Meeting started at 2026-01-08 10:58:04 UTC

The Meeting name is 'Fedora Mindshare Committee meeting - 2026-01-08'

The Meeting Name is now mindshare

!hi

Justin Wheeler (jflory7) - he / him / his

A very good morning, folks!

!hi

Greg Sutcliffe (gwmngilfen) - he / him / his

!localtime jflory7

The current local time of "jflory7" is: "05:58" (timezone: America/New_York)

I am still fixing my coffee, might be 2-3 minutes late.

But I wanted to kick off the meeting logs first 😁

heh

!hi

emma kidney (ekidney) - she / her / hers

Oh, and happy new year too!

I hope everyone is having a good start to 2026 🙂

!hi

Akashdeep Dhar (t0xic0der) - he / him / his

Good morning/afternoon everyone!

happy new year! 🙂 it feels just like last year lol

Now to get myself habituated to writing 2026 sigh

I did almost start this meeting as `2025-01-08`

But I caught myself at the last minute

Well, I think we have all of our folks from the eastern half of the planet here. We will catch up with Joseph async, and we will see if Luis is able to drop in for the latter half.

With that, we're five minutes past.

Let's get started!

I have at least two updates.

OK, those are all of the things I can think off this early in the morning.

Gwmngilfen, Emma Kidney, Akashdeep Dhar: Any other news or community-wide announcements you want to share?

nothing from me!

I got one more but it's very specific to Fedora Badges and FOSSAsia that I shared with you.

Wonder if it is Mindshare worthy, if not I will hold my peace.

Akashdeep Dhar: If it is quick and does require discussion, drop it here!

Fedora Badges feels relevant enough for contributor recognition to have an announcement, IMHO 🙂

Sorry, s/does/does not/

Akashdeep Dhar: If it is quick and does not require discussion, drop it here!

And FOSSAsia falls into the events thing, so here I go.

Fin from my side.

Got a `!link`?

And kudos!

Sweet.

PS. This might require login

Alrighty then! Not bad for news and announcements from the first full week of the year 😄

Let's move on to the next section.

Thanks!

Emma Kidney++ Thanks for following through on this!

jflory7 has already given cookies to ekidney during the F43 timeframe

Looks great. I have a TODO to follow-up there.

Along with the meeting summary from last time, because we got some discussion on the Fedora Discussion topic, and I was meaning to follow up this week.

Those are all the action items from last time. Nice work on wrapping up 2025 on a high note, folks!

Let's get to the agenda next.

OK, so before proceeding, I want to do some ad-hoc agenda-making.

I see four tickets warranting a discussion.

I thought we had a FOSDEM ticket too, but I don't see that from ffmancera and Daniel yet? I hope we see one soon 🌚

Here is my pitch:

- #95: Funding Request: XV Poznańska Impreza Wolnego Oprogramowania (2026) —https://gitlab.com/fedora/mindshare/home/-/issues/95

- #94: Update of the brochure “A Beginners Guide” — https://gitlab.com/fedora/mindshare/home/-/issues/94

- #93: [Funding Request] SCaLE 23x 2026 — https://gitlab.com/fedora/mindshare/home/-/issues/93

I think these three are most urgent and represent net-new tickets from during the holidays. Some of them are timely too, so I suggest starting there.

If time allows, I'd suggest these two as discussion tickets as well:

Sounds like a plan

- #89: Define Digital Ambassadorship in Mindshare responsibilities — https://gitlab.com/fedora/mindshare/home/-/issues/89#note_2956766884

- #96: Proposal for Tangible Contributor Recognition Awards under Fedora Mindshare Recognition Service — https://gitlab.com/fedora/mindshare/home/-/issues/96

Sounds fair?

And doing them in this order too.

Yep.

Emma Kidney, Gwmngilfen: If no objections, we can go with this agenda. We will have voting to do in this meeting 😎

sounds good

OK! So, a Large Event ticket.

And SCaLE is one of our largest events of the calendar year, next to FOSDEM and Flock.

So, this ticket does warrant a closer look and some discussion.

yah the big money number is scary lol

I see the proposed total budget for five people is $7,430 USD.

would this eat a lot of the budget for the rest of the year?

It is, although believe it or not, this is also less than 2025. But since it is probably one of the largest amounts we will see in 2026, we should discuss it, especially as it relates to event strategy.

There is a piece of work I have on my plate, which is to provide a year snapshot of the budget for 2026. I know this is data that would be super helpful to make decisions.

But I don't have it in full yet.

But hey, if it helps further our goals being one of the largest events in the west, sure...

The hotels look rather expensive to me. Like prohibitively expensive kinda expensive.

I do like some of what I see defined here: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SCaLE_23X_Event#Rationale

Great question. So, it is not black-and-white here. Yes, this event does take a large portion of the overall Fedora event budget for 2026. No, it does not totally wipe out our budget to do other events later in the year, although it may make it difficult to do other events that fall in the Large Events category of events.

However, I do think SCaLE has some interesting context, particularly for 2026.

One of the things not mentioned in the ticket is that SCaLE will actually have an entire track for Fedora & CentOS in 2026. New this year.

shaunm has been helping to wrangle that, with Perry Rivera and Alejandro Acosta in support.

I see just one talk there and even that is pending selection. Do we have a booth there as well like we do during FOSDEM? The locations do not seem to be updated just yet.

And other context is that, well, the US West Coast in particular is an expensive region… the hotel cost is what I see with the heaviest footprint on the budget. However, I was also working with the event owners to look for ways to actually _reduce_ the hotel budget from other options in the area.

See here about a booth: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SCaLE_23X_Event#Booth

It does need to be confirmed still.

But one of the best things about SCaLE is that we get a free booth for $0.

The event organizers give it to us as an open source project.

(Usually this is a sponsor benefit only)

Oh I saw that but a bunch of the things including talks and booths are tentative at the moment, so 🤷 I had to ask if folks here would probably have more information on it that what's in there.

Akashdeep Dhar: I think it is reasonable to seek clarity on this. It is up to all of us to decide whether we have the context needed for a vote.

Right now, we have the opportunity to ask questions and get info from the event owners, either before or after voting.

I am drafting a reply asking for more information on the hotel side of things. Just want to check if they have looked closely into finding more relatively affordable stays that might include a little travelling (because heh, I would assume they would be a little far but a whole lot cheaper).

the track, reduced costs, and that it's not the whole budget make me want to say yes, but I wonder if there *are* any other Large Events on the radar? If not this seems a good way to go

It is worth a question to ask. However, I am sad that California is… expensive. Especially the Pasadena / Los Angeles area. I did some quick searching when I saw the budget the first time, and didn't see a whole lot of better options. Some folks are sharing rooms with other Ambassadors as a way to cost-optimize too.

Also a good question. So, the only other large event on my radar is FOSDEM, which I was hoping to vote on today, but I don't see a ticket. (ffmancera hint hint, nudge nudge)

the dedicated track is a plus epecially considering Flock was in europe last year and this year.

I know we have some new events we are thinking about, like FOSSASIA and DevConf India. But I think the cost is especially less for those events.

Yes, that's true. I know some of our American Fedora friends are feeling a bit disconnected, particularly those who have to self-fund their journey to get to Flock. All of the people I see on the organizer list are also folks who have not been able to make it to Flock for a long while, so this is a factor to consider too. Not the only one, but it is one.

For me, I am a little biased, but I do feel prepared to vote today on this event. I have been coordinating with the event owners a bit, so I have confidence. But I definitely want to make sure the Wiki page gets proper gardening, and we get some clarity on the booth plans as the event lead-up happens.

And of course, this new 2026 Fedora & CentOS track. But that is not solely on the event owners here, shaunm is also helping out a lot with this behind the scenes.

i'm a cautious +1 here, I think. My only concern is making sure we don't leave ourselves short of budget, but it seems like this is a good target for it.

i'm a cautious +1 here, I think. My only concern is making sure we don't leave ourselves short of budget, but it seems like this is a good target for spending what we have.

I shaped it as an inquiry rather than asking to compromise for less but I suppose we could all use some more information on this before we can say yes to this. The Wiki page also doesn't satiate me and there's only two event reports bound in the end when we could definitely use some more social media presence (given this is just as major an event as FOSDEM is) regardless of what platform it is on.

Also, let's assume a "start of year" beginning on Monday, January 5th. By policy, we should have a decision within eleven days. Making Friday, January 16th the timeline for when we really should make a decision.

"The ticket needs to get 3 +1s and no -1s in eleven days." — https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/mindshare-committee/events/requests/large/

I could vote but heh, it would be the begrudging vote which would be based mostly on the information that I have been reading on Scale from the previous years and not on the information that we have on hand (which we don't have much of, unfortunately). 🤷

You have the freedom to take your time, as no decision is made until Friday, January 16th, but you will need to set a reminder to make sure to follow up before then, since we won't have a meeting to keep the cadence.

Also, to be clear, regardless of how we vote today, nothing will be decided until 2026-01-16 per policy. Even if there are five +1's in the next 24 hours, we need to wait until that day for a final decision.

Because a `-1` freezes everything

I think given the context im a maybe +1 too but I'll have my vote in before the deadline

So, we have 18 minutes left. I am going to write a summary, but mostly note that we all have an action to add comments to the ticket and to vote by Friday, January 16th.

That is a fair ask. We should not hold them back just because we meet every once in a couple of weeks. I will wait on the reply to my comment before I would go ahead with providing an integer. But hey, that's just from my end.

also I appreciate you putting into words what I was thinking but didn't know how to phrase it Akashdeep Dhar 😆

~ fin ~

On a side note, I want to quickly reflect that on this discussion we had here. Ours is not a committee that signs off anything and everything that crosses our desks but rather takes the time to read between the lines and beyond it before signing off on it. Our skepticism on certain events only helps them be either proposed or organized better in the future.

We'll keep the discussion going on the ticket here.

It is nice to see this function of Mindshare Committee making a comeback. This is one of the functions we were always designed to do, but COVID kinda-sorta messed up everything and erased precedent. But I am happy for this discussion too, especially noting this is one of our largest non-Flock events of the year.

Moving on, though…

Discussions like these can get rather tricky, so it gets quite important to stick to the (and in our case, ask for the) facts. Thanks!

Soooo, this looks like a topic that followed some of the discussion we had following our last meeting on Fedora Discussion.

This feels right up the alley of the Digital Ambassadorship part of our charter.

Mostly because, while it could be physical swag too, it could also be something digital.

I think this is something that could be a fun project and we could integrate the Join SIG too

I do think we sorely need something like this.

I do have this ticket open on the design queue https://gitlab.com/fedora/design/team/requests/-/issues/121 that's kinda similar? Maybe not as thorough

With you on that! 💯

Oh nice!

Well, I am not sure we do want something _incredibly_ detailed, actually.

Mostly because it becomes hard to maintain.

We don't like to write a ton of code all over the place because it becomes hard to maintain, but the same thing goes about information, documentation, and design assets too.

I just saw the mockup in the Design Team ticket, and this feels like the best evolution of the Mindshare ticket.

However, maybe we could also scope something more long-term into that Design Team ticket to figure out a digital angle? Like whether we can put this on the Join SIG docs, like you suggested?

I saw MatH around, I wonder if he has a perspective here as a Join SIG member.

it was an old design I found on the comops repo - i think we could just update it? I'm not sure who the original creator is.

but it was available in a few different languages too

For a printed brochure, something like this would be superb to have at a booth like FOSDEM. For long-term focus, it could be cool to be a part of the Join SIG docs, especially with the visual-forward way of presenting the info.

An update seems sensible to me.

I wonder if something like Weblate could be used to help localize this, especially for a digital version… I know this would make @jibec and the #l10n:fedoraproject.org team happy too.

So, let's sculpt this discussion into a vote.

Oooh, this takes me back to the Fedora Linux 28 days, when I was just starting off with doing Fedora Join SIG talks. We could use a printed brochure like this in in-person events too where folks are browsing booths to see where they can get involved in.

I think we have some ideas, and we should direct the energy and attention on this idea to where the work is happening.

Therefore, here is my proposed plan:

(Ah you said just that lol)

+1 for some paper-based stuff for booths

(or card, etc 😛)

Well, some meeting notes context, then a proposal:

OK, now the proposal.

!proposed Close Mindshare ticket #94 and defer to Design Team ticket #121 for the short-term need of creating a physical, printed brochure for events. Seek input from the Fedora Join SIG and Ambassadors on the content before creating the brochure. Before closing Design Team ticket #121, add a "phase 2" for a digitization of the printed material, and invite feedback from the Join SIG to integrate this into the Fedora Docs site for Join SIG. Explore options for integrating the docs with Weblate for localization, so the content can be translated into multiple languages by our translator community.

WDy'allT?

Sounds good.

Emma Kidney: Your vote on this is key to me, as our Design Team rep!

yes that works!!

Gwmngilfen: What about you?

Emma Kidney: Super. I can handle the follow-up on the Mindshare Committee ticket, but can you take an action to summarize today's discussion into the Design Team ticket?

yep!

(We are close on time, and Gwmngilfen said +1 for paper-based stuff, so I will assume he is happy since we are tight on time)

yep works for me

Let's try and make this one FAAAAAAST

Oh, it is $150 USD for an event in May/June

I guess we could postpone this one

And start some async discussion in the ticket, and vote next time?

I don't want to rush anything, but this does look like an easy ticket

happy to delay it, but looks ok on a first glance

Maybe in the interest of not rushing and cramming, we can push this to ticket discussion and prioritize for our next meeting in two weeks.

I think that's all we have time for.

Time to yield the channel.

Thanks folks for an engaging, feature-packed meeting!

It makes me really happy to see Mindshare up and running again after so long 🙂

See ya around in Fedora! 👋