[osol-mktg] Re: [ug-discuss] Community Consolidation -- Marketing & UGs

[Alan DuBoff]

On Tuesday 03 April 2007 11:43 pm, Jim Grisanzio wrote:
> Sometimes consolidation can strengthen both sides.

Sure, and other times it drives them apart.

> Also, I'm not talking about Sun corporate marketing here. Sure, if Sun
> marketing people want to get involved in the community, they are more
> than welcome -- but they have to earn their way just like everyone else.

I hope you drop the marketing label, as a name. I don't think it represents 
what a community is, and something like community-reachout, or similar might 
be a better way to refer to that.

I see the community doing this in a different capacicty, where local members 
of the community would host booths at open source conferences.

> Some do, and some do not -- just like other parts of the organization
> internally. In a merger, however, I'm hoping that interest will be great
> enough to grow a true OpenSolaris /community/ marketing/user effort.
> Sara, Patrick, Laura, and others have been involved all along, but we as
> a community need to promote OpenSolaris ourselves much more and not
> necessarily depend on expensive Sun programs to do so.

Sure, in some ways. But please understand that things done from Sun will be 
seen with a certain Sun perspective. As an example, a community type grass 
roots movement would be "Windows Refund Day". I know that many might say 
that's corny, but it was an excellent grass roots event that was orchestrated 
and executed by the community.

For other similar events, google "burn all gifs", or "Free Dmitry Sklyarov", 
or DeCSS...those were all grass roots movements (albeit the Dmitry cause was 
fueled in part by the EFF).

There's other ways that out community can help, such as holding BOFs at 
conferences, getting together with other community members, helping people to 
get Solaris installed, configured in the best setup for them, etc...I think 
for the most part, many of the community enjoy this aspect of getting 
together and networking with other OpenSolaris folks.

> But what Sun can't do is
> the massively distributed grass-roots activities, and that's where the
> community comes in. That's what we as a community have not fully
> explored since we launched. I don't have answer here, but that's the
> direction of my thinking.

It takes motivated people also, that stuff doesn't grow on trees.

> Yes, we need to re-name the new (potentially combined) community and it
> can't be marketing. There's nothing wrong with the word "marketing" per
> say, but it connotes Sun corporate control and money, and that's most
> certainly not what I'm after and it's not what any of the Sun
> OpenSolaris marketing people want either. So, to avoid the confusion, we
> ought to consider a new name that we all agree on.

We're certainly in agreement, but I'm not sure what to call it. I see it as a 
reach-out type program, maybe someone can think of a better word that has 
better meaning.

-- 

Alan DuBoff - Solaris x86 Engineering - IHV/OEM Group
Advocate of insourcing at Sun - hire people that care about our company!