Fedora Community Outreach Revamp - Halloween Update

The Fedora Community Outreach Revamp (FCOR) has been underway since summer of 2020. The co-leads, Mariana Balla and Sumantro Mukherjee, along with Marie Nordin, set out to repair broken bridges around Fedora’s outreach. We have made significant steps as a team towards completing the deliverables set out in the Fedora Objective. We are hoping to wrap things up in the next six months. As we move towards the close of 2021, we want to share the latest work that we have accomplished.

Recent accomplishments

The Revamp team was able to bring on an intern through Outreachy during the summer session. Marie Nordin mentored Dhairya Chaudhary who worked May-August on a variety of graphic designs assets related to the FCOR. Dhairya created many designs including logos, how to join Fedora graphics, badges, and our custom WorkAdventure map, the Fedora Museum. Dhairya has designed the Four Foundations bandana found in the Nest with Fedora swag pack!

The biggest hurdle that remains is to complete the documentation. The co-leads have been holding bi-weekly work sessions for a couple months to work through the sheer volume of documentation. We also coordinated a hackfest at Nest with Fedora in August to update the docs. We would like to send a big thank you to the participants for their enthusiasm and response to the session! The documentation is a work in progress, and we hope to have more to show in the next month or so.

What’s next?

In due course, we will establish a regular Fedora Community Outreach Call. These calls will cover a range of topics: current Fedora news, discussion of local/global/virtual events, resource development or sharing, informing one another about current and interesting Fedora and open source topics, etc. These meetings will be a great place to bring together existing and new folks interested in contributing to Fedora’s outreach. Over time, we would love to see some folks who feel inspired to revive their local Ambassador meetings, as well. We hope to have info on the Community Outreach Call shortly, stay tuned!

I chatted with @mattdm about this offline- and he suggested we add “Ambassadors” to the monthly call name. So, something like “Fedora Ambassadors Monthly Call” (not set in stone).

After some discussion, I agree and support this idea for a couple reasons:

All the teams (CommOps, Join, Ambassadors (Emeritus & Mentors as well), & Advocates) will still benefit from the centrally located and updated documentation/processes
From my observation, there are a lot of overlaps in the folks who participate on these various teams. My hope is that folks who join the monthly call will share updates with their respective teams and this will help build collective understanding. This is something we plan to encourage and is part of the “roll-out” plan we are working on.
Join SIG is purposefully low commitment, but those folks are welcome to join the call if desired. They would do this to learn more about the state of Ambassadors, promote/suggest resources, and share best practices around outreach.
CommOps has a semi-active pagure repo, the chat channel is semi-active as well. If the team wants to work more actively on initiatives they have a meeting framework they can use [0]. Overlap will surely exist here as well, so folks from that team are of course welcome to join
Advocates are folks who solely run events, it is more of a title than a team. They can go to the Mindshare Committee in some form and/or get started at this monthly meeting. Whichever place they show up, they should be also directed to the other, if that makes sense. Mindshare Committee gives approval for funds. The Ambassador group has the long term experience with the actual organization and outreach and can provide mentorship/guidance. Advocates should view both groups/meetings as a resource.

[0] https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/commops/#meetings

Comments

mattdm says:

How would the Community Outreach call relate to Mindshare Commitee meetings?

Is there overlap with CommOps?
sumantrom says:
To start, these are gonna be separate meetings and are un-related (at least functionally) for most parts. As the first draft of documentation and process is in place, the outreach revamp team will call forth people who are
- Fedora Ambassadors
- CommOps Team Members
- Join SIG Team Members
- Anyone community member interested in outreach
This is moving a step beyond the regular IRC meetings where folks who would come and discuss what’s-new-in-their-region plus, this time they will also be among those who are passionate and have the capacity will help to revitalize some of the local outreach/ambassador groups that used to be active.
riecatnor says:
I chatted with @mattdm about this offline- and he suggested we add “Ambassadors” to the monthly call name. So, something like “Fedora Ambassadors Monthly Call” (not set in stone).

After some discussion, I agree and support this idea for a couple reasons:
- All the teams (CommOps, Join, Ambassadors (Emeritus & Mentors as well), & Advocates) will still benefit from the centrally located and updated documentation/processes
- From my observation, there are a lot of overlaps in the folks who participate on these various teams. My hope is that folks who join the monthly call will share updates with their respective teams and this will help build collective understanding. This is something we plan to encourage and is part of the “roll-out” plan we are working on.
- Join SIG is purposefully low commitment, but those folks are welcome to join the call if desired. They would do this to learn more about the state of Ambassadors, promote/suggest resources, and share best practices around outreach.
- CommOps has a semi-active pagure repo, the chat channel is semi-active as well. If the team wants to work more actively on initiatives they have a meeting framework they can use [0]. Overlap will surely exist here as well, so folks from that team are of course welcome to join
- Advocates are folks who solely run events, it is more of a title than a team. They can go to the Mindshare Committee in some form and/or get started at this monthly meeting. Whichever place they show up, they should be also directed to the other, if that makes sense. Mindshare Committee gives approval for funds. The Ambassador group has the long term experience with the actual organization and outreach and can provide mentorship/guidance. Advocates should view both groups/meetings as a resource.
[0] https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/commops/#meetings