robyduck added a new comment to an issue you are following:
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@robyduck I realize that we are a volunteer organization, however
volunteering comes with some responsibility. The volunteer gets to decide what they are
going to do but is also making a promise to the rest of us to do it.
No, sorry, a volunteer is not making any promise, neither to you neither to the project,
your interns do. It seems to me you are putting all in the same boat. Volunteers offer
their spare time to commit something they do to the Project, and even if this is just a
few lines of code or an event per year, we should appreciate that and don't close them
out of the door.
It seems like with ambassadors we don't have a willingness to
define what we want from people. The current guidelines are apparently so flexible we are
willing to consider the person who is inactive for 17 of every 18 months equivalent to the
person who answers emails daily.
This applies not only to ambassadors, but to all groups.
To be more specific, we seem to consider all of the following people
Ambassadors (non-exhaustive list):
Someone who helps with one event per year (the three month active person mentioned
above)
Someone who answers emails sent from new people
Someone who serves in an elected position
Someone who does things but never reports them
Someone who has been inactive in all ways for a period of less than 18 months
Someone who has done one of the above at least once in their life
Correct, and we can continue with lists like that even for websites, design, docs,
marketing and and and....
Just go to a repository and type:
*git shortlog -s -n*
Because we have no way of differentiating in these people we run into
problems where we simultaneously have a large number of contributors and not enough to do
what we want to do.
I honestly have no opinion on how the title is managed and how the FAS group is arranged.
The ambassador program specifically has a long history and many topics came up already in
the past. It is a bit superficial to say we don't want them anymore if people
don't reply immediately to an email or organize at least 2 events per year. And you
admit you don't even know much about mentoring and the FAS group. Ambassadors actually
are the only group which still has a mentoring period, that's something other groups
don't do anymore. Because of this, in the past people wanted to set the ambassadors
title even for life...(which also is not correct IMHO)
What does bother me is that we can't effectively handle some
things because we can't figure out who is doing what, if anything. This is even more
terrible of an experience for people trying to figure out how to work with Fedora. As an
example, I have had a reason to send 24 ambassadors across 4 countries email over the last
6 weeks. I've received exactly 2 responses. This is a horrible response rate.
Agree.
We can't fix this without identifying people who are actually
willing to answer email. However, there seems to be unwillingness to even ask people what
they are doing. Where is the evidence that so much is happening from people who will be
so offended by us asking what they did that they will leave?
I suspect we are actually scared to find out exactly how many of the 500+ ambassadors are
actually active. However, without this data we won't know where the holes are. Right
now several regions have been struggling with quorums at meetings. Wouldn't it be
better to know that 85% of the active people were present, rather than 3%?
Yes, that's true. Personally I don't care if we have a rate of 3% or 85%. How
would the rate be in a websites meeting? Or how much is it in a design meeting? It is the
same, that's why I don't agree if we point fingers just to the group we really
need out there, because they help us more than others to gather new contributors.
@robyduck I agree with you that we want to tread lightly and to move
in a way that is cautious and assumes good intent. However, I don't see how asking
someone "Hey, we know you've been doing good things over the last few months.
We'd like to help increase the effectiveness of your efforts by letting the world know
about them. What have you been up to?" is a horrible request.
Your point about scaring people away from becoming Ambassadors if they see lots of rules
or requirements is appropriate. However, we are also demotivating those we have when they
see that everyone is treated the same without regard to their actually activity, if any.
I haven't seen any serious proposals that would add a ton of requirements. I think
the most strenuous might be my suggestion that every so often we just ask people to tell
us what they are doing so we can both know what it is and figure out if it is something we
can somehow hook up to fedmsg.
As I said above, if you want fedmsg to measure ambassador's activity you will likely
fail. We cannot measure that. Before you understand my reply wrong, I agree we need to
compact our ambassadors group to work better and with more active people, but we cannot
achieve this if we say we would drop people from the group if they don't do xyz within
a year. I totally disagree with this hardliner requests.
Speaking about promises: It is true, I am probably one of those who reply to emails and
also does much more stuff than others. But remember that I do that because I know I have
the possibility to say: "Sorry, I will go out with my family and do a lot of sports
in the next months rather than doing anything on Fedora. I am not obliged to do anything,
that's why I like to contribute. Probably, if I would be obliged by a rule which says
I have to commit at least 20 commits a year (even if I normally do at least 500), I would
not like what I am doing that much, unless I am paid for it. Yes, returning to the first
line now, I am doing this in my spare time and therefore I can do with my time whatever I
like.
All this said, and I know you understand my strict answer to your strict statement, I
still agree we need to improve a lot of things in the ambassadors group, but we can do
that with other actions rather than pointing out how many minutes everyone of us is
contributing.
``
To reply, visit the link below or just reply to this email
https://pagure.io/famsco/issue/438