Fedora Community Growing – activity in Brazil

While reading Fedora People, I came across Seth Vidal’s post in the Fedora section talking about the Board meeting.

Quoting him: “To think about how fedora can impact people world-wide and not just in our own little corner. Some emphasis on making sure we encourage fedora adoption and help new contributors in china, india and brazil as well as the places where linux adoption is more common: europe and north america.”

This is the issue I’m thinking for months. As I live in Brazil, I see what we have here: users, many of them. But they’re discouraged about communicating and contributing. But this is changing: beginning this year with the Ambassadors program, we have gathered some potential contributors and we’re helping spread Fedora across our nation. My work with this is being to teach others how work with the Upstream — The Fedora Project — instead of doing their own things in their own way. I think this is so much of importance. Our community here is growing much more! And with the new quality Fedora releases, more users comes.

In my experience, I saw that one of the main reasons people use Software Livre is when how they fit in contributions. When people are doing, helping and building something for a distribution, it’s more likely to the user to be a pleased contributor and user. Here, Debian leads mainly because everyone uses it to customize and create their own derived distributions. Ubuntu is growing larger because people can help there. I personally met some guys that abandoned Fedora because they couldn’t work with it (contributing) and they joined Ubuntu, as they found more easy to join and contribute. This is the main community issue, and Fedora is getting some great advances in this field. Congratulations for us.

As I always speak in my lectures, both developers and users have to listen and communicate. This is a must for advances in the Open Source world.

Well, sometimes our Time isn’t enough to do this well, but better later than never 😉

Finally, I want to inform that I’ll do everything that I can to help spread Fedora here in Brazil. So if anyone needs anything on this from me, I’ll be glad to help.