Originally filed in fedora-commops#68 and ambassadors-na/tasks#123.
FAmSCo should collaborate and help reconstruct the Campus Ambassadors program to better engage and involve students as advocates of Fedora.
A lot of background discussion and context can be found in both of the tickets linked at the top. There's also plenty of information available in the appendix below.
In short, this ticket could be seen as a supporting action of the University Involvement Initiative. The focus of reconstructing the Campus Ambassadors (CAs) would be to help us engage with students at universities to involve them with the project community. Different audiences need different strategies, and the CA program was an attempt to help make Fedora more accessible for students.
An additional aspect of this isn't focused to students at all, but also to faculty and staff at universities too, as an audience to involve with the project community. The radius of influence that a professor or system administrator might have at a university could have an impact on many others, which makes it an important area to consider too.
For more background context, you can also see the talk that @jonatoni and I delivered at Flock 2016 (slides | video | transcript).
I'm going to avoid typing too much here about the "why" for this proposal in light of the other supporting evidence and discussion demonstrated in the appendix.
There are two proposed implementations from past discussions, which are quoted here, as a place to start discussion or to build off of.
"We'd like to target 3 schools in each region, with three 'campus ambassadors' in each region starting in Fall 2016. This assumes we have a healthy enough ambassador program to support targeted outreach in each region. There would be 2 FADs proposed, one for developing EDU materials for both outreach and Campus Ambassador Training, and one for actually training the CA's. Many Ambassadors are adding themselves to the Campus Ambassadors section of the wiki page, to help give an idea of what contacts we have at what universities across the world."
"We'd like to target 3 schools in each region, with three 'campus ambassadors' in each region starting in Fall 2016. This assumes we have a healthy enough ambassador program to support targeted outreach in each region.
There would be 2 FADs proposed, one for developing EDU materials for both outreach and Campus Ambassador Training, and one for actually training the CA's. Many Ambassadors are adding themselves to the Campus Ambassadors section of the wiki page, to help give an idea of what contacts we have at what universities across the world."
Most of this is sourced from the EDU refresh Etherpad, some from following discussions in CommOps meetings.
Start with three Campus Ambassadors (at a minimum) in all regions of the world, totaling up to 12 in the world. If these requirements can be met, then this initiative will have greater traction from higher level in Fedora / Red Hat. These Campus Ambassadors would be responsible for organizing events at universities in their local regions at least once a quarter (or on a regular basis). They would be responsible for planning, events, and outreach with others in their region (but there is definitely some responsibility on the individual Campus Ambassador's part too). I think this approach is following more like the Mozilla Student Ambassador Program in a sense, but still different. It's separated from the regular Ambassadors program in that there are some more action-based requirements in place, but it is still part of the sub-project as a whole.
Start with three Campus Ambassadors (at a minimum) in all regions of the world, totaling up to 12 in the world. If these requirements can be met, then this initiative will have greater traction from higher level in Fedora / Red Hat.
These Campus Ambassadors would be responsible for organizing events at universities in their local regions at least once a quarter (or on a regular basis). They would be responsible for planning, events, and outreach with others in their region (but there is definitely some responsibility on the individual Campus Ambassador's part too). I think this approach is following more like the Mozilla Student Ambassador Program in a sense, but still different. It's separated from the regular Ambassadors program in that there are some more action-based requirements in place, but it is still part of the sub-project as a whole.
Metadata Update from @jflory7: - Issue tagged with: general
Way more than 3 schools could use help. Just helpers helping. We have folks waiting to help, but their schools may not be Ivy League enough (apologies for snark:)) It's not a biblical baby, we can split some efforts. Sure, throw money at the rich schools, but encourage others in Community Colleges to do some sharing and outreach. (-:
Mark: I'm sorry to say that I didn't understand half of what you wrote. Would you mind to explain it a bit more, please? In particular the expressions "Ivy league" and "biblical baby" are beyond my reach. Thanks.
@lailah I read it that @markdude was suggesting to widen the scope beyond only three universities, or to consider universities that aren't necessarily well-known (like community colleges). I agree and disagree with the comment for a couple reasons.
I disagree with focusing on more than three Campus Ambassadors per region at once, in the beginning. I think it's important for us to start with a well-defined scope and work closely with three Campus Ambassadors in each region, so we can work closely with these individuals, figure out what works and what doesn't, and then take what we learn into a model that can be repeated. Then, we should be able to work with more Campus Ambassadors at a larger scale.
I agree that the scope doesn't have to be limited to a well-known university. I think what universities we choose to engage with will depend on what Ambassadors we have where, like the campus presence inventory list shows (although this is likely outdated by now).
Metadata Update from @jflory7: - Issue priority set to: no deadline - Issue set to the milestone: Future releases
Hello my name is Fernando, I think we should do activities to motivate teachers or some people who work in universities, students when they graduate in many occasions there is no relay and maybe the only ambassador who had the university is leaving. If we manage to convince a teacher to be an ambassador within the university, we can guarantee that someone will always be inside the university to support the students and guarantee the post of ambassador after a student graduates.
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