[osol-mktg] Community Consolidation -- Marketing & UGs

[Jim Grisanzio]

Bruno F. Souza wrote On 04/05/07 07:12,:
> 
> On 04/04/2007, at 17:08, Peter Tribble wrote:
> 
>>
>> What I think is flawed with the current structure is the idea that  
>> there's
>> a "user group community" and that user groups live under that  community.
>> I think that's wrong. User groups are, well, user groups and ought  to be
>> first-class citizens in their own right, alongside communities and not
>> placed underneath.
>>
>> Certainly under my understanding of the constitution user groups  
>> themselves
>> should be completely divorced from communities. I don't see LOSUG, for
>> example, as a natural outcome of the the UG community being  directed by
>> the OGB to go do focussed management and accomplishment of objectives.
>>
> 
> A User Group community is a place for User Group _leaders_ (not  
> members) to discuss how to run their UG.


Absolutely true. But there's a little 'but' in there, too. Each user 
group has their own list but I had wanted ug-discuss to be the meta list 
so that members of all user groups could potentially talk to each other 
easily to share ideas, stories, materials, etc as well.


> This has worked very well in other settings, but it needs to be clear  
> that this is not a community that interests many other developers.
> The Java User Groups (JUG) Community, in java.net, hosts today almost  
> 200 JUGs, with more then 300.000 developers as members, but only  around 
> 130 JUG leaders are discussing in the community itself.


That's interesting. Ok, so we are not that out of the ordinary, then. If 
only the leaders communicate across lists on ug-discuss, I think that's 
fine, too.



> Next two weeks I will be running nearly 30 JUG events in Brazil, all  
> organized by JUGs that are collaborating because they are members of  
> the JUGs Community. UG collaboration is very powerful.
> 
>> With that in mind, what is the role of the user group community?  It's 
>> not
>> managing user groups, but it can offer support - materials, support,
>> infrastructure. And there is overlap with what might be called  
>> marketing. So,
>> in that context, merging it with the marketing community to form an
>> outreach community would make sense.
>>
> 
> This is what I was afraid of, that by merging the two, the UG  community 
> would be simply an appendage of the Mkt community. If the  UG community 
> is not independent, then UG will simply consider that it  is (another) 
> Sun program that does not work. Been there, done that.


I'm not sure why this has to be the case. The term "Marketing Community" 
will go away and the term "UG Community" will go away and both will be 
replaced by a new name (which we now have two proposals). No one will be 
an appendage of anyone. And, potentially, that new community could be 
much better represented under the Constitution, since it will be bigger, 
more focused, and more active and probably better able to create an 
environment where general users can participate in OpenSolaris. The 
leaders would have to implement that, though, and I'm coming to believe 
that there is little interest for that at this time. Also, the UG 
Community (the meta community, I mean) is as independent -- or not -- as 
any community on OpenSolaris and is governed by the OpenSolaris 
Constitution, not Sun. I'm not sure why there is a concern about "Sun" 
in this case. Sun has very little interest or control in the matter 
currently. There simply is no UG program -- it's a mail list and a page 
on the site.

Since the UG Community structure is clearly broken (as a result of its 
success under a somewhat limited site structure not designed for how we 
have implemented the community), I think we ought to explore if the 
upcoming wiki space would be a better solution for making that one 
community more visible and easier for people to use. That will solve one 
problem right there.

Jim