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

[Dan Roberts]

Love it, would love to help as well.

Dan

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