The Fedora Community Outreach Revamp Objective(FCOR) co-leads Mariana Balla and Sumantro Mukherjee have been working on documentation for the last six months with the support of Marie Nordin(FCAIC). New documentation has been created and outdated documentation has been revised with valuable help from the community at Nest with Fedora 2021. Most of this documentation has landed on the CommOps docs page. The updated documentation is still a work in progress and the FCOR team plans to wrap this up in the upcoming months with feedback from Ambassadors and folks who are interested in outreach.

The FCOR team is excited to see this initiative move to the next step! With the first draft of documentation in place, we would like to invite the following folks to join us for a monthly call:

• Ambassadors
• Advocates
• CommOps Team Members
• Join SIG Team Members
• Any Fedora community member interested in outreach

If you’re asking “where do I sign up??”, fill out this whenisgood by end of day Tuesday, March 1st. If your curiosity is piqued, or you want to learn more, read on…

What’s the point of the monthly call?

The Ambassadors call is an evolution of the IRC meetings that stopped a few years back, intended to help bring everyone together on a common vision. This new monthly call will run indefinitely. It will be a place for Ambassadors and interested folks to collaborate, to maintain our collective vision around outreach, and to get support for initiatives and events.

The FCOR team plan to have at least one of their own in attendance at the meeting for the next six months. This is to ensure that the Objective work transitions into functioning teams and that context can be provided as needed. We also plan to make any improvements to resources as they are actually being used for the first time. The FCAIC, Marie, will chair the meetings to start things off. After we settle in to the monthly call, we can rotate the chairing role to others who are interested.

This call is not meant to replace local Ambassador meetings. Long term we hope those among us who are passionate and have the capacity will help to revitalize some of the local Ambassador groups that used to be active.

Who can join?

Technically, everyone! These meetings are meant to be monthly catch-ups of Ambassadors to discuss local events, share resources, or inform one another about current and interesting Fedora and open source topics. It is also open to anyone interested in outreach related to Fedora, internal or external. These meetings are a great place to bring together existing and new folks interested in contributing to Fedora’s outreach.

What is the format?

The initial idea is to hold monthly, 1-hour meeting over video chat and discuss. For the first few calls, we plan to focus on engaging folks with the documentation and various updates we have put in place as part of the Objective work. The documentation is not fully complete, and we need feedback to ensure it is functioning well and holds the correct information.

After we work through feedback, the calls will evolve. Participants will have the chance to introduce their local community, share an event they are organizing or bring up for discussion any topic that they judge is useful to examine. If the majority of attendees agree that a different format might be more suitable for these meetings, changes can be implemented.

When is the first meeting and how can I join?

The date and time of the first meeting will be decided with a whenisgood poll where anyone who wishes to participate can respond. Make sure to choose your timezone before you enter your availability on whenisgood. Please fill out the whenisgood poll by end of day Tuesday, March 1st. Once we determine the best date/time to do the kick-off, we will broadcast that info to Ambassador and outreach related channels.

If you want to participate but the proposed dates and times don’t work for your schedule, please leave a comment on the right of your screen with a proposed date and time, or general availability notes. We are trying to suit most timezones but this becomes complicated quickly. If there are many interested folks who are unable to make the times we are suggesting, we will look at setting up another call.

Background

Since July of 2020 co-leads Mariana Balla and Sumantro Mukherjee, with the support of Marie Nordin, have been working on the Fedora Community Outreach Revamp Objective(FCOR).

This objective will be an initiative to revamp several community outreach teams within Fedora that are struggling to function, or need more support to truly become a success. The objective will bring together Ambassadors, Ambassador Emeritus, Join SIG, and Advocates all under the same umbrella of CommOps in a clear and cohesive structure.

This FCOR revolves around processing feedback from the Fedora community and its various outreach groups to help restructure ongoing and new processes. CommOps, Ambassadors, Join SIG are important teams that exist to make the Fedora Project a sustainable open source project by implementing internal and external outreach. Many of the Objective deliverables are completed or in progress.