On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 9:36 AM, Rangeen Basusherry151@gmail.com wrote:
Very true. Local contacts can serve requests which originate from within a rang of a few kilometres. Anything beyond that boils down to the same postage issue. Even the next city is out of reach for local contacts. People are not willing to travel and collect the media themselves. It is much easier for them to obtain a pirated Windows CD.
I tend to think that I have had enough talk about "Windows CD" (pirated is a singularly unfit term to use for software) or, "other Linux distributions". From what I recall, the LocalContacts was an experiment to ensure the following:
[1] local outreach happens [2] a locally available support system is incubated
I am yet to see a positive outcome of either goals. Which is why I had the query about whether it is possible for the local contact to get a geographic profile of requests.
If we do not have enough local contacts to be present across every city we are receiving requests from, our question should be "why not" and, we should start thinking about what can be done. If we have existing LocalContacts not providing media at-cost, our questions should be "why can't they" and, we should start a conversation about how they could be doing this.
One alternative is to use VPP [1] .
As much as I like everyone to receive a media. I guess that just bulk producing media to continue shipments is not going to be a good thing. There should be ways and means to outreach. For example, there are UserGroups a plenty - can we figure out a way to tie into them as well as have them accountable for shipping the media. I know PuneLUG does an awesomely good job of doing so, how about other UGs ? The UGs at institutes for example - does their charter allow them to ship media at-cost ?