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

Tue Jun 26 06:10:28 PDT 2007

Hi Folks,

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
> >
> > I don't have comments directly to the issues you posted, but want to
> > take this opportunity to share our experience re: user group growth.

On Mon, 2007-06-25 at 15:44 -0400, Scott Dickson - Systems Engineer
wrote:
> 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.

I'd echo both Eric's and Scott's thoughts - this stuff is really hard.
We tend to get around 20 ppl or so at the ie-osug meetings, fewer when
the colleges are off, with about 5 or 6 people from Sun helping to make
up those numbers.

We too are impacted by our location - holding meetings at the Sun
offices here helps Sun engineers attend, but we're out of town a bit, so
non-Sun folks tended not to come along.

The reverse is true when we hold meetings at the various colleges around
Dublin city.  Seems like a standard "you can't please everyone" problem
to me.

We're lucky enough to have folks on staff (myself included) with ties
back to various college societies, like the Netsocs in TCD, DCU and UCD
as well as other contacts with colleges - we don't yet have any sort of
formal campus ambassadors here, or OpenSolaris as part of a college
curriculum. The hope is, as we hold more meetings and keep plugging our
project, that will come in time.

An ongoing struggle is getting more engineering folks at Sun here to
*participate* : after all, OpenSolaris doing well is in Sun's best
interests, so it should be in the engineer's best interests to help out.

At the end of the day though, this is volunteer work: we can't force
people to help (although getting an item: "Present x talks about the
technology you're working on at conferences" in engineer's yearly goals
could help, might try that next!)

In the meantime, I've been trying to do what I can to get our message
out there - for example, the mp3s I've put up of the IE-OSUG talks have
been downloaded quite a lot - the most recent having 177 downloads,
which is *massively* more people than have ever come to our meetings -
we're going continue down that road for a while to see how it goes.

Imho, the Irish OpenSolaris User Group is primarily about getting more
folks in Ireland interested in OpenSolaris, but secondarily, it's about
getting *anyone* interested in OpenSolaris, wherever they are. I believe
posting as much information online, keeping up our momentum, and
encouraging others to do likewise is a Good Thing.

Keep up the hard work everyone!

	cheers,
			tim

On Mon, 2007-06-25 at 15:44 -0400, Scott Dickson - Systems Engineer
wrote:
> 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.
> > _______________________________________________
> > advocacy-discuss mailing list
> > advocacy-discuss at opensolaris.org
> > http://opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/advocacy-discuss
> _______________________________________________
> advocacy-discuss mailing list
> advocacy-discuss at opensolaris.org
> http://opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/advocacy-discuss
-- 
Tim Foster, Sun Microsystems Inc, Solaris Engineering Ops
http://blogs.sun.com/timf