On 21 May 2013 10:11, Koushik Kumar Nundy <[email protected]> wrote: > TL;DR : Why change the name at all? Why remove vetting of list? If > name is to be changed, "Geeko" sounds awesome, albeit irrelevant, and > would get my vote.
Why remove vetting? the original Ambassador programme had a confusing contradiction - As well as advocacy of our project and distro, our ambassadors were expected to be established contributors willing to mentor less experienced openSUSE users. The advocacy was seen as a great way of starting out with the Project and contributing for the first time, where as the mentoring and local coordination work *requires* the individual has been involved in the Project for some time in order to know their way around and effectively help others. This contradiction made life very difficult for the Ambassador Welcome team (on which I served) - we'd have people applying to be Ambassadors who had practically no experience with the Project and would therefore not be capable of any form of mentoring or local organisation, but because of the dual-role nature of Ambassadors we'd rubber stamp them anyway. It lead to a situation where we had lots of Ambassadors on the list, some doing great local coordination work and mentoring, many more doing great advocacy, and sadly also a significant amount who signed up but never actually did anything for the Project. The removal of vetting and the focus of the Ambassador programme on advocacy, make it clear its a viable way for new contributors to get started with the Project, and also to better reflect the general nature of the project - Advocating openSUSE is another job that this project needs doing, like Development, Marketing, Artwork, etc. We don't require people to pass through some vetting scheme to get involved in any of those roles in the project, we want to encourage them to roll up their sleeves and pitch in, and make it as easy as possible for them to do so. The mentoring and local organisation functions that were formerly expected of the Ambassadors now sit firmly with the new Local Coordinator role. That's somewhere where we definitely need everyone involved to be established community members. Luckily, openSUSE already has a programme for establishing whether or not someone has provided sustained and substantial contributions to the community, that's the openSUSE Members scheme, so as I'm going through the process of pulling together our new Local Coordinator volunteers, I'm primarily only considering those volunteers who are already openSUSE members. Where a Local Coordinator volunteer isn't a member, but has substantial contributions to the project, I'm encouraging them to apply for membership first - I dont think we need two schemes to recognise and reward our established contributor base. As for changing the name - I thought I'd made that clear already. I feel that Ambassador is a title that carries too much gravitas and assumptions that the person holding the title was assigned the role, and is empowered to speak on behalf of the project. That's not the role of those advocating/evangelising/promoting our project and distro, and Advocate is the best word I could find in the English language to reflect that. If a direct translation doesn't work in the other languages of our project, I'm more than happy to discuss and help find one that better suits your language but still reflects the activities we expect from our openSUSE Advocates. I think Jim's already done a good job with this for Portuguese I dont think changing the name in the English language is a sensible option, and I'm dead set against the idea of titles like 'Geeko' which, while amusing and meaningful to established openSUSE users, is meaningless to those who dont know anything about our project or distro - the very people our Advocates are meant to be reaching out to.. Hope this helps - Richard -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] To contact the owner, e-mail: [email protected]
