[advocacy-discuss] Advocacy Panel Discussion: An Idea for Discussion

[Jim Grisanzio]

hey ...

I'd like to moderate a panel session about Advocacy at the OpenSolaris 
Summit. Slides banned. Only conversation allowed.

I'm looking for three things:

    * people to stop by and engage in the discussion,
    * some suggestions about who should be on the panel itself, and
    * some potential topics to kick around.

Cool with that?

Here's what I'm thinking as the context:

OpenSolaris is 3 years old but grew from plans crafted a year before 
that. So, the project is actually 4 years old, but the concept of 
"advocacy" is still new and not well understood. Initial growth of the 
OpenSolaris community was slow, and advocacy was largely left to a few 
motivated individuals -- engineers, managers, and users running sessions 
at events around the world. User Groups started with little support, but 
over time grew into the Advocacy Community Group with 5,000 people in 67 
UGs in two dozen countries. Not bad. Now how do we scale to hundreds of 
UGs? How do we build a true user community on a global scale on top of 
our community of coders? Also, the OpenSolaris community has 40 
Community Groups and a couple of hundred Projects and over 100,000 
people registered on the site. Again, not bad. Now how do we get the 
next hundred thousand, and what do we want them to do? Do we need more 
kernel code? Drivers? Packages and applications? Documentation? 
Articles? News? Artwork? All good stuff but all quite different.

Here's the point: Advocacy can not simply come from a few motivated 
individuals. Advocacy needs to pervade everyone's activities so we can 
credibly engage a variety of new people with a variety of skills. This 
is not publicity. This is direct, unfiltered engagement at a level that 
leads to active participation and contribution. Remember, everyone has 
something to contribute and everyone is welcome, but we have to go out 
and welcome people and make it easy for them to come back and contribute.

Something like that. What do you think? Worth talking about?

Jim
-- 
http://blogs.sun.com/jimgris