Hi @neorushil

Where is the talk? When is the talk? How did it come about? Is there a specific event?

@bex
The talk is in Jaipur, Rajasthan and I got an invitation from the institute which is conducting an event there for students and graduates who are willing to contribute and be a part of the open source culture.

When:- 22nd June 2019
Where:- Jaipur, Rajasthan (India)

@neorushil can you tell me more about what you do in the Fedora Project and how you are going to structure your talk? You don't have a wiki page and your FAS account was created 10 days before this request.

I am -1 pending an update from @neorushil

In meeting on 26 June 2019: -1 from me

We need to now more about the event, at least:

Link to the event
Number of possible attendees

I'm 0 for this I need more information to vote this

inclining to -1 on this as I need more information around the event.

@bex @sumantrom @bt0dotninja @x3mboy
Hi,

Sorry for the delay in response.
I was on Leave for the last 10 days and was unable to respond.

My account is 10 days old because I created it only 10 days ago so that I can join the community officially and start working.

In India, there is a huge chunk of young students and they do not make any contribution to the open source community in any manner. Why is that? Because no one knows what is open source contribution and how to proceed with contributing.

My goal was to spread awareness about the core values of open source standards and make them aware of the multiple Open Source Projects which are working in tandem with Red Hat's Enterprise Projects such as the Fedora Project. Now the issue is that everyone is aware of what is RHEL and CentOS or even Ubuntu but I have seen that a huge percentage is unaware about what Fedora is and what is its role with the development of RHEL.

I saw that 95% of the audience was unaware of Upstream Projects or what is Upstream in general and what is Red Hat's policy UPSTREAM FIRST, & this has always bugged me.
There was around 400 RED HAT CERTIFIED ENGINEERS/COE holders who were attending the talk and when I asked how many know what Fedora is none of them raised hands as nobody knew it.

I am already aware of this situation as the students aim to get the certificate and then get a job and they are not aware of how to give back to the community. Thus I told them about the Fedora project, what it is, how can you use Fedora, Fedora CoreOS, Silverblue
What is an upstream project and how can you spread awareness about it?

My talk targeted this issue specifically because I believe making them aware that something called "Fedora" exists is the first step.

Here is a link to the blog which I have written:-
https://neoisone.blogspot.com/2019/07/booming-opensource-technologies-on-19th.html

@neorushil welcome to Fedora. Have you been doing work without a FAS before you created your account? If so, what?

Are you slides or the details of the Fedora related content of your talk available? It sounds like from your blog that you talked a lot about RH products and technologies and open source development. This is great! For the purposes of this ticket though we need to drill in on the Fedora parts.

@bex Thanks for the welcome.

I will share the slides as well, I talked about Red Hat but my focus was the Fedora Project as everyone there knew about Red Hat and RH Products and as I mentioned earlier my aim was to make them aware of the upstream technologies primarily Fedora.

You need to understand that in India things are very different when it comes to students, in order to explain it to them what Fedora is and how the Fedora project works, you need to explain it to them the association with Red Hat.
These are students who have just started to step up in the Open source game and they start it with by going straight for the Red Hat Certifications, for them, Red Hat is the only BIG open source name out there, therefore, I couldn't just go and only speak about Fedora without explaining how it connects with Red Hat and the relevance of upstream community.
As I mentioned in my blog, not even a single one of them knew that there is an OS named FEDORA, so I had to show it to them and I only had 30 minutes for the talk which is not a huge window so had to keep it limited.

Before I created the account I was speaking of Fedora CoreOS and Fedora in general at some meetups I previously attended.

You need to understand that in India things are very different when it comes to students, in order to explain it to them what Fedora is and how the Fedora project works, you need to explain it to them the association with Red Hat.

@neorushil, I am not sure if this my place to speak but what about the people who are not aware of Red Hat or generally Open source at all? I have had a different experience (almost every time I did an event). From the community point of view, Fedora is first a platform and an operating system and later "part upstream" of RHEL. My usual flow is Why OpenSource -> Why Linux -> Why Fedora.. saying that Fedora is upstream of RHEL that's why it's awesome is not really the best pitch I would buy. What about the open source values? friendly community, inclusion, a leading edge OS?

These are students who have just started to step up in the Open source game and they start it with by going straight for the Red Hat Certifications, for them, Red Hat is the only BIG open source name out there, therefore, I couldn't just go and only speak about Fedora without explaining how it connects with Red Hat and the relevance of upstream community.

As I mentioned in my blog, not even a single one of them knew that there is an OS named FEDORA, so I had to show it to them and I only had 30 minutes for the talk which is not a huge window so had to keep it limited.

Again, Demo/showing Fedora is alright but then that's all comes down to Gnome or $your_window_manager. What about the underlying things? differences? (the biggest one are the things I mentioned earlier and not dnf IMO). I have no opinion on approval/rejection of budget but saying that in India we need to relate Fedora to Red Hat to make students understand, is not something I agree with.

@siddharthvipul1
This is my approach towards open source.

The people I meet are the students who think that Red Hat is the way into Open Source.
Which is obviously not true, And my flow is the same, Opensource -> Linux -> Why open source -> Why Linux.

I interacted with around 400 students and when I asked them to name some Open Source Linux Based Operating System they said RED HAT, Centos, Ubuntu.
Not one of them mentioned Fedora, and this is why telling them how Fedora is related with Red Hat is important and it is necessary.
My approach is different than yours may be and I respect yours.

Maybe you have not interacted the kind of the crowd I have interacted with and vice versa may be true.
If I have to explain it to students who are completely unaware of community standards, upstream technologies and the values of open source, I start with explaining it to them what actually open source is.
And the best way to do it is to tell them how it is connected with Red Hat and how they differ.

So it is required for them to understand how RED HAT's policy of UPSTREAM FIRST comes into the picture.
I have explained it to them why Fedora is an awesome OS, and why should they check it out over other Linux distros.

This was my experience because usually institutes and colleges just try to pitch the students the technologies with which they can simply go ahead and get a job asap, so the values, communities, contribution is lost in the race to get a job and this is why it is important in my opinion for them to understand how is Fedora involved in evolving RHEL and the reasons why they should check FEDORA out.

I would like to add a couple more things.

I have worked with people who are 11-15 years experienced. RHCE, RHCA, and working on Production servers for decades.
Most of the people I worked with before I joined Red Hat had heard of Fedora but only 1 or 2 of them I know who actually used Fedora OS, No one was aware that a thing called "community" exists where they can interact with other like-minded contributors and developers, speakers.

This is one of the reasons why Indians being in such a huge number fail to contribute to open source. I have not known anyone from the Service Based Industry to actively or even occasionally contribute to any single Open Source Software be it Apache, Mozilla or Ubuntu.

When my talk got finished, as you can see in the image, every single student asked me 2 questions:-

1. How can we start contribution to open source?
2. How will that benefit us to get a Job?

I did answer the first question. However, the second one was a bit tricky because it is being hardcoded in the student's brains that whatever they are doing it has to lead on a path where it lands them an offer letter at the end regardless of the role.
And I am sure you have seen this.

Once they get a decent job, the majority of them will never think of contributing for the community.

This is one of the reasons I wanted to give this talk.
WHY SHOULD YOU CONTRIBUTE?

These were the students who started using a computer on a regular basis after joining college. Because they come from government schools where they had very limited access to desktops and laptops (if they had any).

Their entire exposure to technology comes to them like a flood when they join any college, so terms like UPSTREAM, COMMUNITY, CONTRIBUTION, it means nothing to them as their primary focus becomes whatever hot technology is running in the market.
And most of them are really into the technology, they learn quickly and they manage to create and develop applications fast.
That's why my approach is fine and because I have trained and mentored hundreds of students over the last 7 years. I know how to approach them

Hi and welcome to the Fedora project @neorushil

I have some worries about this ticket, in part because I'm a member of the Fedora-Join team:

First of all, I don't disapprove help seasoned contributors when they are experts in X technologies and give great talks about how much the Fedora ecosystem helps to solve the Y but your speech sounds a little generic. You don't show many Fedora specific information about the Fedora project structure, teams, the onboarding process, WCIDFF, etc.

Also, the fact of the recent account creation doesn't give me enough information to vote for this ticket; I'm still +0

@bt0dotninja
True, the speech was generic, to an audience who were completely unaware of the Fedora Project and given the limited time I've had which was < 30 min.

IMO the first step for that audience was to be aware of the Fedora Project, once that is done I can move onto explaining the other things.
If you went through all my comments you can see that I have mentioned that those were the students who just started with the Open Source Technologies, and once the talk was over I am now getting a huge response from those students on my LinkedIn where I am explaining most of them about the next steps.

Thank you for your response.

@bex @sumantrom @bt0dotninja @x3mboy
Hi,
Sorry for the delay in response.

Np, I would like to ask some question and grab the understanding of this situation.

I was on Leave for the last 10 days and was unable to respond.
My account is 10 days old because I created it only 10 days ago so that I can join the community officially and start working.
In India, there is a huge chunk of young students and they do not make any contribution to the open source community in any manner. Why is that? Because no one knows what is open source contribution and how to proceed with contributing.

I beg to differ. I have been personally been doing events in India for last 6 years and GSoC stats show that India has the most number of GSoC applicant ..what are you exactly aiming it?
If I recall correctly, Jaipur had a very strong FOSS community and there are still a lot of open source activities that happen across India which are primarily targetted for students. Fedora has a strong presence in India.

~snipped tandem with Red Hat's Enterprise Projects such as the Fedora Project.

Did you mean Red Hat Enterprise Project or products that RHT develops for the enterprise at large?

Now the issue is that everyone is aware of what is RHEL and CentOS or even Ubuntu but I have seen that a huge percentage is unaware about what Fedora is and what is its role with the development of RHEL.

In that sense, since they know about CentOS ..are the students already a part of CentOS community? If yes, can you give me some idea around how students participate in CentOS?

~snipped Thus I told them about the Fedora project, what it is, how can you use Fedora, Fedora CoreOS, Silverblue

Core OS? Can you please elaborate what are the points you covered in there?

What is an upstream project and how can you spread awareness about it?

I believe you contribute to some upstream, can you please explain how do you go about spreading awareness?

~snipped

You need to understand that in India things are very different when it comes to students, in order to explain it to them what Fedora is and how the Fedora project works, you need to explain it to them the association with Red Hat.

I doubt that's the case. Let's hypotactically assume that we explain the association of Fedora project with RHT.. does that guarantee that there will be a significant amount of your audience turning into Fedora contributors right away? If so, why ? and If not why is the association necessary then?

I have done events in the past and I have kept RHT out of the picture as sometimes unconsciously we provoke people(faculties) into thinking that students will end up getting job at RHT which is not a great idea to spread and in India sadly, I feel that's very rampant.

These are students who have just started to step up in the Open source game and they start it with by going straight for the Red Hat Certifications, for them, Red Hat is the only BIG open source name out there, therefore, I couldn't just go and only speak about Fedora without explaining how it connects with Red Hat and the relevance of upstream community.
As I mentioned in my blog, not even a single one of them knew that there is an OS named FEDORA, so I had to show it to them and I only had 30 minutes for the talk which is not a huge window so had to keep it limited.

Before I created the account I was speaking of Fedora CoreOS and Fedora in general at some meetups I previously attended.
I am wondering if you can tell me what are the things you covered in CoreOS ?

@siddharthvipul1
This is my approach towards open source.
The people I meet are the students who think that Red Hat is the way into Open Source.
Which is obviously not true, And my flow is the same, Opensource -> Linux -> Why open source -> Why Linux.
I interacted with around 400 students and when I asked them to name some Open Source Linux Based Operating System they said RED HAT, Centos, Ubuntu.

RED HAT is not an OS. It's RHEL.

Not one of them mentioned Fedora, and this is why telling them how Fedora is related with Red Hat is important and it is necessary.
My approach is different than yours may be and I respect yours.
Maybe you have not interacted the kind of the crowd I have interacted with and vice versa may be true.
If I have to explain it to students who are completely unaware of community standards, upstream technologies and the values of open source, I start with explaining it to them what actually open source is.
And the best way to do it is to tell them how it is connected with Red Hat and how they differ.
So it is required for them to understand how RED HAT's policy of UPSTREAM FIRST comes into the picture.
I have explained it to them why Fedora is an awesome OS, and why should they check it out over other Linux distros.
This was my experience because usually institutes and colleges just try to pitch the students the technologies with which they can simply go ahead and get a job asap, so the values, communities, contribution is lost in the race to get a job and this is why it is important in my opinion for them to understand how is Fedora involved in evolving RHEL and the reasons why they should check FEDORA out.

@sumantrom

RED HAT is not an OS. It's RHEL.

I am aware I also work at Red Hat, I was referring to their answers. Generally speaking people don't even use "RHEL" they just say "LINUX" and even Linux is not a name of any OS.

And your point regarding GSoc is correct, I know many students who submit to GSOC and get selected, but then again how many of them are active contributors once they get a job?

I am talking about contributions from people who are working in the industry specially the service based companies. India has over 3 million IT employees who are directly employed and 10 million+ who are indirectly employed and "not" a huge chunk of them are contributors.

Each year 2.15 lakh students graduate from India in the Computer Science Department and they will just jump on the first job they get in any big brand company.
They never get to know about the community part for a long time in their career. I know people 10-12 years experienced having no idea about what/how does the contribution happens.

I doubt that's the case. Let's hypotactically assume that we explain the association of Fedora project with RHT.. does that guarantee that there will be a significant amount of your audience turning into Fedora contributors right away? If so, why ? and If not why is the association necessary then?
I beg to differ. I have been personally been doing events in India for last 6 years and GSoC stats show that India has the most number of GSoC applicant ..what are you exactly aiming it?
If I recall correctly, Jaipur had a very strong FOSS community and there are still a lot of open source activities that happen across India which are primarily targetted for students. Fedora has a strong presence in India.

They will obviously not jump directly on the contribution part, they still have a lot of stuff to figure out.
And it is a fact that Fedora is associated with Red Hat and I felt mentioning this was important for students who are completely unaware of what Fedora is. If this were any FOSS meetup I would have skipped the RHT part but this was a talk for students who are only going for RHT and Red Hat Certifications and this is why it was important for them to know that FEDORA exists and it is associated with the RHT but it is also an independent community which they can join. Honestly speaking I have been recieving messages from some of them after the talk was over about the next steps in contribution. So yes I believe even if a couple of them starts contributing my talk was a success.

Yes, Jaipur has a FOSS community but it is not as big as the communities in New Delhi or Bangalore or Pune and I have been a part of the Jaipur FOSS community since 2009 when there were 10 people in it, so almost 10 years, that is why I am aware of the situation that is there in Rajasthan.
Rajasthan still has 74% rural population and this is why students coming from the smaller cities into Jaipur for higher education are not aware of such things like Open Source standards. They don't even know what is open source or closed source, and if they are introduced to Open source and communities like Fedora this early, by the time they graduate they will start contributing that is my opinion.
If Fedora as you say has a "very strong presence in India" why were none of the 400+ students I addressed were able to answer my question "WHAT IS FEDORA"?
Students comes from cities like Ajmer, Bhilwara, Alwar, Dosa, Dudu, Jhalawar, Udaipur, Jaisalmer, Jodhpur etc. And trust me I have been training hundereds of them over the years and most of them had no idea what does the word FOSS stands for, what is a community and what are community standards.
When you speak of students who submit to GSOC, they are specifically the developers and programmers. But not everyone is a developer and programming is not the only way to contribute.

You can review a software's documents to find errors in it, you can review man pages, you can make the documentation look better, you can test a software out in different environments, and you can submit an issue to the community if you are facing it.

There are multiple ways of contributing and that is what I have explained it to the students.
Even if you are using Fedora as your primary daily use OS and suggesting your peers to use it over other Linux based distros I believe that is also a type of contribution because you are spreading awareness about it. The more users we have the bigget the community will grow.

I asked them to check out Fedora OS, how to download it, what are the advantages of using it, why is the community so strong.

I came to know after joining Fedora officially that I can get a budget for this talk and hence I made this request.
I respect the concerns of all the community members and I am really glad that people are highly concerned about the specifics, I am just like this as well. I am a huge FOSS enthusiast and regardless of weather I get this or not I will continue giving more talks and mentor the students the way I have been doing the past 9 years and would love to include the insights from you guys.

Thank you @sumantrom for your insights and welcoming me to the community.

As the conversation here reflects, there are many ways to approach telling the Fedora story.
Throughout this discussion I have been struck by the following fact pattern:

1) A person who only recently decided to become active in Fedora in a community manner, but who has apparently been active without involving the remainder of the community because of their $dayjob asked for funding. This doesn't mean you haven't been active, but it raises questions.

I don't know that it is your intention, but your request reads like this to me, and possibly others. "I never asked for your support or help before. I never shared the results of my earlier activities so we could celebrate them and work on them together. I never shared the actual activities I was doing so that others in our community could replicate them to get the same success where they are. I never joined your conversations or made any contribution that even required an account before now. Now I want your money."

2) This funding was for a short-notice, at the time sparsely described, talk that happens to be occurring in your home town. The entirety of the request is for travel funding, which is not normally something we have defined as our first steps (see the Advocates program). This doesn't mean it isn't potentially a valid first step, but it raises questions.

@neorushil You said this above:

IMO the first step for that audience was to be aware of the Fedora Project, once that is done I can move onto explaining the other things.

You've made the case that you viewed your approach as meeting the audience where they were and then bringing them to Fedora. This is one of many approaches that can work. What concerns me is there has been no plan stated for how you are going to do this. So far we have seen lots of statements about how you gave a talk and mentioned Fedora. This feels very "spray and pray." If you have a larger strategy and plan why wasn't that stated early on?

One thing we have seen come up is that when we go to an event we have to be prepared to do the work that follows. That may mean that if we go talk about a specific area of contribution we either need to be ready to personally help onboard the contributor, or know that area of the project is healthy and ready to take newcomers. We may need to collect contact details or make sure that we are prepared to catch followup and nurture it. This is even more important when, as you have stated multiple times, you are trying to attract contributors, not individuals who will only be users.

I am concerned that this talk was more about your employer than about our community and that our community featured as a small part that has no follow up activity.

Therefore I am -1 to do this request as I’d like to see you active or come to us with a plan that includes followup. This isn’t to say we want to discourage you, but we’d like the Fedora community to be more than place you go to only to talk about money.

I concur with @bex and I am too a -1 to this request

@bex
Understood, you can close the ticket.
I will try to maintain better standards from next time.

Thanks for your time everyone, you will see my active participation in the future.

REGARDS

We look forward to seeing you active in the community @neorushil