[advocacy-discuss] Connecting w/ local Sun office and universities (Was: OpenSolaris User Group Growth)

[Eric Boutilier]

On Mon, 25 Jun 2007, Jim Grisanzio wrote:
> Moving this thread from the old ug-discuss to advocacy-discuss:
> http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=31624&tstart=0
>
> Last month we were having a conversation about growing the number of 
> OpenSolaris User Groups and the fact that Sun would be contributing more 
> resources to the effort this fiscal year. The link above is the thread.
>
> ...


Jim, all -- Hello from Chicago.

I don't have commentes directly to the issues you posted, but want to
take this opportunity to share our experience re: user group growth.
Would love to hear if the following rings true with yours and other
peoples' experiences too.

When we have a meeting, attendance is low but consistent. About 6 - 10
people generally show up (Along with co-leads, me, Chip Bennett, and
Linda Kateley).

My observation as to why we are not growing is twofold:

1. We have not figured out how to get well-connected with a suburban
    college/university Technical, Comp Sci or Engineering school. When I
    say well-connected, I mean not just as a place for meetings, but
    with at least an endorsement (or even better, direct involvement) of
    at least one member of the faculty or a Graduate TA).

2. There is no involvement or collaboration between the user group and
    the local Sun technical community (Sun's presales and service
    engineers...  aka customer engineers)[1].

Looking around the U.S. and the world at the user groups that are
bigger and growing faster than us, almost without exception (maybe
_totally_ without exception?), they have one of these two attributes.

So my main suggestion is to use this fact as a guide to help predict
which kinds of resourcing ideas will have the most impact.

--
Eric
>From the City of Big Shoulders :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_%28poem%29

[1] I wish Sun sales management would officially provide comp time to
     these individuals (local Sun technical people) in exchange for
     participating in the user group. I'd especially like to see them
     (SE's, Services Engineers, etc.) promoting meetings to the
     technical customers they support (largely UNIX/Linux sys admins and
     engineers in the big industries here in Chicago). And of course
     attend the meetings themselves too -- not only to lend their
     expertise, but just as importantly, so the people they're inviting
     won't feel like they won't know anybody at their first meeting.