[advocacy-discuss] [website-discuss] Thoughts on an opensolaris.com

[Jim Grisanzio]

Dan Price wrote:
> I don't know the answer to the harder questions you raise, such as
> governance, but as for where the user group keeps its home page: I don't
> see anything (short of breaking off from the existing advocacy
> community) which would allow individual user groups to make that
> decision for themselves.  There's nothing to say that we can't add
> a redirect from their existing web property, as needed.
>   

Sure, if UGs have their own infrastructure off opensolaris.org, we can 
link to them. But the value of having opensolaris.org is that we can 
offer a project space and list with relatively little effort on our part 
and the UG's part. For that, though, we need them to be sponsored by a 
CG -- which is both a strong benefit, obviously, but an additional layer 
of complexity that hides the UGs a bit. I'm ok with a .com site with UGs 
living there (pending the governance issue) but I'm also fine updating 
the current Constitution and opensolaris.org to be consistent and to 
consider a new classification so UGs are out from under Advocacy. I 
don't have a strong position about how to solve the problem, so I'm just 
bringing it up for discussion. It's not even a problem, per say. It's 
just exploring options for the next step since I think we have the 
opportunity to grow much faster in this area.


> If need be, the advocacy community should vote amongst itself about
> where it wants user groups to be web hosted. 

Totally agree.  And thanks for bringing that up. I do think Advocacy and 
the UGs will assert a point of view -- I just don't know what that will 
be :)

>  Put another way, I would
> personally strongly *oppose* having user groups split across two sites.
>   

I'd like to prevent that, too. Either move them as a group with their 
involvement or evolve them on .org to elevate their exposure over time. 
In retrospect, I shouldn't have pressed so hard to merge the old UG 
Community, the Marketing Community, and the Immigrants Community to be 
the grand home for the UGs. What I had in mind at the time for Advocacy 
has clearly not occurred. I should have just migrated the UGs to be 
projects under the then existing User Group CG. That would have been a 
much cleaner implementation. Oh, well. At least what we have now is 
still much better than it was last year with UGs as individual pages 
within a CG with over 150 site leaders all stepping all over each other. 
We'll get there ...

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