tl;dr: FUDCons should not exist, they are segregating. Take ppl to Flock with the budget
instead.
At first, I joined Fedora because I wanted to maintain a few packages that were important
to some Brazilian government projects. Later I got to meet the Fedora LATAM community.
Long story short, I understood that, if I was part of the LATAM community, I would
actually be able to understand and help it.
When I decided to join the community, I was told that there were no active mentors in
Brazil, but since I was already an active contributor, it would be ok. I was then accepted
as a Fedora ambassador without reading a single wiki page (or at least, nobody asked me if
I did) and without even ever knowing who my mentor was (please, see [1]).
A few weeks after that I was chairing LATAM ambassadors meetings. The only reason that
happened was because I read supybot's manual, so whenever the chair wouldn't show
up, I would start the meeting myself.
Long story short: I lead (or led) some of the LATAM meetings.
We barely use our budget, as you can find out in our balance, which is not open. The
complains here are about the delay on reimbursements, which are caused for lack of
training on how to fill tickets, which is understandable, since some ambassadors (like me)
do not have mentors. Remember that being a mentor here is pretty much like being a king:
the last mentor must make you the next mentor for that country ( that's how it works
in LATAM). Sometimes they stop contributing and do not assign new mentors. In my country,
the newest ambassador is a Red Hat employee who nobody ever heard about: go figure.
As bex said (and maybe was too kind about it), FUDCon is a GREAT event, it DOES bring
LATAM community together, but there are no contributions coming out of it. It is pretty
much an even to talk about Fedora or other technologies to users OR to students (windows
users). OK. These are developing countries and we want to take Fedora there to get a
bigger user base and bring new contributors on board. The problem is that, in the end,
FUDCon IS a segregating event to keep LATAM and APAC contributors away. Before judging
this statement, PLEASE, read [2], [3], [4] and [5]. In the end of the day, FUDCon is not
a good event for long term contributors and these contributors are not allowed to get
funded to attend Flock. I'd rather see FUDCons extinguished, using the budget to take
a few people from LATAM to Flock, who could then transfer knowledge to people here in
release parties or FADs, than having people who can NEVER even see the guys who develop
koji* or take care of infrastructure i
n person.
Look at other communities like Debian (that organized a very successful DebConf in
Nicaragua in 2012) and OpenSUSE for reference.
PS: This is not a post against the LATAM community at all: Some people here like
echevemaster, potty, neville, itamar and mayorga are very competent. My point is that they
should be spending their time focusing on Fedora problems instead of local community
problems (we have other ppl to do that).
* Dennis Gilmore loves attending FUDCon LATAM - we love you Dennis ;)
[1]
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ambassadors_Join_start
[2]
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/flock-planning@lists.fedora...
[3]
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/ambassadors@lists.fedorapro...
[4]
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/flock-planning@lists.fedora...
[5]
https://meetbot-raw.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2015-06-03/latam_amb...