 Hi everybody. Good morning. Welcome to our session. My name is Marie Norden and I am Fedora's Community Action and Impact Coordinator. I will let my co-hosts introduce themselves. Hi everyone, I am Mariana and I am a Fedora contributor since 2016. Hey all, I'm Shumanthro. I work for the Fedora TV team. I have been in Fedora around 2016. March, so to speak, has been a long, long journey for me. Since everyone is sharing, I started in 2013 at Fedora. So, we are here today to talk about Fedora's community outreach revamp. And I am going to start out today with a little bit of history. How did we get here? And yeah, basically that. So, the Ambassador Program for Fedora is a long-running program. It's been around for over 15 years and it's enjoyed a lot of success in its time. I would say over the years, it came up against some struggles, just changes in structure in who is participating in people's lives. And beyond that, I think we can say maybe the Ambassador team grew, but it wasn't sustainable. So, so, you know, it's kind of like a problem as I came into this position. People were feeling a little bit disjointed from the program. Like they weren't sure what to do. We had a couple changes in how the finance was structured. So, things were just a bit confusing, right? So, when I came in, I actually had a chance to connect with some team members in my team at Red Hat, Open Source Program Office. We kind of looked at the Ambassador Program as a case study for how to implement change. So, from that, I was inspired to write up a proposal to change it. Beyond that, we had other teams involved, right? We had the Joint State, which kind of came out of maybe the... How do I say this? It came out of the unproductivity of ambassadors. So, we had that doing really well. We also had ComOps, which existed before the Joint Team, before I came on even. So, and before Mindchair. So, we have all these different teams. Who's doing what? And in different ways, different parts of these teams have been kind of left behind. So, when I wrote the proposal, I included everything in there so that we could really figure out what the outreach teams were doing. So, after I did the proposal, put it to the Mindchair team committee and it got approved after we completed some community feedback. We put that right back in there. And we got started to work. And the first thing we did was get co-leads, which are Mariana and Simondro. And I cannot say enough about how much work that they've put in to this. I'm going to let them talk about that work. But that's how we got here. So, with that, I'm going to hand it over to Mariana. Thanks, Marie. So, I joined the revamp in July 2020 from the Mindchair ticket, where Marie has initially posted the idea for the revamp. And once we agreed on the co-leads of this, which were going to be Simondro myself and have Marie as a supportive member, we started planning ahead on what our next steps are going to be. So, we initially created a trailer board for documentation and started putting action items there. And we created timelines for our action items and how these are going to be implemented in the future. And we also have a public hack and de-file where we keep notes on our weekly meetings so the three of us meet every Tuesday. Once we were done with our internal planning, we started announcing the revamp to the community. And we had two kick-off meetings with community members. And we also participated on a council video meeting. And if I'm not mistaken, this one is on YouTube. You can check that. Later, we had also an MIA meeting and asked me anything meeting where we answered to frequently asked questions about the revamp, some of them from the community and some of them we came up with them because we thought there are interesting information for the community to know about the revamp. Our very first action item that we took was actually the ambassador's cleanup. This whole effort was to make sure that we have active ambassadors. So we looked back and checked who have been inactive for the past six months. So starting from November, this was something that we worked on November and going back six months, we identified who has not been active through their FAS account. We identified those ambassadors, we reached out to them and those who didn't respond back, we moved them to the emeritus group. Later, the next action item we worked on was the community outreach survey. This was one of the most interesting thing that we have done so far, in my opinion, because the results that we got back from the community, from this survey, was some of the results I didn't expect them to see. So on this survey, we asked ambassadors and contributors in general, not necessarily people who are officially ambassadors, of how they contribute, how they participate in the community, how they organize, how they do outreach in their local communities and what they wanted to change in the future, what were their proposals. And the most interesting result of all is that we found out that people have been organizing events without actually letting the rest of the Fedora community know. So they were now asking for help from the Mindshare teams, which means that we have a lot of Fedora activity out there and we didn't know about it. Which is a very interesting result and we're working with this piece of information from now on. The latest update we have from the event is that starting from two weeks ago, we're now an objective. This was not on our initial plans, but came up due to the discussions we had with the council and with the wider Fedora community in the past months. And now we are an approved Fedora objective for the next months. And we will be joining council meetings. So Sumantra and I are now members of the council since Marie was already there and expect updates on the revamp on the upcoming council meetings. So this is pretty much what we have been worked on so far. And I would like to have Sumantra explain what the outcome is going to be in the upcoming months. Okay, thank you, Mariana and Marie for kind of briefing up the stuff. I'm Sumantra, I joined with Mariana when Marie advised us to form this small team to revamp. So one of the core things we wanted to understand that Marie mentioned was to make this program more sustainable. The only biggest factor that we could do was to take this program and make it like a reference model for any other ambassador program to grow. So we took inspiration from other open source ambassador models. And what we did, we started our journey to make sure that this becomes a smart, modern and more approachable ambassador program, like open ambassador program. One of the ways that we figured out we could do that was to make sure that the documentation is really, really clear. So one thing that came out of the survey was to make sure that the introduction process or the joining process, so-called, we call it the onboarding process in Fedora, to be as clear as possible and as low barrier as possible for anybody to enter. That's how we started creating something called role handbooks. And these role handbooks are gonna be our documentation for reference models for any of outreach teams. Some of them are mentioned by Marie in this, in the first part of the talk, which was the joint SIG, the com ops, the advocates and the ambassadors. So all of these would have specific role handbooks of how you would join these teams and how they are gonna function. We are looking forward to right now having, you know, we heard a lot about how non coders or a lot of documentation folks or translation folks would like to join Fedora project. We have a new thing coming up called Fedora Zine that is gonna focus on making sure that the non contributors get a chance and our awareness to make sure that they contribute to the project. That's one thing we have kept in mind from the surveys. Another very important thing that we have done after looking at the way that we want to sustain with the long-term strategy is we want to make sure that there is an identity that goes with every single outreach team. So they can work not as a single unit but harmoniously together. And that's how we are trying to build or translate more of these role handbooks and all the documentation into as many languages as possible. And what that would do is to make sure that all of these teams can work together across the globe like a single unit. And that's the goal. As a long-term strategy, we see a lot of improvement in terms of involvement. Some of these improvements of how we want to involve more people, how we want to take this forward are shared in our every month blog post as we go on. So there's a community blog where we are posting regular updates about this revamp. And if you're interested, go figure out the updates and let us know if we can take your inputs and make this better. So every month we are probably or rather few months back we rolled out a survey. We're gonna have surveys every six months and one year and two years. So that's gonna be a part of our long-term strategy to make sure that the involvement keeps going on and the awareness is maintained throughout the program. So that's the sum up of all the how we want to present the outreach program for the new generation. So let's go for the questions. I was just about to hop in and give you your five-minute warning, but this is great. I do not see any questions that have been asked in the session yet. So I'll throw you a couple. So when are you hoping to sort of have this completed? So we're looking at a 12 to 18 month timeline from the time it was an objective. So I guess middle of 2022. I mean, there is a lot of work and it is the three of us. We hope to get a whole team going of temporary task force, but the reality of pandemic life is it hasn't been that easy. So the approach that we have found that works is to approach individuals. We know they're interested in XYZ kind of work. So we've managed to involve people from all the different teams in it and we have some support, but it is just us kind of powering through a lot of stuff. So it's gonna take some time, but I think we're looking at 12 to 18 months from now. Okay, so I know there are some people who are new to this whole concept. 42% of people said they hadn't heard of the revamp before this talk. So are there things that people who would like to contribute can do to jump in and help now or is it still sort of wait until more things are in place before they can contribute? So yeah, you can totally jump in. The best way to do that is to jump in the MindShare channel and IRC and kind of just say, hey, I'm interested in working on the revamp and tell us a little bit about what you wanna work on. I wanna work on documentation. I would like to work on graphics. I'm great at organizing. So really if you come to us and have some time, we're absolutely ready to incorporate you into the mix. There is also a telegram chat, we're chat for the TTF. We call this a TTF, a temporary task force. A great example, I can share the telegram link in a second. A great example where we had more people joining us is when we analyzed the survey results. We had very valuable feedback from community members that had experience and that had worked in the past with surveys. So yeah, I will share the telegram chat for anyone who wants to join. Having the horse, that was great. Thank you for that. Are there any other questions from the audience? Can I ask the audience a question? Like, what kind of thing are you here today? I didn't wanna make a whole poll question because there's so many different options, but are you like a professional? Do you do community outreach in your organization? You know, if you feel like sharing in the chat, I'm just kinda curious like who's here today and I guess that's it really, but I would love to provide any more information. Technical writer. Cool. Yeah, the Joint Stick is a totally, it's an amazing place to start with Fedora. I can just talk a little bit about that since we have some more time. Joint Stick, they kind of help you learn about the community, the basics, and how it kind of works. Gives you a little bit of a taste for the culture and they get you hooked up with the teams that you might be involved with working with Rell Eng, Engineering Manager. Awesome. Yes, it definitely is, but it's interesting because a lot of the folks that are in Joint Stick are also in Cobb Mops, have also been ambassadors. So we know that a lot of these team folks are super interested in outreach and talking the talk about Fedora. Yeah, and I will say that no matter what you're interested in, there's probably some space for it in Fedora because operating systems need so much more than code. We need documentation and design and marketing and outreach and all kinds of great stuff. So find a way to get started. Love some more project managers. There's Matthew Miller in the chat.