Hello,

...

As I was explaining earlier, most of the students register as ambassadors mainly for projects, and then they drift off when they get a job. The number of Linux jobs is not as high as on something else, like say Java, Finance sector based jobs, etc. in our part of the world.

I think there isnt a difference between Germany or India. Here do students in her studying time more for FLOSS projects as after it. After that they have jobs and family and spent not more a lot of time for it. But in her study time they do something and its noticeable. So it cant be that all 30 ambassadors from India are not students anymore. Let it be a third whats with the other 20 ambassadors? There should be more activity or think u not?

Also, piracy is so common that there are people who can autocomplete FCKGW- without stopping for breath. Cyberorg is a hero but most of the others dont spend enough time, once they get a job. I agree, The ambassador list needs a cleanup if they dont have an email address written on the user page.

Sure, think we have to clean up that. On the end I think we need the same solution like fedora has for the ambassadors. They had the same problem with guys from India signed as ambassador only for get an fedoraproject mail address. The problem is how we sort out the inactive ambassaadors? br gnokii

Sankar http://psankar.blogspot.com

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On Mon, 2010-06-28 at 16:08 +0200, S.Kemter wrote:

Hello,

...

...

As I was explaining earlier, most of the students register as ambassadors mainly for projects, and then they drift off when they get a job. The number of Linux jobs is not as high as on something else, like say Java, Finance sector based jobs, etc. in our part of the world.

I think there isnt a difference between Germany or India. Here do students in her studying time more for FLOSS projects as after it. After that they have jobs and family and spent not more a lot of time for it.

But in her study time they do something and its noticeable. So it cant be that all 30 ambassadors from India are not students anymore. Let it be a third whats with the other 20 ambassadors? There should be more activity or think u not?

...

Also, piracy is so common that there are people who can autocomplete FCKGW- without stopping for breath. Cyberorg is a hero but most of the others dont spend enough time, once they get a job. I agree, The ambassador list needs a cleanup if they dont have an email address written on the user page.

Sure, think we have to clean up that. On the end I think we need the same solution like fedora has for the ambassadors. They had the same problem with guys from India signed as ambassador only for get an fedoraproject mail address.

I don't believe that translates the truth. As far as I am aware @fedoraproject.org emails are handed by the time you sign up and accept the CLA on FAS2.

The problem is how we sort out the inactive ambassaadors?

br gnokii

...

Sankar http://psankar.blogspot.com

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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. 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. 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. I'm with Gnokii that Launch events can be very easy to do so wonder why so few do them, Andreas -- Andreas Jaeger, Program Manager openSUSE, aj@{novell.com,opensuse.org} Twitter: jaegerandi | Identica: jaegerandi SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg) Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany GPG fingerprint = 93A3 365E CE47 B889 DF7F FED1 389A 563C C272 A126

...

...

On 6/29/2010 at 05:31 PM, in message <201006291401.35013.aj@novell.com>, Andreas Jaeger 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.

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.

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.

I'm with Gnokii that Launch events can be very easy to do so wonder why so few do them,

Novell used to sponsor FOSS.in, during the early editions. Later this changed. I will contact you off-list to see if we can plan and work better, in the upcoming years. I was having some discussions about this to Zonker as well. I agree that presentations, tutorials etc. make more impact. But there are some other factors that affect such participation. Most of these are cultural issues which are difficult to understand for a foreigner. Nuremberg employees travelling to Linuxtag is not the same as, say Shayon Mukherjee travelling from his place to Bangalore. India is a much bigger country geographically and we dont have the excellent European railway system. Even then, last year there was an openSUSE-edu booth in FOSS.in. There are some activities done in bits and piece like this, but not at a bigger scale to gain enough critical mass. If you see the profile pages of ambassadors, most of them are "Students" and all of them are from different states (places). There are not more than 2-3 people per state. It is close to impossible for all these 30 people to gather and very expensive even for 2-3 of these to meet across neighboring states. A student travelling to attend a release-party will be considered a luxurios-waste-of-money in most places of India (even by his/her parents, professors etc.) Also, among the 30 or so ambassadors, if you count the official members (ones with @opensuse.org etc., packagers etc.) I believe it will be a lesser number. Germany has far higher number of openSUSE members, even though there may not be much ambassadors (on a relative scale) There are a lot of other issues as well (type of job market, piracy etc.). So to conclude the thread, as I said earlier, we cannot come with a strategy to increase openSUSE release-parties-count/participation from India, on a mailing list discussion. We can have a chat about it over lunch table, sometime. Also, I use this opportunity to Welcome you to India ;-) Sankar -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+help@opensuse.org

Hello,

...

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.

Why u always talk about travel cost? Who said u should travel far away from ur home to make a Launch Party?

...

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.

as I said it before sounds to me like the big african/australian bird putting his head in the sand.

...

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.

of course that are the terms of foss.in projects sponsored/owned by a commercial organization like openSUSE or fedora have to pay. There wasnt a directly sponsoring fedora or RedHat for foss.in they did what AJ said they shipped speakers there Lennart Poettering, Dimitris Glezos, Jörg Simon all fedora guys here from europe, They had talks, and keynotes and a whole track there of course and are they there the prepare a booth to and I am sure the hung up a big banner.

Also corporate awareness is lower than Europe, here even Enterprise Linux has a small market.

We talking not about market for what purpose we should do that? We give away ur distribution for free. Its a long distance race invest today in markets of tommorrow ;)

...

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.

I planned mine alone, have nothing to do with lot of volunteers.

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.

that have nothing to do with the size of the country. There is only the count of Ambassadors from interest nothing more. Noone requested here to make on every place in ur country a Launch Party so that the size is from interest.

Even the 9 Ambassadors in Germany are, as far as I can see, in blocks of 2/3 in the same town/area.

maybe u should not look a same town, maybe u should ask u self why are there 3 Ambassadors same town. Its because I did a Launch Party there and so I fetched support. I didnt say a lot of windows user here and our university like scientific linux and all there hates openSUSE no I didnt, I made a Launch Party and I find some people. I did and thats the point

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.

ok, when u not doing Launch Parties what doing the Ambassadors from India then? Please tell me, say not I contribute to the wiki or such stuff, because thats not the job for an Ambassador.

In an anti-Linux atmosphere, it is already hard enough for us without the system itself (read, community) turning antagonistic to us.

~kknundy

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...

...

On 6/30/2010 at 02:13 AM, Koushik Kumar Nundy wrote: On 30 June 2010 01:18, S.Kemter wrote: Hello,

<snipped>

...

ok, when u not doing Launch Parties what doing the Ambassadors from India then? Please tell me, say not I contribute to the wiki or such stuff, because thats not the job for an Ambassador.

I can only speak for myself. In the past year or so - -I have done and personally overseen over 100 individual oS installs. -Handled openSUSE in two installfests.

Among them, there will be people who still use openSUSE, dropout's who went (back) to some other distro/OS?

-Taken introductory classes for primary school teachers, albeit as part of a larger group

Among them..

-provided round the year support for around 50 users at town/institute

Among them..

-guided new users

Among them...

-gave several impassioned 'Why openSUSE' speeches to groups and individuals alike. -Ran word-of-mouth as well as DVD distribution campaigns in Mukti, a LUG symposium with over 1000 registrations. -followed strict openSUSE oriented policy in our startup despite disgruntled associates -tried to help on the social media visibility front, mostly twitter.

All of you people could join together and celebrate and spread the word about openSUSE 11.3? An opportunity to turn few people who simply use Linux into major contributors, bring those who live in the past with 10.3, 11.0 to the current/future. I agree, you are not paid to work and we are just a community of volunteers. No one can demand, you to do something. Just suggestions. Thanks Nikanth

This I have done, african bird or not, without even a single piece of merchandise, despite two clear requests, one for merchandise, another for sponsorship. Maybe someone's done a lot more. Maybe I did not try out a Launch party. But when I am not immediately looking for membership, not looking for a software job(as Sankar P suggested in general), not doing FOSS or even s/w full time, not entirely financially independent, I'm afraid this will have to make do on my part. If that is not enough, maybe I'm not suitable for the program. I can step down if it is so.

~kknundy

P.S.[OT] A little clearer sentence construction would be really helpful.

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Moin, On Wednesday 30 June 2010 07:31:03 Jigish Gohil wrote:

On Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 2:13 AM, Koushik Kumar Nundy wrote:

...

independent, I'm afraid this will have to make do on my part. If that is not enough, maybe I'm not suitable for the program. I can step down if it is so.

~kknundy

Wasn't planning to add to this useless thread at all, but looks like instead of encouraging participation this thread's tone is more like "telling" people what to do, no one who is doing a volunteer work in his/her own time like being told what to do and if they don't do launch party they are not doing enough.

BTW 30 or 3 numbers do not matter, ambassadors should contribute in whatever way they can and want to. Launch parties do not cost anything, just get-together with few friends over pizza is all it takes. Organizing joint party with other distros is not because of numbers, it is because we want "open source" community to come together, show off all flavours and let people choose whatever they like. So launch party with just few friends or room full of people is all fine.

Any and all kinds of contribution should be valued, so if ambassadors do not feel like doing a launch party it is OK too, it does not take away all the good things they are doing. Kaushik it should be enough that you know you are doing a good work, ignore the noise. Thanks, Jigish. I fully agree. We shouldn't point to each other "what are you doing?", "Why aren't you doing xyz?". We all are friends of open source and even closer friends to openSUSE and try to spread the word of openSUSE. Any kind of doing this is very welcome and respected.

So, everybody keep up the enthusiasm for openSUSE. Best M

Cheers

-J

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Hello,

...

...

ok, when u not doing Launch Parties what doing the Ambassadors from India then? Please tell me, say not I contribute to the wiki or such stuff, because thats not the job for an Ambassador.

I can only speak for myself. In the past year or so - -I have done and personally overseen over 100 individual oS installs. -Handled openSUSE in two installfests. -Taken introductory classes for primary school teachers, albeit as part of a larger group -provided round the year support for around 50 users at town/institute -guided new users -gave several impassioned 'Why openSUSE' speeches to groups and individuals alike. -Ran word-of-mouth as well as DVD distribution campaigns in Mukti, a LUG symposium with over 1000 registrations. -followed strict openSUSE oriented policy in our startup despite disgruntled associates -tried to help on the social media visibility front, mostly twitter.

Koushik, this is great work! It's just not visible and I think that's why Gnokii was asking.

yes thats the point, I asked the question not to point a finger on you and say you do not enough. Its just debugging, whats going on with the Ambassadors in India.

Going forward with the ambassador program, I'd like to see more sharing of what ambassadors do to encourage and motivate others.

+1

I'd also like to hear about common problems and challenges so that we can work together on solving them.

+1

I've understood now a bit that India is different - thanks for all the comments in the thread,

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hi Satoru, Am Donnerstag 01 Juli 2010 07:05:10 wrote Satoru Matsumoto:

(2010/06/30 5:43), Koushik Kumar Nundy wrote:

...

I can only speak for myself. In the past year or so - -I have done and personally overseen over 100 individual oS installs. -Handled openSUSE in two installfests. -Taken introductory classes for primary school teachers, albeit as part of a larger group -provided round the year support for around 50 users at town/institute -guided new users -gave several impassioned 'Why openSUSE' speeches to groups and individuals alike. -Ran word-of-mouth as well as DVD distribution campaigns in Mukti, a LUG symposium with over 1000 registrations. -followed strict openSUSE oriented policy in our startup despite disgruntled associates -tried to help on the social media visibility front, mostly twitter.

Excellent !

As you may know, we have 'From Ambassadors' corner in our Weekly News. Example: http://wiki.opensuse.org/Archive:Weekly_news_121#From_Ambassadors

The corner is aimed at introducing activities of Ambassadors and we, Weekly News Team, hope as many Ambassadors as possible will report their efforts to promote openSUSE in their regions/countries/cities, so that we can share knowledge, experiences and ideas with each other. Thanks for reminding that :-) -- Sincerely yours

Sascha Manns open-slx GmbH openSUSE Community & Support Agent openSUSE Marketing Team Blog: http://saigkill.wordpress.com Web: http://www.open-slx.de (openSUSE Box Support German) Web: http://www.open-slx.com (openSUSE Box Support English) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+help@opensuse.org

Andreas et al, If you pardon my intromission on this subject I would like to propose something (even taking the risk of not being completely in possession of all relevant information regarding Ambassadors), if of course it's not being done: - From ambassadorial field experience, start identifying problems you have and possible work arounds. Remember that ambassador act much on local basis and this will probably in some cases arise different problems. By understanding them and trying to provide a workaround for them, we can actually improve. In addition if you believe you've found a 'secret formula', also note it and share it. From all this information try to publish a 'Ambassadors field book', but keep in mind that due to the nature of your 'localized' actions, always be sensitive to cultural issues. In corporate Public Relations, specially when addressing to minorities and international communities, cultural factors can be decisive for you success, I believe the same happens with our communities. In other way the 'field book' can provide also a more homogeneous base for training new ambassadors and provide them the know-how from those who have been there before, and not loosing important info. - Sensitive Topic > One of the most common problems in FOSS Communities for what I've seen is to get qualitative and quantitative data for analysis. Sometimes demographic data, social data, etc (no private data). Ambassadors have a good position to sometimes gather information and if you wonder if it is important to feedback it to the 'Strategical Marketing', thats because it's probably important, do such. This data can help improving your work and might even provide information to evaluate your goals. I know ambassadors is a matter of passion and speech to the public (which I don't have such sensivity), but sometimes it can be extended. Try to provide 2 way input: Community > Public Public > Community This might allows us to improve our representative with the public. - Need an idea to promove interaction with your audience in a fancy way of helping Novell and openSUSE? I've taken some time to provide this info to Fedora (https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing/Focus_group_SOP), feel free to duplicate it into your wiki if you believe it's helpful. This is one activity you can do your local enthusiasts and collect some information. It's one of the many ways of doing it. This information might help the community and novell to become more sensitive of the users needs and expectations on openSUSE and specially the community. This can help us to place better outputs amongst the community. Dare to try it, in the end of the focus group, if you can, reward the people with some merchandising and invite them be more active on the community and demonstrate (not lecture them) that we care about their opinion and we are active in trying to provide the best outputs possible. Please be mindful that I've never been an Ambassador, because I always believed I didn't had the right passion. I hope that this helps and makes sense. nelson On Fri, 2010-07-02 at 16:37 +0200, Andreas Jaeger wrote:

On Thursday 01 July 2010 07:05:10 Satoru Matsumoto wrote:

...

(2010/06/30 5:43), Koushik Kumar Nundy wrote:

...

I can only speak for myself. In the past year or so - -I have done and personally overseen over 100 individual oS installs. -Handled openSUSE in two installfests. -Taken introductory classes for primary school teachers, albeit as part of a larger group -provided round the year support for around 50 users at town/institute -guided new users -gave several impassioned 'Why openSUSE' speeches to groups and individuals alike. -Ran word-of-mouth as well as DVD distribution campaigns in Mukti, a LUG symposium with over 1000 registrations. -followed strict openSUSE oriented policy in our startup despite disgruntled associates -tried to help on the social media visibility front, mostly twitter.

Excellent !

As you may know, we have 'From Ambassadors' corner in our Weekly News. Example: http://wiki.opensuse.org/Archive:Weekly_news_121#From_Ambassadors

The corner is aimed at introducing activities of Ambassadors and we, Weekly News Team, hope as many Ambassadors as possible will report their efforts to promote openSUSE in their regions/countries/cities, so that we can share knowledge, experiences and ideas with each other.

So, if you {do|did|are going to do} something as an Ambassador, please post blog entry about that and drop us a note.

It is not necessary to write the article in English, if you are not good at writing sentences in English. In that case, just post blog entry in your native language and drop us a note with a short summary in English, for example: "I attended $LOCAL_EVENT_NAME as an openSUSE Ambassador. Here's my report on that event in $YOUR_LANGUAGE..."

Even if you are not good at writing actually, you can still report your activities by taking pictures at local events and uploading them to online photo sharing service like Flickr.

I know there's a proverb "Silence is golden" - but at least in marketing area, that's not true. If you are an Ambassador, don't hesitate to be big-mouthed. ;-)

Best,

I took the liberty to copy & paste from the above text and from Sascha's and create a new section in the new ambassador page with this contents: http://wiki.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Ambassadors#Sharing_and_Talking

thanks, Andreas

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