[advocacy-discuss] OSUG Discussion: OGB Reorg and New Webapp Issues

[Alan DuBoff]

On Sat, 21 Jun 2008, Simon Phipps wrote:

> Sounds appropriate to me. I would certainly support "User Groups" as one 
> of the top-level entities I propose in 
> http://blogs.sun.com/webmink/entry/simplifying_opensolaris_governance

I haven't been reading this fora for a while, but just wanted to comment 
on a couple things, as I'm trying to get a grip around what I think will 
be the future, and it's not user groups as we know them today or how we've 
know them.

I'm going to take this meeting for my user group to try and find out what 
some of the people want, what they would like to see done, and/or how we 
can change what is a typical user group of today, so that it fits in 
and/or better suites the global economy we live in today.

One thing I'm thinking of is trying to get some Technical Architect Groups 
(TAG) going, where people with common interests could get together and 
speak face-to-face, but go off and work on coding/implementations/work as 
an outcome of that. These are difficult to pull off in the global aspect, 
but it's something we need to ponder. I don't think the forums are working 
in that capacity, and the user groups are not pulling that together. So, 
we have this void to fill. I keep thinking that user groups can help 
assist this, and/or allow others to join.

Also, I have been thinking that the typical 1-2 hour presentation just 
doesn't work these days. People value their time differently, things need 
to be in shorter duration, for web, more in the order of lightning talks. 
In this regard, I've pondered if it wouldn't be better to have 4 short 
presentations, where the video could be shared and/or used amongst other 
user groups. How to fit that and tie it in with the user groups could 
really help many of them survive. Otherwise many of the user groups will 
die on the vine, they ALWAYS do.

Another aspect I've pondered is talks from community members on things 
they are working on. It has been hard to get folks from the community, and 
I think there are things they're doing. As an example, Bob Palowoda is 
using some software to create a tunnel to a VirtualBox on a network, so 
that the VB appears as another host on the network. I think that is cool, 
software was written in the community, I'm sure who wrote it. That is 
goodness. Am trying to get him to talk about that. More short talks by 
people that are doing different things with OpenSolaris, any type of 
multimedia, web related work, servers using OpenSolaris, etc...

To summarize, I agree that user groups are important, but I see a problem 
in user groups we hold today, and what we need for the future. This user 
group format was designed before the inet was created, in many cases 
people didn't even have modems, I was going to user groups before I owned 
my first acoustic coupler...this format doesn't hold water for the future, 
and trying to propogate more of it will only end in a bigger failure.

We need to take some risk, we need to figure out something that works, and 
then spread it out. This is a difficult problem to solve, but the future 
will require change. At some point we need to bite the bullet and take 
some risk if we want to win. How can we change the format as it is today 
so that it will better suite more people? And allow us to share and 
distribute this information much easier?

So that we can all help each other, that's where we can win. By ourselves 
we are weak, but together we can strenghten our community and help it 
become one, rather than many.

--

Alan DuBoff - Solaris x86 IHV/OEM Group