[opensolaris-summit] Advocacy Panel Discussion: An Idea for Discussion

[Joseph George]

I like it too...

~Joe

On 24-Apr-08, at 9:58 AM, Jim Grisanzio wrote:

> hey ...
>
> I'd like to moderate a panel session about Advocacy at the OpenSolaris
> Summit. Slides banned. Only conversation allowed.
>
> I'm looking for three things:
>
>    * people to stop by and engage in the discussion,
>    * some suggestions about who should be on the panel itself, and
>    * some potential topics to kick around.
>
> Cool with that?
>
> Here's what I'm thinking as the context:
>
> OpenSolaris is 3 years old but grew from plans crafted a year before
> that. So, the project is actually 4 years old, but the concept of
> "advocacy" is still new and not well understood. Initial growth of the
> OpenSolaris community was slow, and advocacy was largely left to a few
> motivated individuals -- engineers, managers, and users running  
> sessions
> at events around the world. User Groups started with little support,  
> but
> over time grew into the Advocacy Community Group with 5,000 people  
> in 67
> UGs in two dozen countries. Not bad. Now how do we scale to hundreds  
> of
> UGs? How do we build a true user community on a global scale on top of
> our community of coders? Also, the OpenSolaris community has 40
> Community Groups and a couple of hundred Projects and over 100,000
> people registered on the site. Again, not bad. Now how do we get the
> next hundred thousand, and what do we want them to do? Do we need more
> kernel code? Drivers? Packages and applications? Documentation?
> Articles? News? Artwork? All good stuff but all quite different.
>
> Here's the point: Advocacy can not simply come from a few motivated
> individuals. Advocacy needs to pervade everyone's activities so we can
> credibly engage a variety of new people with a variety of skills. This
> is not publicity. This is direct, unfiltered engagement at a level  
> that
> leads to active participation and contribution. Remember, everyone has
> something to contribute and everyone is welcome, but we have to go out
> and welcome people and make it easy for them to come back and  
> contribute.
>
> Something like that. What do you think? Worth talking about?
>
> Jim
> -- 
> http://blogs.sun.com/jimgris
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