[ug-discuss] OpenSolaris User Group Growth

[Tim Foster]

Hi Jim,

Here's thoughts from me:

On Mon, 2007-05-28 at 16:18 +0900, Jim Grisanzio wrote:
> Does anyone have any ideas about what could be in 
> such a kit? I'm thinking ...
> 
> * x number of OpenSolaris t-shirts (do we need new shirts?)
> * x number of OpenSolaris Starter Kits
> * x number of the OpenSolaris Hand Books
>          (kits/books: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimgris/490843667/)
> * other stuff needed in the kit to start and run a successful group?

* Posters 
  We're trying to roll our own at the moment, but they're pretty basic,
  and we quickly ran out of the nice black OpenSolaris ones that we got
  initially, so more posters would be great.

* Audio recording mechanisms
  This isn't so much about Sun provided resources (though it could be!)
  but I've been thinking for a while, that encouraging all of the
  user-groups to provide mp3s of their meetings would be well worth it.
  
  We've started doing this for the IEOSUG, and I know Alan's got
  dial-in access to the SVOSUG meetings, but that sucks if you're not in
  PST or the US, as the toll-free number isn't toll-free and not
  everyone's dedicated enough to dial into a conference call at 3am.
  Getting audio offline would be wonderful. (I'm still dying to hear
  last Thursday's Project Indiana session)

  $50 on eBay can get a decent mp3 recorder, and with a cheapo condenser
  mic we were able to record:
  http://mediacast.sun.com/share/timf/ie-osug-9.mp3
  and plan to continue with these if we can.  Would providing grants
  to user-groups for obtaining audio recording devices work? Perhaps
  even including the $5 Sun-Microphones[1] in the starter kits might be
  enough.

  I'd love to hear what other UGs were talking about, apart from just
  getting their slides. If there was no excuse for *not* recording
  the sessions, perhaps more user groups would do it?

  At some point, getting these recordings rolled into a single RSS feed
  would be a logical next step. Eventually, we'd have 
  "OpenSolaris Radio"  (which admittedly would take a bit more audio
  production, interviews with celebs, etc.) but even now, we've got a
  lot of OpenSolaris content being produced at every user group meeting
  - I think it's a shame not to share it.

	cheers,
			tim


[1] http://www.bizsyscon.com/pics/SUN_3701678.jpg

-- 
Tim Foster, Sun Microsystems Inc, Solaris Engineering Ops
http://blogs.sun.com/timf