On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 3:56 AM, susmit shannigrahi thinklinux.ssh@gmail.com wrote:
This is not about active/inactive thing. This is about *dead* ambassadors. They are different.
I agree nobody should be removed if inactive, they need mentoring. I don't agree that nobody should be removed even if he left the project.
If someone want to leave the project he/she has to communicate to Membership Administrators (and then FAmSCo) and he/she will be removed, but with a specific request of the person.
The big problem is how we can understand if a person is inactive or dead. I know it seems a stupid question, at the end when we use the term inactive we don't talk about people that haven't do anything for an x period, but generally who isn't active.
I think we have to think at the problem from the positive side. Who is active? I just answered the question in my previous mail. Who is inactive? Simply who isn't active, and the community in the last years clearly express the will that we need to focus on active community. A person isn't recoginzed simply by being member Ambassadors Account System group and having a wiki page: an Ambassador is a person that do something (from the smallest to the biggest activity) and do this for the benefit of all community.
From my side, it would be difficult to decide who could be considered
dead or inactive. If someone think that he/she isn't able to do something for Fedora (in Ambassadors Project), he/she has to take on his/her own the decision to remove him/herself.
To be sincere a year ago I had a different vision, but sharing with community opinions I understand the important principle that we have to start from the most important side: the active one, working, that's for sure, inviting "inactive" people joining our initiative, suggesting ideas to make them again active etc.
I am, in fact many of us are not at all interested in knowing who are inactive. We want the ambassadors who are not anymore with fedora to be removed, just because of the simple fact is these are coming into our way with their dead wiki pages.
It's simple to understand who is active, I just said this. You can simply see who is reporting about events/initiative, who is involved in discussion in the list/IRC and who is organizing small initiative in his city/neighbourhood or simply talk with people around him about Fedora. From the last point I agree it's difficult to measure this, but this is the primary reason I think we shouldn't think to give a person active or inactive status.
Also I have problem with dead ambassadors personally.
When people cone us to me and say "Fedora ambassadors are non responsive...in spite of having 120 Ambassadors for India, nobody helped us", I feel bad.
Maybe it could be usefull, with the acceptance of the people (due to privacy policy concern), creating a page with a contact list.
Ambassador "job" is a wide range "job": many people aren't directly involved in discussion in the list, but they are doing a big an precious job. The big problem is that it's not simple to verify this phenomenon: I agree if someone tell me to think about a solution for really small initiative reporting, but, as it happened one year, or more, ago, I learned that an Ambassador from a small country (take a look at the M-L) wasn't able to connect due to a concrete lack of technology: from a outer POV everyone could think he was inactive, but from a inner POV he was active.
I think the idea someone expressed in the previous posts, to have a page could work, but each person would personally have to make the choice to have his name in a Contact list (please don't call it with "active" or "not inactive" tag). I'm sure this idea could be a real way to know who is available to be contacted.
From the past experience I could clearly say that just from a small
event you can simply understand who is active.
I hope to have cleared my thoughts.
Regards
Francesco Ugolini