[advocacy-discuss] [Fwd: Re: [ug-discuss] OpenSolaris User Group Growth]

[Peter Tribble]

On 6/25/07, Jim Grisanzio <Jim.Grisanzio at sun.com> wrote:
>
> So, my question: if Sun could produce some technical videos as part of
> the overall package that we could offer to user groups for
> meetings/discussions/education, etc, what would be a good topic list to
> start from? In other words, we could record some engineers in Menlo Park
> and other Sun campuses doing talks on x topics. What are the most
> pressing issues to explore?

There are already a fair number of available presentations
that Sun make available on the web. Some are pretty good.
I'm not sure this helps UGs directly - while I occasionally watch
these presentation in a few idle (hah!) minutes at home, I
wouldn't go to a user group meeting to see them. Besides,
personal contact is an important part of going to a meeting.

> Also, regarding engineers and presentations: I think it would be a great
> contribution if Sun could send some engineers to participate at some
> user groups and do presentations. ... There's
> no way to have engineers flying all over the world to each user group.

Given that engineers travel anyway, don't we just need a better way
of connecting traveling engineers with user group meetings?

> But, we will be making a serious effort this year to collaborate with
> the Sun Tech Days team to get community speakers for the OpenSolaris Day
> Tour, to have user group meetings at the tour venues,

We did that at LOSUG, and it went pretty well.

> Thoughts on these issues?

For growth of individual groups, one of the things I think really
helped in London was the decision to have a regular schedule
- 3rd wednesday every month, in our case. And, to be honest,
for a long while it was the same regulars. The last few months
have seen definite growth in numbers, and more diversity.

Do we need more speakers? Sure! Do we need them flown in?
Maybe not - we should be able to find interesting speakers
in our own ranks (yes, that means someone like me...). But if
there was an opportunity to get a visitor in, we should grab
it with both hands.

Oh, and more swag. Especially media kits!

-- 
-Peter Tribble
http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/