Tagging @nb . Could you advise us on the status of this budget request. Let us know how we may assist you, as our event is approaching.

Thanks.

@lajuggler Can you take a look at #83 and give us more details in line with that request's format?

I am planning on attending as well (noted in the wiki) but I am not requesting any funding from Fedora.

Also, I'm curious as to why the SCaLE pass is being budgeted? We normally get a full pass as exhibitors.

I would love to have @aacosta join us. He's always been a valuable contributor at the booth and, given the location, a native Spanish speaker is quite an asset.

Why does Fedora attend?

The Southern California Linux Fest started off as an install fest with a focus on different distros and community support. Even though it's now a major open source event for the United States western coast, expecting over 3000 attendees, 150 exhibitors, with nearly 130 sessions, tutorials, and special events, there remains a focus each year on it's roots. Event Organizers graciously continue to give Fedora a free booth and passes for ambassadors attending.

SCaLE continues to be one of the largest open source events on the West Coast, gaining attendees from all over the US and even as far as South America. Because of it's roots, SCaLE continues to be an eclectic mix of both veterans and rookies to the open source space. Given an essentially free access to such a diverse group is why we attend.

What is the focus of the event?

We've requested that our booth be near the CentOS and RedHat booths. With the recent IBM acquisition, rumors around the future of the project abound. This was evident in the immediate wake of the announcement on our mailing lists, but we expect many attendees will have questions regarding the state of the project this year.

Focus on Workstation, due to the nature of the history of the event being an install-fest, and the solidity that the fedora community isn't being shutdown, and number of students/first time users, is our primary goal this year. We expect to focus on this by distributing install media (USBs) and attending sessions where new users are gathered to get started with linux. (There is an entire track dedicated to this at SCaLE with specific events on getting started that we have attended in the past) We'll also have a laptop with Workstation so others can demo the experience.

Additionally continued focus on Server with a laptop running slides (based off: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D121coztXHY&feature=youtu.be ) about modularity.

How does our attendance at this event build users of or contributors to specific Fedora solutions — and why are those particular solutions strategically important?

In addition to the groups that are at SCaLE to participate in the lower level tracks, there are always a large number of students that come from surrounding universities, as SCaLE gives a substantial discount to students. Often times these (and other attendees) have no idea about what Fedora is, why they should use it, how it's different from other distributions they've heard about, or that it's even related to RedHat or CentOS. A large portion of our time and energy is taken up with these conversation on the expo floor. How can users join our project if they don't know we exist?

It's not worthless to point out the message that not attending will indicate to the community at large (see rumors above) when event staff make known that we were admitted freely.

I know that there are some questions around @aacosta 's ability to make it here, but having a native spanish speaker, is invaluable as the event is held in the greater LA area and there are many attendees that travel up from Mexico for it.

Outside of that, our costs are really minimal. Both myself and @vwbusguy are planning on being there and covering our own costs. Outside of this I'm requesting that we be shipped what-so-ever swag that can be spared for an event of our size. Typically in the past we've restricted more expensive swag, (hats, t-shirts, etc) to users that have a more vested interest in the project (like by showing us that they have fedora installed on their machine and not just in a vm). Even so with over several thousand attendees, the 50 or so t-shirts or hats didn't last very long. We're happy to distribute whatever the mindshare deems reasonable. Since swag distribution has moved out of FAmNA and into mindshare, we're currently limited to some stickers. USBs for install media would be appreciated greatly. Costs can be saved by shipping swag with RH employees (or the swag that they're bringing), or they could be shipped to myself or any of the other ambassadors.

As an alternative budget, if we don't cover costs for @aacosta flight and housing the budget costs would only include any swag shipped and parking/gas for @lajuggler, who lives about 30 miles away but possibly Hours away based on traffic.

@bex Do I need to fill out another ticket for swag, or will this do here?

Do we have any speakers at this event?

The focus on students and first time users seems reasonable — my impression at this conference before was that a lot of attendees had really either already made up their allegiances or were distro hoppers that weren't likely to stay around the community. Possibly we can change their minds, but new users give new opportunities.

Is there a way we can measure the outcome? Maybe... 30 new people introducing themselves and welcomed at https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/c/friends? (Just an idea, and picking 30 out of the hat as 1% of the expected attendees.) Or... 3 more people who are already using Fedora and who are interested in becoming ambassadors?

@mattdm

@aacosta @lajuggler and myself all submitted papers for talks, but weren't accepted. @herlo Is running the install-fest.

You impression is accurate. I might even suggest that it's a majority of people there even with absolutely no data to back it up. But even if it's 2/3's of attendees, that still leaves 1000 attendees it's not true for.

The problem with metrics for this, is some of this may not be realized for a while. A student, interested in trying fedora, may leave a a significant impression, but be totally unwilling to wipe their computer in the middle a semester and choose to wait 2 months until after finals to join the project in earnest. I'm totally open to pushing towards goals, but I also want to be authentic with trying to achieve the purpose behind them. Give me 30 t-shirts and I'll get you 30 posts at https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/c/friends? but I worry that it'll be a false economy. Almost everyone giving away stuff make you let them scan your badge and adds you to their mailing list, but it doesn't mean that most people don't just block those emails once they do.

I will say... that if they HAVE a FAS account they're much more likely to join the community in a meaningful way then if they don't.

@paradoxguitarist using FAS as an indicator as you suggest, is 30 new FAS/claims on the badge a good metric for success?

While I do agree it is good to have some sort of metrics to measure our success, I think it's hard to quantify. Plus, why is this being brought up just in this ticket? I haven't seen anyone asking for specific metrics for success in any of our other mindshare event tickets lately.

@nb It's nothing special to this event — I'd like to see similar thinking for all > $1000 spending.

Give me 30 t-shirts and I'll get you 30 posts at https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/c/friends? but I worry that it'll be a false economy. Almost everyone giving away stuff make you let them scan your badge and adds you to their mailing list, but it doesn't mean that most people don't just block those emails once they do.

I'd rather see 30 introductions not directly in exchange for free shirts, of course, but even then I don't think that'd be totally worthless. We could look back a year later and see what number of the 30 then stayed around.

What do you think about the other part of my suggestion? Getting three new Fedora ambassadors?

@mattdm fair enough, but I think we need to have some discussions, and documentation, around what we want to see. AFAIK the best documentation we have is your blog post that you made a while back, which AFAIK has not been added to any formal documentation. Metrics are a good thing, but I think they are difficult to determine for a lot of our events.

I suggest we start a separate ticket to discuss and document what we as Mindshare want to see, and include metrics as part of this. SCALE is coming up quickly and I don't think we should hold up this ticket based on adding new criteria (metrics) that has not been previously required. It's getting to the point now where we need to make a decision on this event ASAP. I think it's nice to get metrics, but let's not hold up this ticket because of it.

That's fair — I think we can both not hold up the ticket and do some of these things. :)

I am +1 to the proposed budget.

Sounds fair +1 too

@x3mboy voted +1 at our meeting today.

+1

I guess I'll add my +1 as well, with the caveat that I really do want to continue the discussions around the objectives for this event, and ideas about how we can measure various aspects of success.

Could someone clarify if this is fully approved as soon as possible? It appears we may need one more +1 for this to be a go.

All of us here in the LA contingent are enthusiastic in providing a Fedora-positive atmosphere at the next event.

Thank you.

Thank you @jsmith !

Following up on Action Items from last meeting, I have a situation that may impact my travel plans.

I have renewed my visa on Feb 20th (I started the process since Jan 4th), it has been approved but I still haven't received the replacement. I requested a special permission to enter the country for Scale but they told me this situation is not applicable so I'd have to wait for my visa to arrive.

This is keeping me from booking a flight due to the risk of losing the money if I don't get the visa on time. Even if I get the visa on the same week of the event, I may not get a ticket that fits the budget on such short time.

I've thought on alternative plan, which is road trip, car pooling with Ivan Chavero. Ivan works for RedHat, he has a talk approved at Scale, contributes to fedora by promoting it and maintaining a package and he's willing to support Fedora activities in the event.

So my particular request is: please consider exchanging the travel expenses from flight ticket to road expenses (gas, toll roads, parking at hotel and food during trip -not during the event but the commute since that's 16 hours leg each way)

Approved flight budget is $700, we're estimating up to $400 for road expenses

For clarity - this is approved.

I'm so sorry, but does anyone know if any swag (namely usb drives or t-shirts) was sent with RH?

@paradoxguitarist I don't think there was a ticket requesting swag to be shipped or a shipping address given, so I don't think any swag was shipped.

Hello all:

My preview draft of our recent SCaLE17x event is located here:
https://communityblog.fedoraproject.org/?p=7115&preview=1&_ppp=b14667a211

The PDF of the slides from our recent event are here:
https://bit.ly/2GYCy3Z

Perry's budget request link is here:
https://pagure.io/fedora-budget/issue/104

Could someone handle that request? I would like to pay off my credit card bill statement as soon as possible. Thank you.

@lajuggler I saw in the report that a drop in visitors was attributed to the lack of t-shirts. Was there a material change in the quality of the visitors? Did we get the same number of current users? of potential users? I am trying to think about the idea of "who didn't come to the booth because we wouldn't give them a t-shirt?"

@lajuggler the reimbursement request was only submitted two days ago. We try to pay within one week with a goal of never exceeding two weeks.

Aacosta's budget request link is here:
https://pagure.io/fedora-budget/issue/106

Could somebody please take a look at it and LMK if everything is ok?

I'm aware as it was mentioned in the meeting that the budget may be delayed a bit due to quarter leap, but, can we estimate a gross ETA for the reimbursement?

Thank you

@lajuggler any comments on https://pagure.io/mindshare/issue/82#comment-561864

@aacosta the goal is to pay reimbursements within 2 weeks

Hello @bex !

@lajuggler any comments on https://pagure.io/mindshare/issue/82#comment-561864

Please be sure to reimburse @aacosta his share of USD $326.58 [his hotel share] plus other costs related to travel (air/rental/etc.). I don't have visibility into his reimbursement ticket, but I imagine @aacosta's itemization clarifies the additional expenses.

Thank you.

Hello @bex

Regarding:

@lajuggler I saw in the report that a drop in visitors was attributed to the lack of t-shirts. Was there a material change in the quality of the visitors? Did we get the same number of current users? of potential users? I am trying to think about the idea of "who didn't come to the booth because we wouldn't give them a t-shirt?"

I can only comment on the Frdiay and Sunday days, as I was providing support in InstallFest on Saturday. My impression is that there was a noticeable drop in visitors between prior years and this year, as a result of premium swag (shirts / USB) on both days. We had visits from some Fedora long time supporters just to say hello, but I think lack of premium swag certainly was a high factor in fewer visits.

@bex By the way thank you for facilitating my reimbursement.

We do hope you assist us in facilitating @aacosta 's reimbursement. He was very fundamental in our outreach to guests for our recent event. Thank you so much!

Reimbursements are a ministerial thing, not subject to my personal whims. I have asked for receipts as the charges aren't adding up. I believe both @lajuggler and @aacosta do great work and are both fundamental.

I believe this ticket is complete. Please reopen for further conversation. Thanks!