#147 Draft new proposal for better local partnerships and collaborating
Closed: duplicate 2 years ago by riecatnor. Opened 3 years ago by jflory7.

Summary

Draft a proposal to the Mindshare Committee about creating new pathways to local swag production and fulfillment

Background

In the 2020-08-09 Fedora Women's Day organizing session, we had a long but productive side-bar on the challenges and problems of designing, making, and distributing teh Fedora swagz!

@tatica noted the challenges of communities in LATAM with receiving swag. There is a long story to tease out here, so I am going to try to explain it from my perspective:

Before 2015, every region had some decentralized mechanism for creating, producing, and distributing swag. We depended on the individual labor of our many Ambassadors around the world to take the lead on producing swag, funded by Fedora, and depended on those contributors to be the gateway of receiving swag in those regions. This worked well sometimes, but also caused problems when those people become difficult to contact or inactive.

From 2015 to today, we have moved away from decentralized production. While it was not an easy process, I think this process has greatly benefited people in the United States and Western Europe. This is because the centralization of swag increased Fedora's dependency on Red Hat's internal teams to produce and distribute swag. For people who live in places where Red Hat does major business, this is great.

However, the centralization of swag production has not benefited all regions equally. For the RedBubble example that came up in chat today, it is easy and quick for @riecatnor to distribute orders from RedBubble, but it comes at a three week shipping time with a shipping cost of $45 to where @tatica is. She cited an example of working with local producers for customized COVID-19 masks for under $5.

Fedora is unique from other open source communities because of how it is decentralized. While the United States and Western Europe have greatly benefited by the new swag process, we should continue to work with our local Fedorans to spend money locally and give the dollars we spend in these regions a higher impact (versus spending more money on smaller regions but losing that money in shipping fees, customs, and frustrations).

Details

I propose the closing criteria for this ticket is to open a new Mindshare Committee ticket with a proposal from the D&I Team on how to do this. I think Mindshare is the group we need to coordinate with to make this a policy, but before we show up and ask the Mindshare Committee to help us solve problems, we should show up with some kind of solution first.

This is a long-term conversation and does not have a deadline, but it would be great to see a proposal to Mindshare before FWD's begin. (But if it doesn't happen before then, not the end of the world.)

Outcome

  • Better impact of spend in local regions for swag production and distribution
  • Build stronger partnerships and relationships with local organizers and communities (I always prefer spending money in the geographic context of where the spent money is being geographically used—this is one way to build diverse, decentralized communities.)

Metadata Update from @riecatnor:
- Issue close_status updated to: duplicate
- Issue status updated to: Closed (was: Open)

2 years ago

Discussed in 2022-04-25 team meeting.


This was a long and nuanced discussion. The problem statement defined in this ticket still exists, but there is more work on making the new processes and guidelines accessible to all contributors. We thought part of the pain points from this came from a difficult transition from the community-managed swag distribution to the Red Hat-managed swag distribution around 2016/2017. The process has gotten better since then, but there are still pain points. The pain points are unfairly distributed to people outside of the West (USA/Europe).

We felt it makes more sense to drive energy towards improving the existing process and making it more accessible instead of creating a new, parallel system to the one already in place.

Login to comment on this ticket.

Metadata