As a part of the Community Outreach Revamp the Objective co-leads, Mariana (marianab) and Sumantro (sumantrom) along with FCIAC, Marie Nordin (riecatnor), tried to capture the “bright spots” of what motivated the engagement of Fedora Ambassadors. The team approached the situation by developing a set of questions and implementing a community survey.

The idea was to primarily capture:

• Why people do outreach for Fedora
• How people participate in outreach currently
• What do people want to be doing for outreach

The community survey received over 40 complete responses (over 100 incomplete) and the results we found provided some interesting and clear insights for the Revamp. The co-leads, FCAIC, along with Vipul (siddharthvipul1), Ashlyn (lilyx), Alberto (bt0dotninja) and Sayak (sayak), spent several meetings analyzing the responses question by question.

A summary of our findings:

• There were regions we didn’t receive any responses from. The revamp team decided to check in on them and devise a plan to help increase participation in these regions. One of the ways we intend to improve this situation is with the translation of the Role Handbooks.
• The involvement of students at scale can be valuable to Fedora Project. The Survey made it clear that involving students at the University level is key to our success.
• The survey results pointed out that awareness towards the non-coding contribution areas lack exposure, how to receive financial support in particular. This points to the need to increase Mindshare visibility. We also have the Fedora Zine (currently in progress) to help create awareness around the non-coding contributing teams within Fedora.
• When asked “What” made our Ambassadors happy, an interesting observation was noted. On one hand, a lot of our contributors felt that it was fun sharing fedora and it was about meeting great minds, working with the people who understand the culture. On the other hand, some of our contributors noted they prefer working independently. The community preferred to incline with a DIY mindset, having a bunch of resource artifacts would help the community members more particpative. Supporting local Linux User Group (LUG), would make event become more accessible to contributor.
• When asked “What kind of participation one had in the Ambassador Program” the results inched slightly towards how contributors loved the project and pushed daily/regular use of Fedora in their dayjob, friends and family. Technical Presentations/Demos were mostly the weapon of choice for our Ambassadors in their journey.
• Despite COVID-19, most Fedora community members took part in ~5 odd events (vitually) in the last year. In light of COVID, and the improved accessibility we have seen, we should move to make virtual spaces more reachable, such as Discord, Telegram, Matrix(meet people where they are). Because of the high attendance at virtual events, we feel it is important to work on creating some hybrid events for the future.
• Two of the favorite activities Fedora Ambassadors want to take up are to evangelize to students, developers, and other technical group and actively participate in events happening nearby and talk about Fedora. We found that folks don’t prefer to organize events or spend time creating social media posts. It is clear that folks are doing outreachy and events without much communication back to the Outreach teams as a whole, or out to the community at large. This got us thinking about creating some process (with some automation hopefully) for folks to drop what they did, and for the CommOps team to be the ones to promote the work.
• Install fest numbers have declined due to issues faced by new comers while switching from other platforms to Fedora. Install fest are probably not the future as the survey responders point out. However, the Demo sessions w/Swag still seem important, as expected.
• The things Fedora Project can do better can be bifurcated into multiple parts:
  • Incentives
    • networking
    • career opportunities
    • educational resources
    • demos that contributors can learn from
  • Fedora the OS/project should
    • care more about end users
    • focus more on brand recognition
    • demos/marketing/promotion
• We should promote AskFedora
  • add it into the installer
  • adding it to the getfedora.org page