[advocacy-discuss] Advocacy & User Groups: The Future

[Jim Grisanzio]

hey,

I wanted to toss out some issues for discussion regarding the Advocacy 
CG and the User Groups. Where are we going? How are we going to get 
there? Who does what?

I'd like to explore this because as the OpenSolaris distributions mature 
and become easier to install and use, the OpenSolaris community will be 
reaching out to extremely large numbers of users. That will be a new 
experience for many of us. We have to think in terms of hundreds of 
thousands of people using our stuff in many regions around the world -- 
which means cutting across some big language, cultural, and technical 
barriers. We already have user groups and country portals in many of 
these regions, so how do we get people involved to help engage new 
users? How do we establish closer relationships with the distro 
developers both on and off opensolaris.org? How do we grow ourselves as 
a CG at a reasonable pace? And how do we manage all those new questions 
we'll get. :) I think Advocacy can easily set up some region-specific 
lists that can be staffed with user group members from around the world 
to answer questions and help new people out. Just one idea off the top 
of my head.

Also, back six months or so we had a conversation about moving the user 
groups to projects so we could raise their profile and fix the old UG 
Community. That's done. User Groups are now projects just like all 
projects on opensolaris.org, and they are growing at their own pace. 
Perfect. But the migration of UGs to projects was always an interim 
solution in my mind. What's next? Should user groups be elevated 
further? Should they continue living under the Advocacy CG? Should 
Advocacy and the UGs grow into some new user-specific entity or become a 
separate section of opensolaris.org?

Think long term on this stuff. Nothing is going to happen fast. In fact, 
I specifically want to start small and grow slowly. But I also want to 
map out some possibilities and see where we have some consensus so we 
actually end up where we want to be in a year or so.

Thoughts?

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