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

[Scott Dickson - Systems Engineer]

I have to echo Eric's assessment.  We have a hard time engaging the 
sales folks to help invite people and get the word out.  We have a hard 
time getting some of the local engineers involved.  We have traditional 
internal barriers of divisions within the company that somehow get in 
the way.

But the biggest hindrance for us here in Atlanta has been location, 
location, location.    The office is highly inconvenient for at least 
half of the customers and all of the university folks.  No place that is 
less inconvenient appears to be available without a fee.  We have no 
budget.  If you are an hour's drive away, you won't get the university 
folks.  If you have the meeting on campus (at least here), you won't get 
the commercial folks - university parking is a nightmare.  Add to this 
big traffic issues.

We have considered different times of day, different days, even having 
bridge calls and webex for folks who can't get here.

The end of it is this: if it's a huge hassle to attend the meeting, 
people won't.  And I don't know how we can really address that in our 
present state.

--SCott

Eric Boutilier wrote:
> 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.
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