Per new policy, I am filing a ticket looking for approval for an event in North America since it is over $1000 USD. Regretfully, I am hoping to seek an answer ASAP to finalize details with event organizers in the next week.
MIT has its own hackathon each year, HackMIT. It is a larger hackathon fitting close to 1,000 hackers at MIT for a weekend. HackMIT happens on the weekend of September 16-17, 2017 this year. FAmNA is hoping to send two Ambassadors to attend as event sponsors to engage and interact with student hackers and help promote Fedora and open source.
More detailed information can be found here. Summarized information is included in this ticket.
The full line-item budget is available on the wiki.
At a glance, the total estimated amount for the event as of today is $1345.37 USD, which includes a special negotiated sponsorship rate of $750 USD. The rest includes estimates for travel, shipping logistics, and a small printing budget for "Fedora <3 Python" material. FAmNA voted and approved $1750.00 USD as the total for this event, with the intent of staying close to or below the estimate as much as possible.
Therefore, I would like to request the approval of the Council for $1750.00 USD for this event.
This event is full of some of the brightest hackers from around the country. With over 1,000 university students in attendance, there is a large potential to make an impact with open source and Fedora at HackMIT. There is a longer justification on the wiki page – that section is excerpted here for convenience.
Also, please see relevant discussion in the FAmNA ticket with regards to this section.
The goal of Fedora at HackMIT is unique from a traditional Linux event. This a university-organized hackathon, where students from the country (and at this one, even the world) gather for one weekend to learn new technology and build cool projects that have a vision and an impact. For many students with ambitious plans, open source is potentially a tangential part of their goals to accomplish this.
Fedora is not just an operating system, but also a community of people and resources. Fedora attending this event helps promote the Fedora community as a platform for building applications and also finding ways to extend a students' own ambitions by connecting them to the wider open source community. Based on last year's experience, it's a great opportunity to influence and introduce open source, Linux, and Fedora to students for the first time (or build on top of the knowledge they already have).
Fedora's attendance at this event aims for users over contributors. Ideally, since most students either haven't used Linux or still experimenting around, there's a potential to influence them about the project and excite them with some of its cutting-edge development features (this is an angle we went for last year, since students come to events like these with the intent to try new tech or to try learning something new).
In the long-term, we would ideally accomplish two things:
Since hackathons are intentionally marketed to students as a chance to try something new or crazy or to work with tech that is out of the norm, it would be a good audience for us to promote Fedora and some of the exciting things happening in the community. If possible, using containers to build and develop applications would be one possibility, where we can introduce Fedora Atomic. Otherwise, we can focus on Fedora Workstation as a development operating system for normal day-to-day work.
From last year, the mentorship opportunity was vital to why it felt like a successful event for us. Even if Fedora itself wasn't the primary focus at times, we as Ambassadors had unique conversations and individual interactions with students on their projects. We were able to offer advice, insight, and help support them in their goals to build their projects. This left a powerfully positive impression of the Fedora community and led students back to our table to take a break from their project and talk with us about various tech topics (which can be used to connect back to Fedora's technical and non-technical goals).
Last year, we used a Fedora Badge (see here), which we had available at the booth and passed around handouts at tables we visited. It only had eight students scan the badge, with one of them showing activity on their account after the event.
While I would like to have a badge again this year, I'd rather focus on making individual connections with students that we can follow up on after the event. In particular, I want to create a Google Drive form for students to enter their contact info if they'd like to keep up-to-date on Fedora news or hear about opportunities to get involved. I haven't thought beyond this, but I think it would improve our likelihood of post-event engagement / interaction of the students with the Fedora community, if there was a personalized follow-up.
11 hours of notice? Did this event magically pop up yesterday morning? I don't get why this request is so last minute for something that likely was scheduled a while ago.
I'm not a fan of the google form idea either. Collecting personal contact info to basically spam them with Fedora "news" sounds like every corporate marketing email scheme I've seen. I don't see the utility in doing that for two reasons: 1) it'll get deleted like all other "keep me updated" emails, 2) there's nobody signed up to actually generate those emails to begin with.
Did we get any students from last year that continued participation in Fedora after the event? While this is being described as "large potential", I haven't seen that from last years event. Let's not try to resort to hyperbole to justify expenses.
FAmNA meets every two weeks in the summer, so we had our first meeting of the month last night. At the time, I wasn't aware of the new policy that events over $1000 USD had to also be approved by the Council. I filed the ticket here as soon as the event was approved by FAmNA.
For additional context, I've been working on this since July 5th, when the organizing team first reached out to me. But it's been a process to get to this point. Where normal companies can pull the trigger on whether they want to be a sponsor and coordinate a little more quickly, we obviously have a different model as an open source project that involves input from the community. I've tried to move as swiftly as possible on this, but these are the circumstances. I also hadn't planned to get the budget approved twice, as I was unaware of this new policy.
This was a loose idea, but the motivation was to connect students who had an interest to contribute or get involved with the community with a human. I wasn't thinking of a "mailing list" but rather a one-time email sent to offer mentorship / guidance to get involved with Fedora in a capacity. There were others in FAmNA who also expressed interest in helping with such a thing, if the interest ended up being larger than what one person could handle.
To emphasize, "news" isn't really what I was getting at by collecting contact info. The intention was to gather contact info for people who actively had an interest to get involved with the Fedora community, and then to have a human contact them and reach out. If they didn't engage after that, then that would be the end of it.
This was an idea I came up with after BrickHack 2016 when students came up to us actively asking for help with installing or using Linux. @cprofitt and I ended up hand-writing emails from interested people in upstate NY to try to do follow-up for some sort of event on the Rochester Institute of Technology campus with the FOSS program there, but I misplaced the paper while packing up from the event. This is why I thought a digital form would make this easier.
I'd be interested to know your thoughts and ideas on what would be a successful way of engaging with students and other participants post-event.
I think HackMIT is an event that focuses more on a user-awareness than a contributor-awareness. The ideas I wanted to try differently this year were to try to see if we could try to actively appeal to students as an opportunity to contribute and get involved. I don't think the Fedora Badge alone was a good measure of the impact I felt we had at the event last year.
I am confident that the impact we had last year was strong, but it's difficult to quantify in numbers and metrics because I only tried to do this with a badge, and that didn't work the way I had hoped. You can read more about last year's event on the Community Blog, where I actively tried to gauge and measure our impact.
I am equally unaware of this policy and would like to know where it came from. I don't believe this is a Fedora Council policy. If NA generated this policy on their own, I would have like to have seen them ask before they made the council responsible.
Unless I'm mistaken, there is no such policy. I thought what was stated in our NA meeting was, instead, that @jflory7 would have to ask the Council because we would need more budget to fund HackMIT's proposed budget.
FAmNA meets every two weeks in the summer, so we had our first meeting of the month last night. At the time, I wasn't aware of the new policy that events over $1000 USD had to also be approved by the Council. I filed the ticket here as soon as the event was approved by FAmNA. I am equally unaware of this policy and would like to know where it came from. I don't believe this is a Fedora Council policy. If NA generated this policy on their own, I would have like to have seen them ask before they made the council responsible.
Ok, I have figured out where this came from. This event will put NA at the limit of their budget, apparently. What this means is that the region needs to request funds, not necessarily on a per event basis. (see: 01:37:21 in https://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2017-08-11/famna.2017-08-11-00.59.log.html)
I am concerned because I see other approved tickets from the minutes and they aren't in the budget in ledger.
I would like to see a single budget request from the region for funding to cover them for the next period, if they are expecting to continue to need funding. The goal is not to create line item oversight from the council. We approve larger budget amounts, typically.
This event has some questions and I encourage those to be answered either here or in the NA ticket.
CC: @award3535
Also, I have done some looking and it appears that NA allocated $9000 to events in Quarter 1 but spent less that $4500. This means there is still money or there are missing expenses.
I've put in a sweep entry, but I don't think we need to approve anymore money for NA until they can show they have spent their existing allocation.
@award3535 ??
@bex said… Ok, I have figured out where this came from. This event will put NA at the limit of their budget, apparently. What this means is that the region needs to request funds, not necessarily on a per event basis. (see: 01:37:21 in https://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2017-08-11/famna.2017-08-11-00.59.log.html)
I guess it would help for me to re-read the minutes, I missed this point. :grimacing: The original context for me filing this ticket is due to a misread and a little stress on my end.
This is something we should be able to discuss at a meeting. If you had specific things in mind that you would want us to discuss, it might help to file a ticket to make sure it is covered.
Okay. More clarity would be helpful. I'm not sure if this ticket should be closed and migrated back to the FAmNA ticket tracker or if this ticket still needs further discussion.
I believe this ticket should be closed and migrated back, unless the region has not fully reported their budgeting situation.
I base this on: https://budget.fedoraproject.org/budget/FY18/na.html notice the total unallocated at the top and that the Q3 budget includes the event in question.
@bex said… I believe this ticket should be closed and migrated back, unless the region has not fully reported their budgeting situation. I base this on: https://budget.fedoraproject.org/budget/FY18/na.html notice the total unallocated at the top and that the Q3 budget includes the event in question.
@bex said… I believe this ticket should be closed and migrated back, unless the region has not fully reported their budgeting situation.
Okay, basing off the information currently in the ledger (which seems accurate to me), I'm going to close this ticket and move forward with event execution, per the vote in the FAmNA ticket. I apologize for this confusion.
Metadata Update from @jflory7: - Issue close_status updated to: no action needed - Issue status updated to: Closed (was: Open)
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