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

[Jim Walker]

Jim,

I think the website components user groups have by being projects
is great. It makes it easy to organize meetings, presentations and
events.

But, if I came into the opensolaris.org site as a first time user I would
have to know to go to the Advocacy Community and do a few more
clicks to get a list of user groups before I could see which ones were
in my area, or know to go to the Projects page and sort through a long
list of projects to find the user groups.

It might be good to have a User Groups button under Projects (or
someplace else) in the sidebar that goes to this page:
http://opensolaris.org/os/community/advocacy/usergroups

Actually, it would be nice to get to this page with one sidebar click:
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/advocacy/usergroups/ug-leaders/

Also, it would be cool to have an interactive map showing where
the user groups were located around the world.

Cheers,
Jim

Jim Grisanzio wrote:
> 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
>