Hi, I'll share some personal experiences handling lots of guys in college/university setup. Hope they are helpful.
On Thu, Dec 8, 2011 at 5:45 PM, sankarshan <[email protected]> wrote: > On Thu, Dec 8, 2011 at 5:24 PM, Ankur Sinha <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Why worry you ask? 300 requests per month, 30 serviced, rest 270 are >> disappointed and say "what a crappy program" => All of fedora freemedia >> gets a bad name => All of fedora India gets a bad name => Fedora as a >> whole in India gets a bad name. Isn't it a worrying situation? > > It isn't. The current method of handling the requests allows: It is somewhat worrying but not alarming (as the tone in Ankur's mail suggests). Worrying because at the gound level - new students trying to get a knack of GNU/Linux world will take any distro they are given. If its Ubuntu (admit it - its easily accessible) They generally stick on to it if they *remain* in the GNU/Linux world. Generally is the keyword here. I have two case studies here. One is my lab-mate who uses Ubuntu (as it was the first distro she got) for all technical needs and Fedora quite minimally. The other is a Comp Science guy, Rohit - who came to the Fedora InstallFest we had in COEP and uses Fedora now for all possible stuff - his studies, experimentation etc. (He was a volunteer for FUDCon Pune too) We share lots of mails and he surely seems to be a promising addition to the contributors community shortly. > - 10% of the requests to be met > - no way to keep track of those receiving the media to be included > into the Community True. But on a one-to-one basis (mentor<-->new guy relationship), its quite possible to pin point and possibly accumulate new contributors. There's no mechanism to document the actual path of finding out whether he/she is in the community now. > As much of the good it brings about, it is merely a hand-out. And, > asking more people to hand-out more isn't going to work. > True again, but still we can hope. One loyal Fedora guy (as in Rohit's case above) out of 60+ installs we had [1] is good enough considering the variety of choices we have in the FOSS world. I actually worked on what you had commented on [1] (had weekend sessions, organized mini events) and surely it yielded results with people like [2] doing awesome stuff with Fedora + other FOSS technologies if not contributing directly. > -- > sankarshan mukhopadhyay > <http://sankarshan.randomink.org/blog> [1] http://suchakra.wordpress.com/2010/08/02/report-on-installfest-at-coep-31st-july-2010-pune-india/ [2] http://www.chetanpatil.info/blog.html My opinion on this thread : Its good to keep all avenues to spread Fedora open - be it Freemedia, direct distribution of ISOs, mailing lists, mentoring or whatever. We can only tell someone about awesomeness of Fedora as an OS at least if he/she has a Live ISO to try :) I personally keep a pendrive ready with F15/F16 to demonstrate/install anytime ,anywhere. I'd say choose your own means to spread Fedora, but do choose at least one asap. Suchakra _______________________________________________ india mailing list [email protected] https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/india
