Hi Jenda, On 17/07/06, Jan Vancura <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Preventing such an effort, or out-lawing it, pushing away form the community, is incredibly counter-productive and short sighted, IMHO.
I may be wrong but I think that the main problem here is the way it was handled. The Ubuntu community already has an excellent example of one of its teams covering costs for printed materials: the doc team sells its material, through lulu.com, at cost price. I think case badges are a great idea and I'd like one myself. If you want to print stickers, at your own risk and with the intention of covering your costs through sales, that's fine The issues here, I think, are: 1. This could easily appear to be a Marketing Team project, when it's actually your personal project. 2. The team has no infrastructure to handle any surplus. 3. Marketing has an image problem - we need to be seen to be doing the right thing. The first point is easy to resolve: whenever we have an idea that would make use of team resources - such as the /MarketingTeam/ wiki pages - we seek and obtain approval from the ML and, preferably, make the final decision at an IRC meeting. When individual team members act unilaterally, then make retrospective announcements to the ML, it's bound to irritate people. With an issue such as this, it's even more likely to get people's backs up. The second point is quite a good thing, really. We don't need money and we shouldn't be seeking to generate it. Money is a problem we really don't need, at the moment. The third point is really important: we're new and we're unknown. If we misjudge and end up losing the trust of the community, it'd be a terrible waste of an opportunity. If we misjudge as a team, at least we can go back and show our discussions on the ML, when questioned. If one person decides they're going to do something that has the potential to harm the team, then there's no chance to work out if it's a good idea or not.
Please do come up with a _better_ way of getting printed materials out there.
Why? I mean, I like the idea of the stickers, but if it's going to cause a problem within the team, or see you risk money you can't afford to lose, then we don't really need them.
OTOH, if it is considered inappropriate to have a 'if you wish, you can order printed ones for price of printing and shipping here' on the wiki, it can be removed.
I think the responses on the ML have shown that people are uncomfortable with the way this has been handled. To be fair, you didn't give us the chance to say whether we felt it appropriate or not (unless I missed something).
Have a look at the back of the Ubuntu CD, though. Canonical ships source code for price of shipping and media (and so should anyone publishing GPL code/material).
I'm not sure that's relevant. Canonical is a commercial organisation with the means to handle that. If Canonical makes a profit on it (unlikely) they have the infrastructure to bank it and, almost certainly, feed it back into Ubuntu. We are a volunteer team, which is presently poorly organised. We don't have the infrastructure to deal with financial stuff. No one would seek to stop you producing stickers and selling them (other than Canonical, perhaps, who own the trademark). Just please don't do it in the team's name, without first involving the team. The offer to donate any profit to the team shows your intentions are for the best. If we're to be a team, and not individuals on an mailing list, then we really need to discuss this sort of thing in the open first. If the team agrees it's not the way to go, well, that's a shame for the person that proposed it, but maybe there are ways to do it outside of the team. -- Matthew Revell www.understated.co.uk -- ubuntu-marketing mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-marketing
