Every year, on the anniversary of the Fedora Project's founding (November 6), there would be an Appreciation Day for people to thank each other for their work on the Fedora Project.
This is an idea that I brainstormed a while ago with some thoughts from @cprofitt. My wiki page details the full information of the Appreciation Day. For convenience, some of the wiki page is excerpted below.
Inspired by the Ubuntu Community Appreciation Day, it is of interest to the Fedora Project community to organize a similar day or week of appreciation for the contributors who help volunteer their time to help make Fedora what it is. This can be from a development, infrastructure, marketing, engineering, or any other relevant standpoint.
During this time of appreciation, users and contributors alike would be highly encouraged to select either a single or group of contributors to thank for their efforts in the Project. This appreciation could be given in as simple of a way as a karma cookie in IRC, a short note of thanks delivered on a wiki page, or even a longer form appreciation such as a letter or personal email.
The purpose of planning such an event is driven by the form of communication in an open source project such as Fedora. For many of us, our daily interactions, discussions, and meeting are in a non-lively format such as text via IRC or in other forms of text, such as email and wiki articles. This is effective for accomplishing our goals and getting work done, but in a sense, we lose a human sense of interpersonal interactions and physical cues. Sometimes it can almost seem robotic, with the exception of video conference calls with some members of the community.
So why wait for next year's Flock or FUDcon(s) to roll around in order to regain some of that humanity? There are ways that we as a project can still reach out to each other and make an impact without just giving high-fives at conferences. In a sense, the "system" is already in place with the implementation of the Fedora "cookie" badges from IRC. With a little bit of joint organization and awareness, we could create our own community appreciation day or week to help boost our bonds not just as a FOSS project, but as a community and even in some sense a family.
To organize a Fedora Appreciation Day, outreach and awareness are important ahead of time so the community is aware of the event. Especially for something that has not yet happened before, spending extra time on awareness will be important so contributors remember and are aware of the day. Consider the following steps if you are organizing an event.
Discussed in 2016-10-04 meeting.
Without a doubt, this was a very hot topic during the meeting today, which is awesome! I'm going to summarize some of the key points we covered.
We briefly discussed the idea of having a badge as a "reward" for the event (or something to take with you), but we weren't clear on how to best go about distributing something like that. I'd be lenient to have a badge without having a way that we can clearly grant it to others.
Does anyone have any ideas on how we could distribute to badge to people who spend time thanking another contributor or contributors?
I actioned myself to write a Community Blog about this over the coming weekend to announce it to the community, both contributors and users. Some of it will surely be shaped by other discussion that we will happen, but I can get out a first draft hopefully really soon.
Like with Fedora Women Day 2016, it would be nice to encourage local communities to have an in-person celebration to commemorate the day. This could be a good way to help build local communities and introduce others into Fedora (since it is the thirteen year anniversary of the project). Some kind of physical / in-person resources would be especially helpful here.
But we also covered the area of trying to use or allocate any budget for this. I'd rather focus spending time and energy on how to make it a successful virtual event because incorporating any funds for this will be a burden (especially one month out), and it might end up just making the event impossible to execute for some. There's also the note that much of the community would likely be unable to participate in a local event, and at the end of the day, I think it's especially important too that we give appreciation and thanks to some of the contributors who may find it difficult to make it out to in-person or physical events, and let them know their work is still greatly appreciated and valued.
I would consider this a stretch goal, but someone mentioned compiling some sort of short and sweet video to release on the day of, highlighting the community and commemorating the day. I don't have enough video editing experience on Linux to pull something together, but I would be very open to the idea of creating something if there is someone with video experience who could help drive this forward.
I think a big, public wiki page for people to leave general notes or thanks on is a good idea. I debated the idea of an Etherpad and wiki, and I think a wiki would work best since it requires someone to authenticate in FAS… just in case someone random decided to jump into an Etherpad, delete everything, and run off.
We could structure the wiki page with categories for specific sub-projects and have a general area of thanks, or we could just have it as one big, open-ended page.
So @ankursinha mentioned the idea of this, and then @nb actually made it happen! But we wanted to have an IRC command to help encourage and make it easier for people to give thanks to other contributors. On the spot, we created a .thank command that you can use to accomplish this. To thank another contributor in IRC, try the following:
.thank
<jflory7> .thank nb <zodbot> jflory7 thinks nb is awesome and is happy they are helping! (Please don't forget to nb++ also)
A social media presence will also be helpful for this event. I think a short and sweet hashtag would be fine, maybe #FedoraAppreciation? I'm trying to think if there might be something more unique we can use, because I'm worried about overlap with any appreciation for actual fedoras. :stuck_out_tongue:
@rhea mentioned the idea of helping set up a live stream or interview series during the week that we could run with Fedora contributors to talk a little bit about the type of work they do, why they contribute, who they want to thank, etc. Something short and sweet, but definitely personal and hopefully putting faces to nicks. I think this is a good idea to help support the idea of a united Fedora community if we can pull it off. I'm not that experienced in streaming, so I would be interested in knowing what kind of technical setup someone might need if we wanted to include them.
@ankursinha rightfully noted that some parts of the project are a lot less visible than others, and there could be an issue with some core parts of the project and community members involved there who may not be recognized for their work. While I think it's impossible to guarantee that everyone will be thanked for something, I think we can make it easier for people to know who to thank for what.
For example, you might not ever think of the people who create the FAS login with Ipsilon, but that's a core thing that everyone in Fedora has used. If you were to explicitly mention "here are the people who make the FAS login system run everyday!" and point to an IRC channel or specific nicks, it would make it easier for people to say, "Oh, so that's who makes this happen!"
Perhaps on the Fedora Appreciation Day page (or maybe its own page), we can do a best attempt at highlighting various parts of the project that may not normally be thought of.
Okay, phew! I think I covered everything here from the meeting. I'm going to be following up shortly with a mailing list introduction of this idea to hopefully bring more people into this discussion and get some more ideas flowing. It's important we act swiftly on this one as we're working against a one month timer. :grin:
@bex @cprofitt @skamath @dhanesh95 @adityakonarde @ankursinha @rhea @x3mboy @bt0dotninja @amsharma @tatica @bee2502
I was so excited 5 mins back while I was typing text here, but thanks to Pagure to spoil it all when it just killed my excitement by eating all my text when I clicked "Update Issue" here :( Anyways, typing again.
I loved this idea, I have so many people to whom I want to thank. Here are few ideas from my side.
I liked the idea of shooting videos. Just to add on that, can we have a repository to collect all these thank you videos. That way anyone who is sitting at home, traveling or anywhere, can just record their thank you video and upload them to the repo link. Commops can own that repo and that way we will have a collection of videos which can be played in the events, published to the fedora magazine etc etc. One person can shoot one video or two people together can have a recording or a bunch of people can record together. Length can be limited to 2-3 mins.
This is little different and unique. We can appreciate the person earning the highest number of thanks in terms of badge/text/mail/video. That person can be declared as the star of the Fedora Appreciation Day, 2016 and can be awarded/appreciated by FPL in Flock, 2017.
Having local events in good, but let's not just limit it to that. We can have hangouts across the globe and virtual events. We can record the online conversation videos as well.
WOW, I am totally excited about it. I need to start writing my thank you mails from today ;)
and you Parure, I am copying this text in my editor to make sure I have my backup, in case, you ditch me again!
For the tech side of things, i think that it would be best if we could stream it on youtube so I don't know about getting access to that.
As for the setup, I could prepare scenes and overlays and everything on my end and run the ... i don't know what's this called :D stuff..
As for hosts and guests, we could connect using bluejeans? Can we use that @amsharma? You probably know a bit more about that, i'm still newbie :]
@rhea yeah I can help with bluejeans.
for .thanks we should consider leveraging something like https://happinesspackets.io/
While I think this has value as an idea, I strongly encourage the idea of a soft-launch, at best for this year.
For one thing, we have a release that is timed around this date every year. If we work better with ambassadors the release parties can help with this effort. Additionally, we should be leveraging this to build a marketing outcome from this so that we don't just celebrate internally but we attract more of the target audiences to Fedora.
I believe that proper coordination on this needs to happen way more than 30 days out. So a soft launch this year coupled with making this a FOSCo priority when that group comes online seems like a good strategy.
Discussed in 2016-11-29 meeting.
We're picking back up on some older tickets again. We wanted to help get this one on the map again for 2017.
In the meeting, we agreed that a little bit after a Fedora release would be a good time to try to plan it. We agreed and disagreed with @bex's point about lining it up with a Fedora release. We disagreed that we should put extra emphasis on local events / release parties since it might exclude a notable number of contributors who don't have access to these events, but we agreed that it would be a great opportunity to help promote Fedora and its awesome community to an audience outside of just our contributors (especially if announcements line up with a Fedora Magazine release week, where views are at the highest).
@bex, we were hoping to get your thoughts on holding this somewhere in July (to give some wiggle room if F26 delays). If the timeframe sounds good, we can work on selecting a definite date or range of days to hold the Appreciation Day event. The idea was that once we lock down on a date, we can begin doing some preliminary messaging like creating a wiki page to host information about the event, and a CommBlog post to help raise awareness that this is something happening this summer (we'll likely write more later on, but this is just a first step).
Thanks!
@bex, we were hoping to get your thoughts on holding this somewhere in July (to give some wiggle room if F26 delays). If the timeframe sounds good, we can work on selecting a definite date or range of days to hold the Appreciation Day event.
I see nothing driving me toward any particular day in July. However, I'd encourage a quick search of global holiday calendars to make sure you won't hit a golden week or something similar. My quick search showed the most holidays in the first 10 days or so of July. Therefore, In the absence of anything else, I suggest the 2nd-last weeks for consideration,
The idea was that once we lock down on a date, we can begin doing some preliminary messaging like creating a wiki page to host information about the event, and a CommBlog post to help raise awareness that this is something happening this summer (we'll likely write more later on, but this is just a first step).
I encourage you to start drafting the material now. I suspect it will take longer than you think to finalize once people start offering feedback.
Okay. For now, we can tentatively aim for the last two weeks of July for a rough deadline for this.
I agree. I'm going to make a note for creating a draft of this for after DevConf / FOSDEM (after Feb. 5th). We can probably add this ticket back to the meeting agenda then too so we can discuss and evaluate this again as a group.
Potentially, we can mention those areas of the project when we announce this initiative.
Additionally, we should be leveraging this to build a marketing outcome from this so that we don't just celebrate internally but we attract more of the target audiences to Fedora.
I agree we need to leverage this outside of the traditional Fedora channels. Do we have a list of Linux / FOSS media sites that we could try to use to publicize the event? (1) I would be willing to write an introduction to 'Fedora Appreciation Days' to be published. (2) Our posts of appreciation need not be limited to Fedorans. People can post message of appreciation for other open source projects / upstreams that they are thankful for.
I agree. I'm going to make a note for creating a draft of this for after DevConf / FOSDEM (after Feb. 5th).
Justin, let me know how I can assist. I would like to help create the draft as well.
Just wanted to check on on the intended timeline again. Are we still aiming for June?
Metadata Update from @cprofitt: - Issue set to the milestone: None (was: Fedora 26)
Metadata Update from @jflory7: - Issue set to the milestone: Fedora 26 - Issue tagged with: meeting, outreach
https://pagure.io/fedora-diversity/issue/4
A new ticket was filed to help keep track of discussion / planning for organizing this during 2017. You can find that ticket here.
https://pagure.io/fedora-commops/issue/110
Metadata Update from @jflory7: - Issue set to the milestone: None (was: Fedora 26)
Metadata Update from @jflory7: - Issue close_status updated to: Moved - Issue set to the milestone: Fedora 26 (to June 2017) - Issue status updated to: Closed (was: Open)
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