Mel 女士已经来到大陆,将在北京待到周三,之后从周三下午待到周六早晨。更多
的安排即将后续揭晓。Mel 女士不辞旅途劳苦,在博客上撰文分析了目前 Fedora
在中国地区的问题,准备在接下来的一周里与 Fedora 中国贡献者爱好者们讨论。
先简述如下:
0. 只有一个大使导师。这点限制了中国区大使的发展,影响了 Fedora 的品牌知
名度。预计解决方案:增加大使导师的数量。
1. 中国区的宣传材料很少。T-shirts 等材料在中国的制作分发很便宜,但是进口
很贵。预计解决方案:在中国区域内寻找 Fedora 宣传材料的制造。根据亚洲区大
使的情况来看,材料的管理也需要注意。
2. 语言障碍。 中英文差异是原因,但不是借口,参加其他语言 Fedora 社区的发
展。预计解决方案:增加中国区和其他地区的交流机会。
3. 在中国接触到开源解决方案的人很少。 有能力的人很多,但是知道如何和社区
和上游协作
的人不多。预计解决方案:提供更多接触到其他地区开源贡献者的机会,让本土的
开发者更多的了解开源的工作方式。
更多内容请参考原文:
First of all, thank you to Kaio for translating my earlier blog post,
and to everyone who’s responded – on the original post, the translation,
IRC, and the Fedora Chinese mailing list – I’m about to fall asleep
(jetlag) but will sit down and reply to everybody when I wake up
tomorrow morning.
My schedule in China is starting to settle down a bit – I am in Beijing
from today (Sunday) until Wednesday afternoon, and in Shanghai from
Wednesday evening until Saturday morning when I fly back to the US. If
you’re involved with or interested in Fedora or even FOSS in general,
and you are in either of these two cities, I’d love to meet with you;
propose times, dates, and locations and I’ll continue to blog here every
day I’m in China.
Today I spent the afternoon with Gerard Braad and his wife Shan, who
graciously helped with travel logistics (have you ever tried to book a
hotel via a website in a language you don’t know?) showed me around
Beijing and told me about their perspective on the situation. We have an
overarching goal for this week: RAPTOR-PROOF FEDORA EFFORTS IN CHINA.
What this means is that we need to spread and scale the knowledge here
that we have about how to participate in the Fedora community so that if
any one person is eaten by a raptor, the Chinese Fedora community is
still ok. Right now, the burden lies on too few shoulders – so few that
one person getting the flu could seriously bottleneck efforts the entire
country. Clearly, this must change!
The major raptor-proofing problems we have identified, and potential
solutions we’ll be working on
this week:
0. There is only one regional Ambassador mentor, so it is very difficult
to grow Ambassador presence (and hence Fedora brand awareness) in China.
Strong mentoring is particularly important here; Chinese culture is
considerably from existing FOSS subcultures, so teaching new Ambassadors
about upstream communication may take a lot of time and patience.
Solution: identify and train multiple potential Ambassador mentors.
1. There are few materials (swag/media) in China. This includes things
like t-shirts and LiveCDs, the latter being tremendously important in a
country with slow download speeds, fickle connectivity, and firewalls.
The price of manufacturing and distribution within China is very cheap,
and the price (and difficulty) of importing them from elsewhere is very
high, so it makes sense to make these things in-country, but it has
been difficult for Chinese Ambassadors to get financial resources from
Fedora. Solution: Get small quantities of physical media of all sorts
(pens, stickers, CDs, etc) to China and have them duplicated; Chinese
factories are fantastic at making copies, and it’s easier to hand
someone an item to copy than to go back and forth with written
specifications describing it. Also look into the state of the queue via
which APAC Ambassadors are supposed to be requesting resources; who
maintains it? Is it well-understood and publicized? Is there a clear
process by which Ambassadors can find the status and expected response
time of their requests?
2. The language barrier is a red herring. Yes, the Chinese-English
language barrier makes things more
difficult, and we should encourage and cultivate participation in (the
various forms of) Chinese so people can work in their native tongue, and
improve the cross-communications between the Chinese and English (and
other-language) speaking parts of the Fedora community – BUT it’s not a
blocker and we shouldn’t use it as an excuse. Solution: Set up
opportunities to cross-collaborate between China and other region, THEN
use that existing collaboration to drive linguistic crossover, rather
than always planning things the other way around. We’ll try to start
with a MIPS FAD centered around Beijing; more on this later.
3. There are very few people in China with exposure to the open source
way of doing things – there are many people with the technical ability
to contribute, but few who know how to do that work in the context of a
FOSS community and push their work upstream. Solution: See #2, with an
emphasis on getting people to meet other strong contributors from
outside their region. Can we bring some MIPS hackers from China out to
January 2011’s Tempe FUDCon to present their work to NA contributors?
Can we send EMEA Ambassadors to APAC events? Also, Ambassadors can focus
on getting individual people started in the community; it’s easy to
find, request, and use resources once you know it’s easy (people tend to
have the ungrounded perception that it’s hard, because they don’t know
what the process is).
Other topics on the table:
* Major dates for media availability in China: Software Freedom Day
(September 2010) and F14 release day (November 2010). We’ll treat the
first event as a test run for how to do media production in China, so
the second one will be a simple “just do the same thing again” execution.
* Marketing and Ambassadors in China in general, and the
relationship between the multiple groups and people involved in one or
both.
* Fedora-zh community infrastructure hosting. Where can this be
done? Right now, everything except the IRC channel (#fedora-zh) and
mailing list is scattered in an undocumented manner across individual
uncoordinated VPS accounts that cost a tremendous amount of money
relative to the average Chinese salary, so it’s a fragile network that
is in danger of disappearing with no backup.
* Getting introduced to existing Fedora contributors in the region,
both online and in person, and trying to understand the network of
contributors in China, and articulate the structure of that network and
the culture it works within back out to the broader Fedora community,
along with what work is being done here.
Thoughts? Other things we need to add to the agenda?
We’ll be in #fedora-zh (
irc.freenode.net) all week if you want to talk
or find out what’s happening in the region; I’m mchua and Gerard is
gbraad, and there are plenty of others in the channel who can fill you
in on what they’re doing as well. You don’t need to speak Chinese to
hang out in #fedora-zh (I sure don’t!) There are many people there who
understand English, and some of us also understand other languages as
well, so please come on in and join us and lurk; we’ll be posting and
logging conversations there throughout the week.
--
Take a Deep Breath out of Windows