[advocacy-discuss] OpenSolaris hotspots

[Jim Grisanzio]

Craig van vliet wrote:
> Hi - I am new to OpenSolaris 

Welcome :)

> but as it is the best OS I have used I have joined the advocacy mailing list to help promote OpenSolaris. The promotion of user groups is certainly a great idea (a previous post). I have also been looking at the metrics with some additional data, to try and find OpenSolaris "hotspots" and see why they are performing better. 
>
> I downloaded the metrics and then cross referenced this with data from UNdata, for the number of people with computers/100, number of people with internet access/100, averaged these then divided by number of hits per region. I was looking for areas with higher saturation, not higher overall numbers. I believe these areas will be easier to get evangelists to persuade the masses.
>
> Found generally USA high, then Europe, then Asia and South America. Singapore although was the highest, and within Europe, France and Netherlands were poor performers. I am in Tasmania in Australia without a user group (until I move to England soon), so I can't really get a true feel for the community yet, but if someone could maybe give some insight into why Singapore so high, and some extra thoughts on how we can get the BRIC nations better represented.
>   

Not sure what's up with Singapore, but it sounds good. :) I know they 
had a big event there recently, so maybe that activity bumped the stats? 
Whenever there are big OpenSolaris events around the world, we can 
usually see bumps in web traffic and site registrations. The increases 
aren't huge, but many times they are big enough to see.

I think web metrics are interesting, but it's difficult to get a good 
measure and draw firm conclusions. I know of some OpenSolaris groups 
that prefer to meet live, rather than communicate online via 
opensolaris.org lists/forums. That's certainly true in Japan. Also, in 
China, I see very large meetings taking place in the user groups there 
and even larger meetings at universities with hundreds of people at a 
time, but much of that activity is not reflected on opensolaris.org 
lists. They have local sites and mirrors in China, too, so 
opensolaris.org in California doesn't necessarily see all of that 
traffic. Then take the Bangalore group in India. They are very active on 
opensolaris.org lists and also with live meetings locally, but a huge 
focus for them is the BeleniX distro, which sits on Genunix. So, that 
traffic is split. And Genunix itself has to be considered because there 
is bunch of stuff there now. Who knows. It's interesting. I'm a big 
advocate of encouraging this distribution of web properties around the 
world and not centralizing everything on opensolaris.org. In fact, the 
more sites the better.

Regarding the emerging BRICA regions and what we can do, I think we 
should be going there and doing events locally (which we are, actually), 
but it's a big investment and it takes time. Also, it's very cool that 
OpenSolaris 2008.05 is localized into something like 40+ languages, but 
we have a lot of work to do localizing opensolaris.org. But that will be 
much easier when we get the new site implemented this year.

Interesting subject ...

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