Advocate Program

What Is A Fedora Advocate?

Advocates are passionate contributors who want to participate in community events, represent Fedora and help grow the user and contributor community. Advocates are people who love spreading knowledge about their area of interest in Fedora. Many advocates also organize release parties where they share information about What’s new in Fedora. Advocates also help new contributors join and hack on any of the subprojects at meetups and Fedora Activity Days (FADs). Advocates come from all parts of the project and represent contributors from all areas, technical and non-technical.

What Purpose Do They Solve?

Organize Fedora participation at events

  • Foster Fedora contributors and encourage contribution and usage

  • Promote Fedora and cross-community interaction

  • Hold calendar events like release parties

  • Promote Fedora technology at local user groups with talks etc.

What To Makes A Great Fedora Advocate?

Fedora Advocates tend to be people who are:

  • already contributors and users of Fedora.

    Advocates are adding to their current contribution, not starting out with Fedora. This allows you to focus on community building in your area of expertise and interest. If you’re brand new to the project, becoming an Advocate is most likely not a good first step. Start with contribution in other areas first.

  • friendly and approachable.

    They like working with and talking to others, especially one-on-one in person or electronically. They realize that people are the key element of successful Open Source projects. Everything that we do — events, budgets, swag, blogging — it’s all done to make personal connections with folks who either want to use or contribute to Fedora.

  • wanting to lead a regional or locally focused community or start one.

    You should be eager and happy to work with Fedora Ambassadors to learn more about the project which you may not have contributed to before.

  • the fabric of the community outreach effort.

    You are expected to collaborate and work with people in your local area, including colleges, universities, professional groups or meetups, and other places where like-minded individuals tend to congregate. You are the face of Fedora in your area.

Joining

Joining the Advocates is super-easy. Just hold an event. Really, that’s it. Details on how to do that and advice for getting started are below.

You should also consider joining these two mailing lists:

  • The Ambassadors Mailing list.

    This list is where the ambassador and advocate groups talk and plan events. Events are announced, planned and improved on this list. This list helps you know what is going on that you might want to help with and shares ideas you might want to copy and modify for your area. Talking to a local Ambassador directly although a nice approach puts you in contact with one person who can be busy. By talking to the whole community you increase your chance of help and collaboration.

  • The Mindshare-Announce list.

    This low volume list will help you know what is going on in Fedora that relates to marketing and community growth. The Mindshare committee, which approves event requests also posts their meeting minutes here.

Once you’ve done your first event, we’ll add you to the list of advocates by putting you into the advocates FAS group.

Getting Started

Make your first projects small ones that are well-defined. Many advocates start out by:

  • holding a Fedora Calendar Event such as a Release Party.

    This will give you the chance to learn the process of hosting events and communicating with the Ambassadors and Mindshare.

  • joining an existing event and helping out.

    This is easy to do if your monitoring the mailing list.

  • teaming up with a Fedora Ambassador.

    It’s great to have Ambassadors by your side, they can help you plan and execute your event. They also have lots of experience with what works and what doesn’t and they may be familiar with different parts of the project than you are.

In all cases, think about what your community is interested in and focused on. Fedora has multiple editions and objectives and they are all great technologies and great stories to tell. Pick the one that makes the most sense to your and your community. For some people, focussing on the work of a specific subproject makes the most sense. If your community is focused on a specific language stack, etc., talk about that.

Holding An Event

When you’re ready to hold an event, you need to do a few simple things:

  1. Open a ticket in the Mindshare Issue Tracker and let people know about your event. If your event needs financial or swag support (see below) this is a crucial (and mandatory) first step.

  2. Send an email to the ambassadors mailing list and let the world know what you’re planning. Ambassadors and others may have suggestions or advice that can improve your event. This also lets you find others who may want to help you with your event.

  3. Hold your event. Be awesome!

  4. Write an event report. An event report lets the community know what happened and how it went. Ideally your report will be shared on the Fedora Community Blog, but posting it on your own blog and the Fedora Planet is fine too. If your even requires financial or swag support (see below), this is mandatory.

  5. "Lather. Rinse. Repeat." as your shampoo bottle says. Do it again and again and keep the momentum going.

Getting Swag or Financial Support

The goal of an event is the spread knowledge and attract users and contributors to Fedora. We realize that sometimes you need swag (such as stickers, buttons and pins) or money to help make this possible. The Advocate role is designed with the idea of easy to accomplish events in mind. Our Fedora Ambassadors (which you are free to join) also do larger more involved events.

Therefore, Advocates are limited in what they can request. When you are planning for an event you should think about using Fedora Stickers (we have lots of designs and will typically send 50 stickers) and a budget of $100 or less. If you need more, we encourage you to team up with a Fedora Ambassador have them sponsor the event and ask for a larger budget. We are open to you suggesting uses for your budget that make the most sense for you, your area, and the event, however we tend to restrict the money to no more than $25 being spent on travel and none being used to produced swag. The balance is typically spent on food, meeting space, etc.

To request support do this:

  1. Make sure the ticket you opened with Mindshare above contains your budget request and is detailed as to how you want to use it. There is a template in the Mindshare Repository to help you. You need to select it from the Type drop down. The template is named advocate. Please use it.

  2. Wait for Mindshare to make a decision. Our goal is to decide on events within one calendar week. However, you should have as much lead time as possible as there may be questions from the committee or unforeseeable delays. Shipping also takes time, so allow a lot of it, especially if the import process in your country is long.

    Mindshare will typically respond with:

    • Approved: GO FOR IT! Your event is approved. We want you to be successful.

    • Questions/Suggestions: We are a bit confused or have some questions and ideas. We may also suggest different ways to use your budget or that you work with an Ambassador. In some cases we will want to make sure you’re well versed in the technology you want to represent. Respond to these concerns to get a final decision.

    • Declined: There are various reasons why we can’t support your event. We hope to never have to decline an event and instead that we can work with you to make it a success.

  3. Do It! Hold the event and save your receipts.

  4. Write your report. Link your report to your ticket.

  5. Submit a reimbursement request to the Fedora Budget Pagure using the provided template. Reimbursements are typically paid within 2 weeks.

Writing Your Event Report

The work of Advocates is often featured in the Mindshare newsletters and hence the event report holds a significant amount of importance. The report is a general summary of an event which gives the project an idea of what’s going on and reports on successes as well as lessons learned.

Reporting can be done in many ways. Here’s are a couple of commonly used methods for sharing the event report with the community:

  • Community Blog : Advocates can sign in to the Wordpress instance of Community Blog using your FAS Credentials by following this link. Once inside, you can create a new post where you can draft your experience. After you are done, subscribe to CommOps list and share the link of your draft. Politely ask if somebody can approve your post after a review. Here’s an example of a Release Party Blog post.

  • Your own Blog : If you have been maintaining your own blog, you can post it there as well. To extend the reach of audience, Advocates may syndicate their blog to Fedora Planet. For more information check out this 'how to'.

Comment on your issue in the mindshare repo with a link to your event report.