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

[Scott Dickson - Systems Engineer]

Some of the staunchest supporters of ATLOSUG are our internal engineers 
- from service, pre-sales, post-sales, systems, engineering, software - 
across the board.  But, I can't help but think that we could be more 
successful if folks, especially SSEs, would push this as they engage 
customers.

Sales folks can help, but the people they deal with are not the ones who 
are necessarily the constituency for a user group.  The service folks, 
on the other hand, deal with those who get their hands dirty and might 
be interested.

As to list usage, we have tried to get conversations started to no real 
success.  The only conversation that sustains at all is how bad any 
proposed time / location change is for at least half of the group.

Partly this is a local culture thing.  Partly it's a local geography 
thing.  Partly it's a Sun culture thing.

--SCott

Jim Grisanzio wrote:
> 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.
>
>
> Interesting. I'm going to see if I can help here as well. It will be a 
> good opportunity for me to get to know some of our field guys and the 
> executives running those operations. This could be a good opportunity 
> for a lot of people.
>
>
>> 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.
>
> Are you using your list for conversations? In other words, perhaps 
> face-to-face meetings more infrequently but more on-list interactions.
>
>
>> 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
>
>
> Jim