 So hopefully it's recording. So welcome to my talk, which will be about federal swag. Does everyone know what it stands for, swag, the stuff we all get, and see promotional materials we keep away at conferences, or users, contributors, et cetera. I had a similar talk at the last year's forum, where we discussed a couple of ideas. So this talk will be a lot about the progress we've made. And we managed to execute one of the ideas we had last year. So last year, the subtitle was, let's make federal swag. So this year, we finally made federal swag. And we indeed have, because I have one of those things. At least for FATCON APEC, they produce federal swag. So if you don't have them, then go to FATCON APEC, they usually do. So why don't you? It's just I'm sure you have to say that we did that. And normally we know swag, and we went bowling at the end of our subspeed, so it made sense to give everybody subsuggest. Yeah, so my name is Yuriy Hirshman. I work for the FATCON APEC, but in Fedora, besides, for example, Fedora Packager, and mainly Fedora Ambassador, I'm still very involved in the production of swag for EMEA. So I'd like to start with the strategy. That's also one of the topics I discussed last year, because before we had any kind of strategy, it was a very chaotic thing, I would say. We always got together, and everyone had some great idea about some swag. It was like, yeah, I saw Debian Sorgs at FOSDEMMEN. We have to have those as well, et cetera. So to us who are in charge of production, we were pretty much overwhelmed by ideas what we should produce without really any lasening if it has any marketing impact. If it does any job, you know, to promote Fedora, et cetera. So fortunately, last year, Fedora as a whole got some, let's say, structure in strategy. So we now know better our target audience. They're usually like, let's say, short-term goals for that particular year, or let's say, two years. And it actually helped us to make the swag production to be more targeted, so we know better what to focus on. So for example, this year, the target were Python developers. So we produced a lot of Python-related swag that we can use at conferences. I'm going to talk about it a bit later. So it was definitely helpful, and that's improved quite a lot since the last year. So it's not ideal, but it moved at least a bit from the chaotic way I've got an idea, and it's cool, and we need to produce it, and let's do it to something like, yeah, we've got this target audience. We want to attack this year. So what could actually attack them to feather out? What could make the marketing a promotional job? So speaking of target audiences, this is also stuff I talked about last year, but I think it's quite important to realize that we don't really have one group of people that we target with the swag and our marketing in general. But actually, we've got quite different kinds of target audiences. So one of them is current users. So those are people that are already using Fedora. So our marketing goal should be to keep those people on Fedora, keep them using Fedora, and ideally, make them more involved. Those people usually have already some, sometimes even emotional relationship with Fedora, and they want to express it. So for such a target audience, stuff that can show their affiliation with the band is ideal. So it's all those Fedora band, its swag, like t-shirts, hoodies, and stuff like that. That's mainly the users. Then a sort of subset of this group are contributors. We often forget about them. So we produce t-shirts and whatever. And it's all targeted at users to get more people attracted to Fedora. But we forget that we've got, as Matthew said in the morning, we've got up to 4,000 or less contributors to Fedora. And a lot of them are doing a great job in their spare time at evenings. And sometimes it makes miracles to just show them that the project really appreciates their work or the community appreciates their work. So I'm going to talk about it a bit later as well. But the experience is with this. And that's also one thing we shouldn't forget about, that we also have people that are a lot involved in Fedora. We don't really have to convince them that Fedora is great. But we should also don't forget about them with swag. And then the last girl, which is really the one that is the most emphasized when you are doing marketing and since swag is part of the marketing, it's the potential users. People that sometimes they don't even have a clue what Fedora is. Sometimes it's people that know a little about Fedora and you need to convince them or attack them to Fedora. Those people, they are usually not the swag that is just about branding. Maybe you have a sticker without any information, just the logo, and you give them the stickers. It's usually just a piece of paper for them. So for these people, the ideal swag is something where they can at least learn a bit more about the project or some incentive to look into that. So they go to our booth at some conference and they learn about Fedora and you give them something like so far DVDs have been doing this job. They are going to go away. I'm going to talk about it as well. So it's something like this. But if you produce just buttons, stickers, whatever, in the best scenario, they put it on their laptop besides dozens of other stickers. And it does some little branding job recognition job for us. But it's not the ideal thing. So now I'm going to talk about the gun situation. So we finally have official merchandise store that had cool stuff store. I'm not sure if it's, I checked it just recently today and I actually didn't find any Fedora swag there. So I'm not sure if it's just a short term thing or it was a move there. But yeah, it's been there since last year. They offer a couple of t-shirts, marks, what else is there, maybe hoodie. And it's good for our, as I spoke about, current users, people who want to show the affiliation with Fedora. And they usually don't have a problem to pay for things. They go to other booth conferences and they beg for stuff like, see, Debian guys, they have a hoodie and I'd love to have Fedora hoodie and just shut up and take my money and give me the hoodie. But I think the problem with this is that Fedora doesn't have a legal entity. Her head is not really interested in selling her merchandise. So we, there is no legal way to do it right now or, it's... Well, there was interest, but it died mostly because there was no idea as to what to sell there. There was several, okay, now get us the ideas and for the U.S. in the U.S. there must be some interest. Yeah, but do you want to do it through the third parties now? The Cool Stuff, I had Cool Stuff stories also run by like a third party company, Unique Stickers. It's called Unique Stickers, but currently they also sell Fedora t-shirt and they want to expand the offering with hoodies and stuff like that. Actually, the cooperation with Unique Stickers is like a pretty good thing. Everyone got a sheet of Unique Stickers, like Fedora Stickers from Unique Stickers in the morning. So they support Fedora with some face-wagging and they are really helpful. They do discounts to Fedora users or whatever. So I think this is probably more viable. Instead of starting up the whole business where you need to have an online store, then you need to do all the procurement and payments and stuff like that worldwide. It gets really complicated. It's just better to do it in cooperation with Linux-friendly vendors like Unique Stickers. Definitely, it's an improvement since the last year when we didn't have anything like that. Will it be possible at some point to use those companies to actually sell hoodies and stuff like that at conferences? So like, I don't know right now how it would work, but basically they ship us a package, we sell what we could, then we ship it back or we keep it for next conference. Yeah, that's a tricky thing because usually, for example, if you go to FOSDEM, you should have some kind of license to do business there. I mean, you can just put the t-shirts on the table, you collect money, then you send it to Unique Stickers, then it's done. Once there are some guys from a financial tax collector, then it's simply not legal, I think, this way. Well, most likely it's doable unless someone shows up to check all the legalities of those shops there and do it like a legal way. I think it would be just too complicated. Can we just allow them to Unique Stickers and just distribute them? Somebody would approach you and say they want to brand a Unique Stickers to sell? Who gave it to them? I think it can't... Because they produce and they make a profit Yeah, they got it from the council. The deal is that we are not going to get money from them, but we are already getting face-whack from them. From time to time, they just send us stickers and stuff like that that your ambassadors can use. I was not really involved in that deal, so I don't know any... I was forbidden for the EMEA area five years ago. We had one producer who was in my house and said I will produce under the hood of Ratman. And we also talked to the rules that time because of the legal issues and we don't get any permission to do anything. We had the potential under from Hungary as well. Who produces stuff that beyond other projects and they also didn't get through. I don't have the answer. I hit the same block as you did. Personally, in Europe, at least me, more or less pissed off because of this behavior that it's now possible to do things which we came up five years, six years, ten years ago. That time we also founded an MPO to do some things which was also pissed off by Ratat because of legal issues and now it's possible to do. Yeah, I think it has a lot to do with stuff that UNIX stickers is US-based. You have to go to the US and meet the right people. Yeah, that's the answer. But UNIX stickers booth at the conference in the US and meet booth and then meet the right people. That's the way it is. I can't really do much about it. When you say we get some stickers, no, not we, the North American and the Westerners get some stickers there, we have still prepared it from our budget phase. From a simple point of view, I see it as an improvement at least for the users that they can at least finally have some option. Yeah, but it's quite unfair. I mean, we have three times as much budget anyway, as EG, APAC and the thumb has. And to be honest, the people from the budget, they fight and a little bit of swag. I mean, APAC is two third of the people of the budget there, so we need some living more as the North Americans. So if you buy this, all budget is gone. And they have three times that budget and still getting that kind of fees, that's unfair. That's really not a really full class. Yeah, like, we are gay on this. I think we can change it in this room. Are we gay on this? I'm not sure if we can do anything about it, but... Yeah, but we can communicate it very openly. Yeah. We can communicate it more than once, believe me. Yeah. Last year, I had some pictures of what we are producing and then when I go through it again, just, you know, we are still producing the basic stuff, like stickers with Fedora logo and Fedora logos of Fedora editions, case batches you can put on, like, replace the windows inside logo or whatever. We also have to produce the tiny stickers that you can put on the windows keyboard to replace the windows logo. We don't produce spills no more. It's basically because it was always produced by Christoph in Germany and we don't have any connection to that render and so there is no particular, like, other reason behind that. Then we produce patterns, pens. We don't produce marks anymore. Also, again, it's not that we would really be against that but basically it's also a problem with marks, you know, to ship them. They are quite heavy and they can bake. Also, quite often, so, yeah, instead of one mark you can ship like 100 stickers so it's question what's more valuable. That's the basic stuff. Yeah, DVDs, that's always a topic in the last couple of years. So, currently we are producing, for Fedora 24 we produced 1,000 DVDs of Fedora Workstation for EMEA. At the big we produced 5,000 and the big was just a couple of years ago. Like, Fedora 18, 19 we produced 5,000 so since then it's gone down to 1,000 and I think we cannot really produce less because those DVDs are pressed and the most of the cost is fixed to set up the machines and stuff like that and the more than you produce the cheaper unit it is and it doesn't make any economical sense to produce less than 1,000. So for the... Excuse me. Do you have the number of DVDs sold or is it just EMEA? This is just EMEA. EMEA is probably the only Asian one. I wouldn't go back to the plan we had once producing together with EMEA but it's a problem for Fedors they are very patriotic in their countries they want to produce locally so right now the DVDs are producing in EMEA and we searched not long as they came under the price from EMEA but now we have drone DVDs with an hockey sleeve this time it is even fair from my perspective I would go back to producing them with EMEA again as I said we cannot produce enough DVDs but we produce this on 1,500 3,000 a year 4,000 a year One DVD was 2 years One DVD was 2 years No, it's cheaper than EMEA but it's so burnt I really see it because a lot of people come back to me and speak to me but it's cheaper for EMEA we will probably the plan right now is to produce another 1,400 to 5,000 and then we will properly discontinue it because the demand is really low I don't really see any new computers coming with DVDs this time I produced them pretty late no one cared, no one asked for them at some point it was like wow no one has started working on DVDs because you need artwork you need to get the cool the render and stuff like that so we produced them pretty late and no one really complains so it's a bit of a sign that I demand anymore and it's a technology of the past and the point was set after February 25 and we will discontinue that EMEA I can accept what we do with the other areas where we have to handle it DVD and swag is handled locally by the regions the decision is just for them I agree but what to do with the Congress with a little bandwidth like Africa or Latam I have no idea about Latam they would have they would have a decision by themselves as I said we have our budget and we produce that we would need more yes a lot of notebooks and laptops with a DVD drive but it's very horrible to download a DVD in Cambodia so it takes me several days also to Africa or Middle East it's from EMEA or from like the European Union it's extremely difficult to ship anything like it gets lost like when we send it like you can send it with primary services like a DHL or UPS and so on and then I remember once I didn't know the price upfront and for shipping a package to Jordan we paid $1500 for that it was just insane and it was with DHL the package was there in two days it was delivered without any problems with customs just couldn't afford it was the same remember you did ship something to me that I can send it to Cambodia because it was cheaper to send it from Germany to Cambodia as from Jack to Africa it's because in other countries DHL doesn't really provide the standard mail services but when we use the standard mail services for countries like Middle East or Africa it really gets stuck at customs sometimes it disappears forever and people like it's I suppose it must be a variable or something because those people ask for like three times of the price of that package like the customs ask them for $300 you know just to get that package so really it's to have for the package $900 when he came to me I don't know do you have an idea that we went to Robin and even Robin did you know what else can we send us send a letter from Red Hat and then Red Hat legally did that so that we could add the DVDs but he got it out two months after he went it also takes time sometimes it gets there within a couple of days and the customs keep it there for weeks and they tell them ok pay us $300 and you have it immediately or wait so what I wanted to say is even though those countries may still need the DVDs you know the standard production and shipping we have for ambassadors doesn't really work because it takes time it gets lost or it gets stuck at the customs so probably like the free media service is better for them if they need the DVD someone can bring it for them and send it as a simple package that you know the customs don't really care about much but anyway also people ask a lot about USB drives unfortunately I don't still see them as a viable replacement because of the price I repeat it every year like that the capacity goes up but the minimal price stays the same so for the same price couple of years ago when you could get like one gigabyte now you can get four gigabytes and so on but we'd love to have for example two gigs USB drive that is really cheap for example for one dollar and that would be just enough for us but the thing is that the price is still like I don't know at least two, three, four dollars and that's just the price then the reliability usually if you buy the cheap USB drives usually easily like one out of four or five is bad play broken so it's not very reliable either and another thing is it's really difficult to load stuff on that in large scale like I can't even imagine loading Fedora on one thousand USBs like you can you can send them blank USBs and tell them load Fedora on it yourself but even like when I prepared some Chinese with Fedora and I prepared like for example 25, 30 USB drives the humans are a little slow and it took me a whole day to get it done it's just a funny thing in Suzer they distribute the flash drives throughout the company like we would do in Bruno and Red Hat everybody gets a couple flash drives and after a few days they collect them back and they expect people to upload it so gout so soon okay you can think about it that's an idea that's an idea it could make the possibility to produce USB drives and the slave of the USB thing the ribbon or whatever outside can be branded with Fedora what do you mean USB keys? there is one thing which is small as a USB stick but it scores enough data to the URL but we did the research remember even the ad thing branded as Fedora and then just produced for gig parts by 20,000 and sell them or send them away tell the people loan it for yourself and brand the USB the problem is to the price it's like the DVDs we produce now the past ones are 35 cents US dollar cents it's still like 10 times as much with 1000 you have to say it's much cheaper it's like 25 US cents so that's the thing what we've been experimenting with in the Czech community is like a user handbook last year I had just a couple mockups of the front page and some idea what should be included and stuff like that this year I already have it but it's in Czech because it was written by Czech contributor so we used that as a pilot we used that at a couple of conferences we gave it away at universities, high schools I think the experience with that is pretty positive so it can partly replace the DVDs as an incentive to learn more about Fedora it doesn't really have the Fedora itself in it but it should work for example like meeting someone from the community or attending other booths to an installed system and getting familiar with the system so it explains him the values of Fedora what Fedora is about, where to get it how to get it on a USB drive, how to install it how the desktop works how to install applications and basic stuff we are now currently working on the second edition it's already been translated to English and now it waits for typesetting and painting I was hoping to have the English version here also for you to review the problem is it hasn't had any kind of project manager who would be kicking people around to finish the translations, finish the proofreading and stuff like that typesetting but finally the original guy who wrote it in Czech is now working on the English version to make it ready for painting so hopefully in a couple of months we will have it in English as well then we will see if it... we also thought about the translations how to easily translate to other languages and actually we ended up translating the files directly because if it's Satan, the sources are Satan in Asciidox stored in Github and it's like very easy for the translator to just because it doesn't change that often we plan to release a new version like every year so it's not like it would change like every week or a month but luckily we came up with the conclusion that translating the Asciidox files directly is probably the best way to go instead of hooking up the two systems like Zanata even though if someone has an experience with that and want to help with that and finds it better we don't have a problem with that but we've got the experience with the translation systems and we found this good enough and here this is the audience for this the potential users the handbook doesn't really have any new information for someone who is already using Fedora but it's a really nice introduction into Fedora it's also written the way that it's not extremely really specific that it means it's written for Fedora 24 and when Fedora 25 is out then it's updated it's written the way that it's fairly generic and still helpful and useful so this was written like a year ago and I think it's still not like updated it's still usable, not a lot of things have changed we had a banner just before after we painted that we had a dispute with the owner of Fedora.cz domain so we had to move the Fedora community portal to Moe Fedora.cz which is like my Fedora.cz and it was just after we painted the book with all the links to Fedora.cz and it's a printed stuff it's not a digital stuff where you just change it in a second but we already have a new batch that has Moe Fedora.cz but yeah, just go on as I spoke about it Python specific stuff swag so we I think it's all on this picture if there is anything missing as I said at the beginning for this year Fedora Python developers focused for us so we had a pretty good presence at PyKron US and all I think this and this was produced for PyKron US but in EMEA we reused the artworks so we painted it and we used it two weeks ago at EuroPython the biggest Python conference in Europe and it was also pretty successful. I've got a couple of players if you want to take a look I think those players are pretty well done and that's also one of the things I wanted to see last year like we had a lot of swag that was really just about vending containing only the Fedora logo doesn't they didn't contain any more information at best maybe a link to getfedora.org and I think this is for someone who wants to get all and more about Fedora getting something like this at the booth is still better than giving him just a plain Fedora logo sticker because even if he goes through it in five minutes and then throws it away I would call it a success story because even in five minutes he can learn quite a lot from this about Fedora so that's one of the examples I know there was a big discussion about flyers on ambassadors mailing lists last year like some people don't find it very eco-friendly printing flyers that usually end up in a bin but I still think it's a good incentive you can get at the booth to learn more about Fedora this leads me to I call it better swag at conferences I mentioned that earlier this talk when we went to force them people complained that we'd love to have Fedora t-shirts, hoodies, etc I also explained that there isn't why we don't have them, we don't sell them anyway when I looked at the total cost of our presence at force them like I don't know the budget is for example two thousand euros or two dollars and then I was like well if we produce 100 t-shirts we give to users that are like have a good conversation with us and they seem to be pretty enthusiastic about Fedora then it would be maybe like 10% of the total cost of the conference and it would make definitely better impression by those users so that's what we did at force them this year we produced around 100 something like I am Fedora user proud Fedora user t-shirts and it was pretty successful we indeed made those people happy what we were thinking before that we were trying to find a way how to give those t-shirts away like what should be the criteria of course if there is someone you meet there and he always asked about Fedora and he is a long time user then you can give him the t-shirt either way but then you still should have some formal criteria for that Matthew Miller came up with an idea because for the big events we make the Fedora batches for attending that event that you go to our booth you can scan the QR code and get the batch so we were like hey we can actually make people or ask them to get the batch first like get all the people who are already users and have pass accounts easy and then you can get the t-shirt and it can make other people to create the account and actually then we can see what people created a fast account at FOSDEM 2016 and later we can check if any of them actually continued somehow contributing to Fedora and then we can actually get some feedback about this giving away t-shirts makes any impact or not I think someone did a pretty thorough in the FOSDEM batch so it was pretty useful I think anyone else can add it on your blog right so we did the same for EuroPython we don't really have any data for that yet the major problem with this is actually technical that people have a lot of problems creating an account in Fedora account system it always like typed out and it was done well there is a major rewrite happening they talk about it in the infrastructure talk it's going to be FOSDEM free that should probably solve this hopefully because we had that particular problem at FOSDEM and then when I spoke Michal Ciprian who was at EuroPython at our booth they had exactly the same problem people were trying to register to get the fast account and then to get the batch and they just couldn't and couldn't have a major problem with this so we've got 10 minutes left so what's been also in the program is that now we've got a guitar repository with designer sets how is that possible oh that's maybe as long as it's available we've got at least some ambassadors now let's say this some of us of course have a totally problem with creating swag there is one in EMEA who has a totally problematic problem for him to buy the ticket that he designed even if he wants to do everything different and yes from the last year he got from me the way how he should do it but he did not sit down and accept it but he made after that a ticket marketing tried to change that and now comments have taken that over without any thinking on everything and if you see there was last week a week before a particular community talk how to get things out of the design team but the problem is it works out for everything because there are all different methods so we discussed last week in Boston you did it and the problem is Reddit doesn't want that the local gets out that kind so it will be an internal asset for just recycling and you have very low interest but that's on the end of the problem it's not actually still an improvement because in the past when someone had to recreate the art blog because for example one designer didn't know where you know that it's not just an entirely legal program I told it already that all the ABAC DVDs are misproduced it's also you cannot take an RGB picture and then print it it turns out black so we have black DVDs now instead of blue so it's paper purple yeah we had one purple why not use the service of the professional which is awful as a service where it's a problem of the impossible with that is it so hard to create a ticket it is okay if you don't have the knowledge we will definitely also help find a way to improve what we want to produce but why is that important why every other bus of yours we've got four minutes and use it and don't know what it is I get you I've got four minutes left some of you made a ticket and designed it and wanted it powered by Fedoros and then it turned out he meant the case batches and I said oh you mean the case batches yes I showed him and then I gave him the PDF for the case batches and I got case batches besides yeah yeah I understand the idea yeah it's just I've got a couple of like the last thing that they would say that swag ideas should be better like a list of wishes so the last one I'd like to realize in the future is yeah as I mentioned at the beginning we shouldn't forget about it the current contributors and last time we produced something for them was ten years of Fedora t-shirts I think it was when Fedora 20 was released just before that we did the Schradinger scat t-shirts but since then and it's been almost two years nothing and I could at that time I could see you know what impact it could do because a lot of people were like it's also a lot of people didn't expect something like this so it was like a nice surprise for them it was like really nice touch from the community on the other hand we need someone who will just you know push this because you need some budget for that you need some ideas when there is the problem was how they push it yeah for you I guess it's a lot of pushing I had no time to come up with something and the problem was everybody accepted or wanted to have a blue one like the ten years one again and Fedora 21 was the flavors thing so sometimes it takes a lot of time to think about what you can do I mean the miracle was the Fedora 19 one before it was easy I'm working with Masha to create like some generic Fedora contributor t-shirt with something that is timeless that can be produced and it should be just for the contributors because it's not just about I think the t-shirt or whatever it has you know twice the value if the only way to get it is by contributing to Fedora that you cannot buy it somewhere you cannot get it in some other conference and stuff like that so it can be simply like really just Fedora contributor generic thing but the only way to get it is you know through some recognition based on your contributors to Fedora and yeah that's it for me we've got one minute so if you have any other question anything you want to discuss if not then that's the end thank you for your attention so I think for them even you said that people are trying to register by dating on your fewer than three batch so like how few because what I saw was about like 10 newcomers living like each year I didn't really I don't think I counted the people I forced them and I definitely don't remember now how many couldn't register and gave up in the end but it was certainly a problem like a lot of people but I don't know how many of them did register in the end after like five attempts or how many of them just gave up because we told them it was written on the table if you want to show us that you got the batch on your phone or whatever and people took pictures of that and maybe sometimes they didn't even come back and complain about it so it's hard to but it's definitely a low number of people that get it yeah we gave it to some existing ones as well in the end it would make no sense if there was somebody who was actually contributing registered to give them a t-shirt actually the interesting thing which I saw was like every time 100 batches were collected so I was thinking was it related to the number of t-shirts? yeah probably