On Friday, March 01, 2013 13:28:49 Karsten 'quaid' Wade wrote:
I include evangelism - of the type we discuss here where you give
talks
and such - because I all the evangelists I can think of are also doing
other things in the project. Thus, the evangelism becomes an extension
of their contributing. For example, Fedora Ambassadors are evangelizing
in ways that contribute back to the project.
Arguably, evangelism itself can be a contribution. Not automatically,
though, if you don't actively try to engage back with the community. For
example, if you make a presentation available under an open license so
others can reuse it - that's a contribution.
Being a contributor is more of a mindset - you think in ways of "how can
I best do this so it is helpful to others and they can reuse it in
whatever way they need or see fit."
I think that's fair. This discussion serves to demonstrate that the line between
community segments is fuzzy.
I'm about to trigger some old memories for Karsten...
When we started working on what would become Fedora Ambassadors back in 2005 (under the
"Community Marketing Contacts" name), our thinking was that it would be a
sub-project of Fedora Marketing that would not provide a direct material benefit back to
the Fedora but would be a grassroots movement to expose more people to Fedora. It very
quickly exceeded our expectations. It had a low barrier to entry that allowed people to
easily get started with the project. They could be Ambassadors exclusively, or they could
branch out and begin working in other projects. The result was an explosion in the number
of evangelists involved with the project, many of whom did begin to contribute to the
project in other ways. It's now impossible to deny the program's value to the
larger Fedora community.
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Patrick W. Barnes
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