 Okay, so welcome to my presentation everyone. It's supposed to be about FAMSCO and it's possible transition to FAMSCO or some similar thing. My name is Yuriy Aishman. I'm still the chair of FAMSCO even though I'm not really proud of that. I'd really love to hand that over to someone else really really soon. And why? The fact is that the FAMSCO is dead nowadays. Like I still feel some responsibility so I'm trying to maintain some level of activity so if we have any requests or any problems to solve I'm trying to respond and stuff like that but the FAMSCO itself has not been active for several months already. Like all the people in FAMSCO have been serving in the body for like at least me for the last three and a half years and we hear that guys it's quite similar and I feel that most of us are kind of banged out from that. So even if we decide to keep FAMSCO we will definitely need a lot of new blood. I don't think there will be a lot of people from the current FAMSCO that would turn for it again if we have any elections. Like at the beginning of the talk I'd like to start with the tasks of FAMSCO what FAMSCO is doing nowadays so if we have any new body what are the tasks that the new body would have to take over. So FAMSCO is a federal ambassador steering committee so we should steer the ambassador's project to look at its big picture solve like directly the sub-project and so on. It didn't really work that way before when I joined FAMSCO I'm going to talk about it a bit later on the slide. I'm going to talk about what has changed in the last two or three years. The thing is that when I joined FAMSCO it was pretty much like we did mostly day-to-day business like we had to approve pretty much every single expense ambassadors did if someone wanted to buy all the producers for $50 FAMSCO had to vote about it and approve it. So that's something we have changed but it should be the leadership of the fund ambassador's project. Well in the last couple of years it has also taken care of the original support budget so every year we get money from our heads from Opsas and we are trying to spread it in the regions and spend it wisely. So even though we have moved most of these regions FAMSCO is still the body that is responsible for that and Odex is responsible for Mandash. We wanted to keep a portion of that budget for some kind of like global initiatives or something like that and it never really worked out or we didn't really have any like global initiatives it was always if we wanted to do something like the regions just took it and they allocated some of their budget to make it happen in the regions. Here we also take care of the membership administration that also involves the mentorship program that we have a group of mentors that make sure that the people that become ambassadors are capable of doing that and know enough about the project and so on. So we still approve like new mentors. We also are trying to set the rules or at least guide the mentors what the new ambassador should know and what should be his or her profile. We also solve escalations if there are any problems in the regions and some conflicts that can always be raised to FAMSCO. Fortunately we haven't had such an issue for a long time. We also review events so if one of the agents want to organize federal activity day or for example FAT, APEC or light them they always go first to FAMSCO and if FAMSCO likes the bit like the choice of the region and approves it then they go to I suppose it's you Matthew right about now. Sorry now I was distracted by you. It's awesome. So like who gives the final approval for FAT cons? So yeah we are basically moving as we just need to be in the council. Okay so now it's the council but historically FAMSCO always pay a part of that. So they review the bit and if it was okay then we just forward it to FLP or now the council. FAMSCO also served as a coordination between agents. So it was a place where we discussed all kinds of activities so that we can coordinate things globally. It worked pretty well. Even actually when for example one agent didn't have a representative in FAMSCO there was also always a bit of disconnection between the other agents and the other agents so it definitely this is definitely an important function of FAMSCO to people from all agents can talk to each other or at least the representatives. And it's also here I also tend to enable the collaboration with the rest of the project. Sometimes it works better sometimes a bit worse. So what has changed in FAMSCO in the last two years pretty much since I joined FAMSCO in 2012. So we created a new system for budgeting. As I said before that every single expense had to be approved by FAMSCO. So we were busy just by just approving the tickets. We didn't have enough time for the more important debates and steering the sub-project. So we moved pretty much all this to the agents closer to contributors. And I must say it has worked pretty well. All the agents have picked up that task pretty well. At the beginning we set up some general rules, some boundaries like for example limits. If there is an expense over $2,000 it still needs to go to FAMSCO. But otherwise it's all in hands of agents. And we just make sure that the rules are set and work. Nowadays it's the regions that plan events and activities. At least in EIMIA and APEC we organize federal activity days. Like in December when we plan activities and events for the next year. And it's always the base for the budget. The region creates a budget and sends it to FAMSCO. And then FAMSCO puts it together as one budget proposal and sends it to... Well, historically it was always OSAS if it's going to go through the council. From now on then it's a council. And we also created a clear criteria to remove inactive ambassadors. It's not really a move, it was a long heated discussion over that. And apparently it's a very sensitive topic for many people. Ambassadors complain for years that we don't really have any process how to remove inactive ambassadors. And then there are countries that have for example 10 or 15 ambassadors and maybe two out of them are active. And then it's confusing for users or contributors when they want to contact an ambassador from that country and they try five ambassadors and none of them nice forms. Because they didn't take one of those two. So we wanted to find a way how to clear the list of ambassadors. On the other hand there was a big pushback on removing ambassadors completely from the group of ambassadors. So then we came to a consensus that we don't really remove ambassadors completely from a group. There was also a philosophical question if the status of federal ambassador is for lifetime. So once you get it you have it for another or if it has some conditions and you need to be active and do something to have the status of federal ambassador. In the end we decided that the consensus is that it's for lifetime. On the other hand to clear the list of ambassadors we set a criteria and if the ambassador doesn't meet them then we flag him as inactive and he's removed from the list. On the other hand he's still in the group and whenever he or she feels that he wants to contribute again then they just need to go to fast account and switch the flag back to active. We managed to clear the list quite a bit I think. You're setting their fast account to inactive or you're just marking it in some way? I think the fast account is marked as inactive right? Maybe it sounds like you saw this already but Apache gets around this by having a meritous thing rather than saying inactive. We basically just say like if you had reached a point where you just don't have time to contribute we want to recognize that you have merit and all this stuff. There was a big pushback. You earn basically all you have to do with Apache still having time to contribute before you can toggle that and really all you have to do is go back and say hey like my day job now. A lot of people argue that it's really difficult to measure the activity of federal ambassadors. Someone doesn't have to be active on mailing lists. If you are from a different country you know nothing about his activity but he still could be active locally like organizing local events. Just not reporting about them and stuff. The consensus was that it's really hard to measure the activity of federal ambassadors so we can't really judge that. We don't really want to remove them really completely. The main issue with people that just disappear without saying go work. We just needed to get rid of them. People argue that it's not a fact to remove them completely from the group. The consensus is that they are still in the group but they are not publicly visible for. So it pretty much solves the original issue and it's still okay for people who are not fine with removing them completely. We also wanted to have the criteria being independent on someone's decisions because historically for example the Indian community just made a list of inactive ambassadors and those were removed. Kushal was not extremely happy about our solution but it was also one of the objectives people had that they didn't really want to have this process be dependent on someone's decision. If there is, for example, fight with different groups and they would propose to each other to be removed or whatever. So this is pretty much independent. Robert, do you know exactly what the criteria are? I think the ambassador needs to be inactive for online activity. It's not just an ambassador activity, it's the whole fedora activity. It's really just to remove people that are not interested in Fedora at all anymore. But let's get to FOSCO, which is supposed to be a Fedora Outage Steering Committee proposed by Matthew like 10 months ago. He proposed it in FOSCO Tech that we could actually think about this and to have this new body and potentially replace FOSCO with it. I actually found it a good idea because FOSCO has an agenda that definitely goes beyond boundaries of ambassadors. For example, that we manage the regional support budget. This budget is not meant just for ambassadors but for historical reasons because it's mostly ambassadors who manage the budgets and organize even activities that actually have some budgets and need some funding. So it was mostly related to ambassadors and other groups that didn't have that much time to care about this. On the other hand, we don't really want to exclude anyone else. So we'd like to be inclusive in this and invite other groups in Fedora actually participating in this as well. So for me it was a really good idea that we could create a body that can include other groups. And involve them in the processes ambassadors have been doing almost exclusively in the last couple of years. And frankly, after the changes we have made, I don't think ambassadors need their own steering committee. We've moved so much agenda to the regions and it has really worked pretty well that I think we've got the body would have capacity to oversee other sub-projects as well. And shared committee would definitely support collaboration. As we could see even in FAMSCO, one body and regular meetings really helped coordinating stuff. At least it worked for the regions. So I'm pretty sure it could also work for example for coordination between ambassadors, marketing, design and so on. So I really like this idea. On the other hand, we haven't moved that far from then. And that's when I like to start the discussion because I've got a couple of open questions. So should FAMSCO be an additional body? Should we keep FAMSCO and then just create another body above that that would oversee ambassadors and FAMSCO and other groups? My opinion is we shouldn't. We should have as few bodies as possible in my opinion. And just solving problems by creating new bodies and committees is not a good way to go for me at least. So if we decide for something like FAMSCO or whatever, I think it should definitely replace FAMSCO. What should be its agenda? It should be community operations. That's what FAMSCO mostly did. Or should it be outage activities? Daily creating metrics for those activities and daily focusing on the outside. One thing I want to add is that when I used the word outreach here originally, I was thinking in a very general broad sense of just kind of... And after that, this pointed out to me and I agree that outreach often has a connotation of specific diversity outreach. So there's maybe some good reasons to avoid that name here for avoiding confusion. But when I talk about outreach originally this, I really just meant something... All the activities like ambassadors and marketing and things that could go to outside of our community rather than things that are focused in the community. So I'm not disagreeing with anything, I just want to clarify that. Because we have had two or three IRC meetings about this and I could see that there were definitely different views on this. That some people understood it as the outage thing that we should really focus on the engaging people from the outside and so on. And some people, as me, understood it as the replacement for Fomsco mostly. And a body that would take over the current agenda of Fomsco. Yeah, so that's definitely a good topic for discussion. And also what subject should it over fee? Because like originally I think we meant the ambassadors, marketing, design. But then there may also be other sub-projects like documentation. I think there will be a long list there. My question is that everything has a nice orderly place for it to connect up to. Not necessarily to be controlled by, but just a place where it plugs into a tree rather than having a disparate mesh of bubbles for our work chart. Because it had a hop with stuff and that didn't really out-rich as such. I wouldn't really correct documentation that didn't out-rich. For me the out-reaching stuff is more marketing, magazine, but not out-reaching stuff. I would just agree with that. Marketing is the first thing much more successful than getting someone to come to the Nora. It's one of the first things they interact with. But then I don't see it as the operating system is the first thing that they interact with. I see it as it's probably operating system. So when I talk to people about why they saw the distribution of the Metafidora, one of the most common answers is I had to do something. I did a Google search. How to do it? So I can Google it to you now. So that's why documentation for me is part of that. Yeah, for me it's part of the product. Out-reaching is getting someone to get the word out. Documentation helps to pull that out. For me it's also a guy's own. It's definitely tied to the product a lot. On the other hand it's really connected to the out-reach art. So that's the product. It's part of the product, not of the message. It's having all the areas of the message to have. Maybe connecting the docs more into the best code. Docs fits with marketing and that group in sort of an internal collaboration context. I said my user experience context. When you talk about the ambassadors and marketing, how many features that we've made in the distribution, if you want to coordinate that having good user experience, then you have your ambassador saying here are the awesome new things in the door. And you have the marketing that will push you those features. And then you have the docs so that once you use the lights on that book, they know how to grab them. So that's where that comes in as far as my conversation. But that's like a governance group. My concern with this has been that kind of collaboration could happen without a governance group. And it makes more sense to have individuals driving for that kind of collaboration between different groups. And then if you build up organizational structures to support the people, they're doing that. They're not doing it around the way they're doing it. So I want to contradict that because from the design team, a lot of times we get told, oh wouldn't it be awesome if we have this and this and this and this that gets dumped on our lap. There's no direction. There's no copy. There's no like high level plan to it. It's just like, oh I thought it would be cool to print out a thousand four branded stocks. And there's nobody like as a physician to say, is four branded stocks something that's going to help us? Is that something that people want? Is that like, there's no, there's no like thread or like, there's no like thesis to like this is this larger effort we're trying to put forth. And Fedora's stock supports it because it plugs into that system. It's not. It's just like you said, organic. It's very ad hoc. And the problem that we have on the design team is we get, we see them all coming in and we're just like, well let's see. So you don't have any guidance to prioritize things. And like to further that point, like we get the order for Fedora's stocks and we're like, well, and I'm never heard of this person before. And like you try to find out if this, because sometimes they're like, oh Fedora's is on and you're like, well, here's the authorizing. And a lot of times it's just someone thinks it's a good idea to have Fedora's share and they're not involved in it and there's no way to sort of have a vast account but it's hard to tell. This is why I have a question of the division between design and marketing and part because I don't generally, until I've been here for a while I didn't know anybody in design and there's not a lot across communication and those two groups would actually be talking a lot and that doesn't happen and the same thing with, there's not a lot of... Like I believe like, design should talk but it's, because we do a lot of other stuff other than marketing to let it roll. Can I go back one second? One of the things about that idea of having individuals, that organic thing of having individuals collaborating, I think that's really good and work really well when we have strong people in this position. One of the things I worry about is if you have some sort of structures there and then that person goes on other things or is busy for that release or the structures make the vacuum obvious rather than it's just people based, we noticed the vacuum three months later when we were like, oh great, nobody did that, who was doing that? Oh my goodness, Yaroslav was doing so much work, for example. And so having those things a little more formalized, can I help with that? Even though I really see the appeal of what you're saying about... We don't want to have bureaucracy, burning things to the point where you've got to go through the bureaucracy already. The other side of that concern was after you proposed it, the idea was very slow at the moment. There weren't people standing up. Sometimes things should be slow. You've got to spend three grand on socks. It shouldn't be a thing. People get very enthusiastic, especially about stuff. I'm an eco-hippie, so it kind of hurts me internally. Because it's like, what is going to happen to this stuff in the years, or in the years? Where is it going to end up? And I understand people's enthusiasm, and I don't want to shoot down their enthusiasm and they can feel bad, but at the same time it's like... At the same time you feel bad. Yeah. But it's one of those things like think about, don't just think about, oh, wouldn't it be cool if we were handing out socks at this conference and thinking about, like, ten years from now? So for me at least, and following this conversation for a while, I've been here for a minute, but I still feel pretty new. I'm still discovering new pieces of fedora, treasure troves of info every week. And the thing I think here that's important is that everybody assumes that, because we're a FOS community, is everyone's responsibility, and it's no one's responsibility, just like the WikiVills. There's no dedicated team that finds that common thing that everyone needs to do, which is messaging or outreach, and that's just that set of people's priorities. It's up to the docs to talk to the people and their teams, and it's up to the design people to talk to their teams, that because community is everyone's responsibility, it's no one's responsibility. So codifying it into something that is a manifestation where people can point back to is important, and it's something that we haven't tried to do. Ambassadors has been carrying that torch for a really long time, right? It's like all of this stuff falls under ambassadors, and everything that is words, they get printed on stuff falls in the market, and everything that's visual falls onto design. But there isn't a coordinating body between all of them, because everybody thinks that each one of those silos does this one thing, and how this just stops when it comes back. There's no overarching plan. Right. It's the art, this would be nice, this would be nice. I think it lacks the form, because there's no, this is what we're going to try to push. This is where we, this is the plan for, like, even in the magazine, we just sort of write articles. We had some sort of, like, plan of, okay, this is, like, and it ties into the project plan entirely, but it sort of tailor that for the outreach. And then we use that as our guide, or, like, but then, yeah, it's like, come to act sort of a committee, or it could just be a group of, okay, we come up with a plan, and that way, when something comes up, it's like, well, how does this apply? I don't know how that works, and the government, you know, it would be a journey. They are, I'm completely okay with that. It was supposed to be a discussion. We're going to solve the next 10 minutes, right? Yeah. Matthew, you have gone up to the foundation for the outreach. Yeah. Maybe the answer is a little kind of twofold. One, it's a messaging body, not an average body. And then it becomes much clearer who needs to work with this body. And the second piece is that gives it better definitions. One of the things I was hearing in your definition was it's kind of a jungle owner. It's everything that's not in this other group. It's not a defined collection of things. And so you're going to wind up with a screwdriver sitting next to the knives and the forks, and the screwdriver's like, I'm bored here. Great. You're right. That was bad. Yeah. So, I'm already... Do you have more slides? Yeah, I've got one more. It was meant to be for Rami, but let's do it at the beginning, at the end, for example, because I've got one more slide. It was pretty much a proposal for how the body should be structured from Fransco. Actually, I came with that first, and then Christoph, we had a proposal that was almost identical. So, how we see it from the point of view of Fransco... So, Fransco, whatever it's going to be, should take over the agent of Fransco, as it is probably now. And then build on that. We really need to... We can't have any vacuum after this continuing Fransco, because really the budget we oversee nowadays is almost $100,000, and we really have the structure is actually well designed and working, so we can't just leave it in a vacuum. So, the new body would definitely have to take over this, and then, well, we can figure out what to include in the go. Like, my proposal, in my opinion, is that we should start with ambassador's marketing and design, because those three groups, I think, are the obvious targets for this. And then, again, as it goes, we can... Well, it makes sense to, for example, include another sub-project, because we feel that some coordination with them is necessary, then we can, again, work on that. But starting with something like... Let's include everything that is not under Fransco. I think it's a bit too vague plan for the beginning, so it's really better to start with something smaller and then add. And the structure, pretty much, we agree, at least I and Christoph agree, that we should move from completely elected body to more appointed members, something similar to the council, because firstly, I really like democracy, but I don't think it's the best model. In the elections, people vote, and most of them know very little about the candidates. Democracy and voting are not always the same thing, and that isn't for voting, it has not actually resulted in democracy. So the idea with council moved from elections to other appointed members that are active in that era of expertise is definitely something I like. So our proposal was to have four representatives from the regions, because we feel that it's really necessary to keep the coordination between the regions, because the regions have their own budgets, but we still need to make sure that they are doing the same thing from the strategic point of view, that they are not producing completely different swag that is completely out of our strategy, like Fedora, Sorks or whatever. And also, we saw it in FAMSCO that if one of the regions was missing, then there was immediately a disconnection between FAMSCO and some overall strategy and what the region was doing. So having representatives from the regions is, I think, pretty important, and I didn't really want to put there representatives of Fedora ambassadors, like regional communities of ambassadors, because I think we should really shift from the ambassadors' only thing to more inclusive, like let's say, Kirgouff contributors, to be a representative of contributors in that region. And even if we switch from FAMSCO to something else, I think even the processes should be changed the way that other contributors can participate in the decisions and expensive intervals and so on, because right now it's mostly in all regions set up that just ambassadors vote and just ambassadors attend regional meetings and stuff like that. And then we should also have representatives from other groups, like design, marketing, so that we can ensure some coordination with those groups. And then, yeah, we could have also like one or two seats elected there. I think a body with like seven members is the right size. I don't know if we want to have a group that has, for example, 50 people or something like that. I still would like to keep it rather a small group, but it's really up to discussion. We, for example, include more groups later than it would preferably require more members. But I think magazine is part of the... It is, and it is not. I think it's early like under the umbrella of marketing. Is it anything marketing does? Yeah, pretty much. Oh, yeah, yeah. I think traditionally there's been a split between investors and marketing where we should be a lot closer together, but they should be more involved. I don't disagree with that. Like, investors should be making stuff for investors to use and also... Because investors are the foot soldiers that are coming out there. Yeah, ambassadors are pretty much a tool for marketing. So the people that go to... Well, it is... Maybe not that nicely named, but... And it's not the same about design. And occasionally we get the same experience with investors coming into marketing like, you know, where are my materials at? And that's pretty much their interaction with marketing. And it's kind of like... That's not great. You know, like, A, I don't know exactly what you're looking for. B, it's great that you have a thing Tuesday. It's Monday at 11 now. You know, suddenly there's definitely some... We have a lot of work in making the work together. My concern with this is that some of the very ambassadors are having... I know that we're transitioning from Vansco to Bosco, but having four reps from ambassadors and then one from marketing and one from... Yeah, deep. One from random. And then nothing specifically from docs or translators. Yeah, I think it's really... What I want to emphasize is that I really want to move from the ambassador's only thing to earlier. Now, a lot of those activities are done early in the regions. And what I want... And I'm mostly done by ambassadors, but the word I'd like to change is that we really include other contributors as well. And then it doesn't have to be... The representative of the region doesn't have to be an ambassador. It could be a person who is mostly active in design or marketing and so on. But it's a proposal from Vansco. We see the problem mostly to solve what Vansco or take over what Vansco is doing. I'm pretty sure that there are definitely more stakeholders here. The main goal of what we're trying to create here is just to increase the communication collaboration between these groups. I mean, that's what whenever we come up with it, that's the goal of what it's like. So even if the groups stay a little bit apart, like, I don't know, whether a board of people from each group can do that or if a board of people... I think it is a learning and outcome goal of overall branding strategy and common actually thing. These are the things that we want to be talking about and actually going out and talking about it. Yes, because it is two-fold. One is sort of like... Because that's one problem we have in the moment, is that unless you have a member of two teams like Marketing and Designs and me, there's no collaboration. That sort of whole get-to-get or members of the groups that sort of take together and talk all together about the goal. I mean, that's the problem. That's the whole way of hitting to come up with the... So I have a lot of thoughts about these things. As soon as it's normally over, right now it's not much. But I don't even hear some thoughts really quick, but I'm happy to say that we should talk about this more here in the slot or something. So the commops question, I'm giving a learning talk tomorrow before 30 and it's going to be about commops stuff. So be sure... Sure, what's commops? So that's what we're going to talk about today. Right. Well, that's the deal. We're still... There's three different context here. One is that government's bodies that are elected versus appointed and doing... How do you do the... How do you transfer the responsibility when people move in and out of a volunteer project? And how do you make decisions when you have a massive base of people to decide things? The second one is that outreach is a little determined. It needs a lot of different things to do with people. And the third one is that the work that needs to be done is a kind of work that is a heterogeneous contribution. Right? This is mostly... There are a lot of developers in the community and when they share their contributions amongst each other, it's a monstrous experience. It's the tools that you use, it's traffic, it's all of the debt tools. Right? Whereas a contribution in design is very different and a contribution in marketing is even different. So figuring out how to coordinate heterogeneous contributions is going to require a better intent and a different kind of strategy and different kinds of contributors. They are hybrids. And that is going to take a new focus and there's a lot of stuff that has been piled from this discussion and other discussions in marketing that ComOps is going to attempt to solve and is going to need a lot of help. So I will drop as much as I can in a leg and talk, but if you check the link in IRC, there's a wiki page where we start to lay out everybody's priorities who have come and started talking about this stuff and the issue areas that you want to deal with. We can have a separate group. The idea is the fundamental thing is you don't want people to choose between building things and building communities that build things. So the same way that DevOps is instrumenting and automating and integrating, you want to do that with your community too. So you don't want someone who's developing a project to have to choose between developing it or writing a blog post a group of people to. So integrating into the existing Fedora infrastructure as best as you can, creating as frictionless of a system as possible, leveraging stuff like FedMessage, which is an amazing piece of infrastructure that creates this huge layer across the entire project of all the activity. We're just starting to analyze and figure it out, but from that we can also publish and bring the two key concepts is heat and light. You want to bring heat to the parts of the project and the development. You want to bring light to the stuff that's already happening so that you can bring more heat. So I'm very interested in these things and it's definitely something that I'm looking forward to doing more with. It's still very new, we're still figuring it out and I'm looking forward to getting more input of flock and new. I think we can, is there something like, is the last day for, can we still arrange? The open slot. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Also there was one talk, Kessels today I guess. Four? Four. Nobody wants to go anywhere else? I don't know. I would be willing to go off the top of doing a separate talk at four. Four is what Kessels right now wants to do. Oh, I can't. No, no. Yeah, but we can definitely meet again. And if you did want to go to that one you'd like to go see Dan Walsh. Yeah. So you've never seen Dan Walsh. But you meet the last day. The last day is... Look at the same time of being technical writers, new people, new people, non-speakers, we're the screwdriver.