with no response. So I continued with sticking to 15:00 UTC with the long-term hope that at some point we would expand to some other time zone to fit other regions. Now, let me tell you what we did for the GNOME-A11y team that I work with. I proposed and set up weekly meetings there that alternate each week. 07:00 UTC and 15:00 UTC every Thursday. Specifically so we could get our Asian team members to participate. And it actually works pretty well. It meant that I had to be up for a meeting at 2 a.m. every two weeks, but I didn't care as long as we ensured that everyone around the globe participated fairly. Would this kind of arrangement work for you? If so, I'm ready to do it for the team. In our case, I would suggest we have both time-shifted meetings on the same day. So I would attend at 2 a.m. and at 10 a.m. the same day. That way we keep topics close together instead of so differently each week. I ask only two things: 1) Do you think people will show up at that hour from that region? 2) I want a commitment of coverage. I may not always be around to lead meetings at that hour and I would like to ensure that we have backup person to lead meetings when I cannot be there. AJ is already my backup for 15:00 UTC, now I want to see backup for 07:00 UTC. This could solve the timezone issues. But obviously, it does not solve the language barrier issues and I'm not sure how we can address that. Primarily, openSUSE meetings are held in English, and that is actually a barrier we need to tear down. But someone has to come up with a creative solution that fixes that problem. I'm willing to discuss this in more detail with you if you are interested in discussing ideas. I'm very interested to learn more about the Asian region and its potential as part of the openSUSE Community. We must do more to recognize and grow and strengthen ourselves in many regions of the world and not be stuck in the easy route of just staying English. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts as well as other people's thoughts on this. Sincerely, Bryen M Yunashko openSUSE Board Member openSUSE Marketing Team lead -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-ambassadors+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-ambassadors+help@opensuse.org