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

[Al Hopper]

On Wed, Apr 23, 2008 at 11:28 PM, Jim Grisanzio <Jim.Grisanzio at sun.com> 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?

You bet.  A big +1

Regards,

-- 
Al Hopper  Logical Approach Inc,Plano,TX al at logical-approach.com
                   Voice: 972.379.2133 Timezone: US CDT
OpenSolaris Governing Board (OGB) Member - Apr 2005 to Mar 2007
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/ogb/ogb_2005-2007/