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

[Miles Nordin]

>>>>> "ad" == Alan DuBoff <alan.duboff at sun.com> writes:

    ad> I'm not sure if my user group community is defunct or not, I
    ad> didn't responsd to any repeated inquiries there either, so it
    ad> must be...:-/

The list I was on, ug-nycosug at opensolaris.org, just got removed.  It
might have been nice to send a ``we're removing this list because
______'' mail to the list before deleting it, but no worries, I
figured it out. :)

I'm involved in several users' groups in the NYC area that work really
well, but I think maybe the group needs to be somewhat independent of
the vendors it discusses, like NYLUG, NYCBUG, and Unigroup are.
Sometimes vendors like IBM or Apple give these groups meeting space,
and sometimes Unigroup makes ``field trips'' to Sun, but all those
groups run their own mailing lists, web sites, and board elections.

Further, I'm completely uncomfortable being labelled an ``OpenSolaris
Advocate,'' because, although yes I do tell people why I use Solaris
and why I think it's better than Linux and BSD, I also spend a lot of
time complaining about the performance of Solaris or the frequent
misunderstandings about how much of Solaris is actually Open.  I do
both.  For example, I held an installfest for SXCE and tried to
convince all my friends to come, but while we were opening cases to
move jumpers for an OpenPROM upgrade, or waiting for DVDs to spin, I
talked about what it means to ``pull a Darwin'' and about all the blob
drivers creeping into Linux.

I expect users' groups to be like cancer support groups or group
therapy, for people suffering/enjoying some large complicated device,
not for evangelism, not for ``cancer is great!'' or ``you should get
married and fight with your wife, too, like me!''

Calling me an ``Advocate'' or an ``Evangelist'' makes me think I'm
either a Happy Dog, or I'm collecting a paycheck.  so I think maybe
these Sun ug's are not what I expected, are something different from
NYLUG/NYCBUG/Unigroup.

Nor do I want the organizational structure of any users' group whose
meetings I attend to be infiltrated by salesmen.  This trips a big
switch in my head that helps avoid wastes of my time.  The users'
groups I do attend _do_ often have talks from companies selling
something, but they have organizers that help filter sales and
marketing folk before they use my attention.

Now, the talks I've attended through Unigroup's trips to Sun have
certainly not been wastes of time.  They've been among the best.  But
to me this separation seems like it might be important to the
legitimacy of the group, and its consequent ability to retain members.

Keeping our NYC users' groups outside Sun will also solve the problem
we had on ug-nycosug, where we had a mailing list but no actual group
to use it.  At best, we had Brian Gupta and I discussing the
possibility of meeting right before the mailing list was quietly
deleted.
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