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

[Foz Saeed]

+ 1

On Jan 25, 2008, at 1:00 AM, Jim Walker <James.Walker at Sun.COM> wrote:

> 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
>>
>
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