It would be nice to have a calendar that integrates with FAS and, allows someone to post the details of the event. Another group of folks, can take a look-see at the posting and approve it to be listed. The original poster could choose to be the event owner or, add someone who is the actual owner. Since Events etc fall under the ambit of FAmSCo, perhaps they might consider this stuff.

When it comes to India, traditionally, we have been producing media specifically aimed at distributing at events. We do get large amounts of face-time with our participants at any event and, invariably it leads to sharing of media or, requests for media. This is besides the production that is carried out by magazines across the country. During the F12 cycle we conducted a small experiment.

We did not produce any media.

Not even for events.

Since this was a shocking thing to do, we spent the entire cycle with bated breath trying to assess the impact. As on date, it seems to be minimal. In fact, it has allowed us to do interesting things. Things like ensuring that at events we have an updated tree around for anyone who wants to update their system or, even update their trees. We have had a moderate measure of success with spinning LiveUSBs. But more importantly, we have had “Local Points of Contacts” and, some enterprising folks come up to fill up the void. Or, in other words, the deliberate creation of vacuum allowed some “retailers” to come in to the picture and, become the source points to obtain the media.

Producing media, even when done in the bulk that we do, is an expensive affair and, add the shipping costs towards sending them across to events and, you can figure out that it was becoming more of a “mass media production house” kind of business without actually having a full-fledged team doing it.

The next logical step would be to figure out how to provide the information about alternative sources of media (even if they are not zero-cost) to those who cannot obtain it via the Freemedia system. Providing them with an option to choose a retailer from which to purchase the media from is a better option than letting their Freemedia requests go unattended. A system that allows such vendors to be listed and, based on regions, information provided to the requesting parties would go a long way in addressing this. Clearly mentioning that this is a pure information provider service with no assurances of guarantees would perhaps be the caveat that would allow us to begin ensuring that anyone who requests a media has the information about where to obtain one from.

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This year we have been able to reach out to a number of events and groups which helped us take the message of the Four Foundations to them. That has been good. We have also noticed that a larger number of those signing up to become Ambassadors are students or, are dipping their feet into the FOSS way of doing things. So, here’s the area in which we need to work our hardest.

Earlier I wrote:

Additionally, if during the initial days, the new Ambassadors are encouraged to actively participate in any other part of the project, it should lead to greater involvement and appreciation of the Foundations. This of course has the advantage of helping them build the social connects and network across projects/amongst individuals which is an invaluable part of being an Ambassador. It also builds up the required confidence in the Ambassador to go out and evangelize about contributing back to various projects and upstream. Because, if one has already drunk the Kool-Aid, talking about it is dead simple.

And, it is true. An Ambassador is the face of the project to the external world. It requires people skills but more importantly, it requires an intrinsic knowledge about the project that takes time and effort to build up. Unless an Ambassador takes a keen interest in the various projects within Fedora and, contributes to at least one of them, it is an uphill climb for most. More so for a student who is just learning the ways of FOSS and, gathering experiences via Fedora.

In the coming months, the plan is to put in place a stronger coaching plan for these student contributors so as to tap into their huge talent and, the capacity to produce stunning results. We have always been surprised by the sheer amount ideas that come up when students are gradually pointed to a direction.

Stay tuned. Exciting stuff is going to happen.

In fact I wanted to talk with him about how massive the momentum built up by Transifex has been. Just two years ago, in 2007, Tx was a GSoC project within The Fedora Project aimed at looking at managing translations from a developer’s perspective. Today, it is a start-up which is hiring employees, relocating to newer offices, has a foot-print across a significant portion of upstream community projects and, most importantly, has clients willing to pay for customization services and, developer services. Tx isn’t only helping translation communities by allowing them to craft their work in peace – it is keeping developer sanity with the fire-n-forget model of the architecture. I hear that PulseAudio, PackageKit developers are strong supporters of Tx. That is tremendous news. The provocative nature of Tx is also based on the charm that it has been bootstrapped. That should provide hope to developers thinking along the “product” route.

I would say that these two years have done Dimitris good. His focus on the road Tx should take has become more vivid and, he has a deeper insight into the changes he wants to bring about via Indifex. There’s nothing more exciting than keeping a close watch on his team and his company for news that would come up soon. Tx is coming up with a killer set of features in the upcoming releases. That should get the attention of a couple of clients too.

Throughout the afternoon we ended up talking about getting youngsters up to speed to think beyond patches as contributions and, starting tuning their thoughts to products. Dimitris opines that patches are excellent jump-off points but in order to become a valuable contributor, one must start thinking about “architecture”, “design”, “roadmap”, “milestones” and all such issues that form part of the theory classes but never see implementation in real-life scenarios. In addition, there is also the need to inculcate the “CC thinking” in everyday work of creativity – be it code or, content or even be it hardware and standards (the “CC thinking” is a fancy short-hand towards thinking about Open Standards, Open Protocols and so forth. In a somewhat twitter-ish way, we compressed it to a meta-statement we both could relate to and agree with).

Dinner and post-dinner with a couple of us was another story. Having a bunch of hard-core “Fedora” folks in the room creates a passion. Sitting back to savor the flames of discussions and, interjecting with a leading viewpoint to keep the debate flowing is the best way to get action items resolved. Nothing wasn’t touched upon – from the way to get best out of *SCos to mundane stuff like getting feature requests into Tx, OLPC and Sugar, or, talking about the general issues within the IT development community in Greece. And of course, the frequent checks on Wikipedia to validate various points in the argument. We could have done with an offline Wiki Reader yesterday

I think I finally went to sleep at something around 0200 today – which is impossibly past my standard time. There are photos aplenty, though I don’t know who will be uploading them. There was food, there was coffee, cakes, and, there were friends – in short, a nice day.

An immediate benefit of any project participating in the Summer of Code is the ability to get exciting extensions or, innovations via a group of highly talented individuals – both mentors and, contributors. Having had the opportunity to look at the projects from fairly close quarters over a period of years, there are a couple of things that stood out. Some of them are listed on my wiki page. I’d say that the most important thing is to “have a plan“. A stage of proper planning which sets the expectations and deliverables for a GSoC proposal goes a long way in becoming a successful proposal. That, coupled with a scheduled update-review cycle makes it a proposal that has a constant communication channel. I was reminded of the this fantastic mentoring how-to today while reading the latest issue of The GNOME Journal (as an aside, you should read this issue).

If you look at the wiki page I pointed out earlier, you’ll note that I mention an “annual round-up”. This by itself is very trivial to do and yet very important.. It provides an yardstick by which to measure the success or, failure of a GSoC experience of being able to generate sustained and relevant participation. For example, if projects did more of this kind of “where are they now ?” series, it provides upcoming and potential contributors with role-models they can look up to or, be like.

That single act of being able to have role models makes for a tremendous motivation to become a sustained contributor to Free and Open Source Software.

The FAmSCo, along with the other *SCo in Fedora land offer the finest opportunity to demonstrate leadership, show commitment and, work in one of the front-line roles of the project. I took sometime in reading up the statements of the candidates and, one of things that struck me (besides those mentioned here) was the recurring theme of making the FAmSCo process more “open” and “transparent”. Among the important duties which are owned by FAmSCo, encouraging communication is a noteworthy one. I hope that the candidates, once part of FAmSCo, will take time to bring about a change in the way communication is handled. I am sure that there are ways it could be made better and relevant.

The other aspect is the need to have goals or plans that are measurable. I hope that this comes up in the town-hall, and, the candidates think over how they would like to measure their impact on FAmSCo in specific and The Fedora Project in general terms based on their plans. From a personal perspective, I have been incredibly pleased to see FAmSCo initiate plans and processes that would lead to the most awesome bunch of Fedora Ambassadors – be it a structured mentoring program or, through a follow-up on learning from events. I’d like to see that continue with more vigor. Working with folks to facilitate bringing out the best in them has its own reward.

This time around there are a lot of friends in the fray and, that makes me very happy. It is always good to see folks stepping up and desiring to do what they are really good at. So, mark the calendar and, remember to vote.

Name: sankarshan
IRC Nick: sankarshan (or, sm|CPU)
IRC Channel : #fedora-india … #fedora-ambassadors
Fedora Ambassador: India

The mandatory mugshot is here.

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Photos are available with the tag “Fedora Release Party” The day kicked off with a short welcome address by Rahul Sundaram and, we dived into showing off some videos. Particularly, we got a strong response around the Red Hat Way. It moved into the new items that are in Fedora 11 and, predictably enough, there were plenty of questions around filesystems (ext4) and virtualization (libvirt and KVM). Rahul passed the mic to Rakesh who talked about Package Management, PackageKit, RPM (including a somewhat quick run-down of the RPM internals). It was time for Prasad to step-up and, talk about his projects and how, he got into FOSS and, learnt new languages by devising projects. There were moments of hilarity as the demo instance of pem was using Kushal’s expenses and, we sort of opened up Kushal’s accounts for the participants to ogle at Kushal showed off Sugar on a Stick and, talked about Sugar in specific and Sugar-Fedora parts in general. The pizzas (link to image) provided an opportunity to get the interaction going. Especially since there were students in the crowd and, that generally leads to lots of discussions and rapid-fire Q/A.

Post lunch, we had a demonstration by Satish of the work-in-progress Moblin Spin based on Fedora and, a quick introduction to Spins by Rahul. The latter was aimed at taking in feedback about what spins/remixes are worth investing time and effort on and, also an extension to the “what package is missing” survey that he conducted some time back. And, with that it was a wrap. It was wonderful to meet new people. watch the infrequent Fedora T-Shirt in the crowd allowing folks to take note of the communication means (web-page and IRC channels).

There are things we could have done better. Some observations are as:

• Having a discussion about localization and, internationalization specifically aimed at understanding how content in local language could be produced using Fedora.
• Quick means to contribution – we barely touched about easy areas to become a contributor
• Documentation – we should talk more about it
• Virtualization – with the number of folks interested in questions around v12n, it would have been nice to talk about v12n
• LiveUSB Creator – we did not anticipate questions around that tool and, there were use cases aplenty. Note to other organizers, never underestimate the power of a sleekly done UI wrapped around a “rock-my-world” tool
• Project 389 – would have been lovely to have a show-n-tell around this
• Predicting the footfall – always good to have more folks, but we sure did not anticipate 50+ folks over a weekend. Lesson there about using this momentum to have some form of regular meetings

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As an aside, I am posting this using gscribble – a yet another offline client for Wordpress blogs being developed by Roshan. I had to rebuild it to get it working for F11 and, the truly bleeding rpms are here

Turns out that India has the second highest number of accepted proposals. I recall reading earlier that the number of proposals/applications from India was significantly high as well. However, I’d say that this is just a beginning and 101 isn’t really a number to be going to town about. Sure it is better than where we were 3 years ago. But, the world has also progressed since then and, we just cannot keep on benchmarking without adjusting for that change. There are certain trends which are nice though. Things like second time applicants, applicants turned mentors. These indicate the willingness to participate, to contribute, to collaborate and to coach – all important ingredients in the great rush to become a better FOSS citizen.

It is a privilege to be a mentor because it gives one a chance to read the proposals before hand, help in scrubbing and polishing them and, to take a dipstick test into the trends of FOSS adoption and awareness in the country. And, the T-Shirt is a nice incentive Among the few things that do come to mind include the need by all the projects to lay frameworks that can coach the young participants more effectively – work towards bringing them up to speed throughout the year and, show them how to think. The last point was hammered home in a number of proposals that seemed to have a distinct lack of originality. While we rejoice and blog triumphantly about the increase in India’s contribution, we need to keep in mind that this is just a start of the contribution process and, the virtuous cycle ends when the contributors of today become confident enough to take the role of mentors of tomorrow.

I am sure that the following have been written again and again, but I’d say it is never enough. For those who want to participate in GSoC and work towards a good application, it would be nice to keep in mind some of the following.

• Participate early, participate continuously – a project can become confident of the student’s ability to deliver if there exist proof that the student has what it takes to take the idea from a concept stage to a deliverable. So, do not land up on a project during GSoC, give it some deep thought and engage in a structured fashion much earlier so that the developers know who you are and what you can do.
• Think, don’t just read – if there is constant participation, anticipating a potential GSoC project becomes much easier. Thinking about it in the perspective of relevance and value to the project gives it the much needed shine. This also means that it is easy to write a proposal around an idea than just verbatim copy of the text of the idea into the proposal
• Talk, don’t just write – it is important to indulge in public discussion of the ideas, the proposed paths and initiate discussion. GSoC proposals are not fire-n-forget type documents. They need constant attention
• Listen, don’t just talk – a good proposal is one that discusses it with potential mentors and, can evolve through discussions and suggestions. Keeping eyes and ears open to good ideas also demonstrate a willingness on part of the candidate to become a better contributor and a good participant