On Tue, 2005-08-30 at 17:42 +0200, Erwin Tenhumberg wrote: > For example, is it better being present at an event at all, even if > the presence is poor, than having no presence?
Its a no brainer to say that a poor presence is undesirable. The prime consideration should always be will this be an effective promotion of OOo. The issue really is who decides what a poor presence is and does one instance or aspect being poor mean the situation is forever irretrievable. We should use experience to learn and improve and accept occasionally that things don't happen as planned. That happens a lot in bazaars. Cathedrals generally don't get too much going wrong but then not much innovation takes place either. > Since we all want that OpenOffice.org appears in the best light > possible, I think we need define some kind of minimum level of > presence or engagement, in case we decide to go to an event. I'm > not sure what this minimum level should look like. A simple > table where 50% of the time nobody is available as a contact > person because the booth is understaffed, is probably not > something that puts OpenOffice.org in the best light (I'm not > saying that this has happened!). I already suggested that we get some basic art work that can be shipped to any conference. There really is no reason for a booth to look bad. For NEA I got a white sheet with a large OOo transfer on it for the table and that looked perfectly professional in keeping with the other booths. We did not have such a cover at DLS because no-one particularly took responsibility for it but its easy to fix, we learnt something. The artwork was 4 large 2m x 0.7m rolled up paper columns costing £140. These could easily be shipped anywhere at minimal cost. So we can solve the problem of a booth looking acceptably professional without breaking the bank. That's the easy part ;-) > Another question is, who may say what (as an "official" > OpenOffice.org representative)? > It would be useful to have some consistent messaging and a few > official spokes people, e.g. the marketing project leads, > community council members and maybe native-lang project leads. > From my point of view it does not work if everybody feels > empowered to represent OpenOffice.org in press interviews > without engaging an "OpenOffice.org official". I think this is a bit of a different issue really. On a booth, its unlikely that you will always have available an "official spokesperson" unless there are very many of them. Some shows might have press people there to talk to others don't. We didn't see any press at NEA but there were press people at DLS. It won't always be predictable either. At LUG radio, no press but Mark Shuttleworth came up to the booth to talk about education and FLOSS. I think proven expertise in the target market is more important than being a project lead when dealing directly with customers. The best person to sell OOo to a bunch of lawyers is a lawyer, to teachers a teacher etc. If the show is a sales opportunity its different from a press conference. > An open source > project obviously has less boundaries and restrictions than > a corporate environment, but for example at Sun there are > very strict policies regarding press interviews, etc., and > I think these policies make sense. They do for a corporate company with a marketing budget and a large legal department. The difficulty you have with an Open Source community is that you can't use payment as the incentive to get people to do the work, you have to be more opportunistic than a corporate needs to be and you have to have different incentives to motivate volunteers. If Sun wants you to go to LA to represent them at a show, they will instruct you to go, pay your expenses and your salary. That is a significant difference. > We probably need official > press kits and press FAQs for those people to hand out who do > not hold an official OpenOffice.org role. Even the "official > spokes people" should not be allowed to say anything they > want to about OpenOffice.org, because wrong or misleading > statements from them can be very damaging to the project. How often has this happened so far? I'm just curious, because if you tie everything up with red tape you need to be sure that the benefit outweighs the losses. I doubt many people on this list have formally made press announcements and claimed to represent OOo let alone show it in a bad light. If it ain't broke don't fix it. > A question that affects me myself as a Sun employee is, how > much a sponsoring company (Sun in my case) may promote itself > when it is officially representing OpenOffice.org. > > Yes, I admit that I do mention Sun and I do let them look good, > but I typically also try to include most/all other "good citizens", > i.e. I also mention companies like Novell in my presentations. > Novell (e.g. Michael Meeks) typicall mentions Sun. If I'm > supposed to do an OpenOffice.org presentation, I'm not just > using the StarOffice customer pitch, even though StarOffice > is based on OpenOffice.org and Sun is still the main code > contributor. Intention is the key here. Star Office and OOo to an extent are competitors. Probably most people will use one or the other. If you were in a situation where an OOo customer said I must have this clip art or I must have this support or filter, there would be no real issue in saying you can solve this by using SO even if you are a Sun employee. If a SO customer said oh, but it must be Open Source you would say you need OOo. But what about the case where I design a widget that runs OOo and only OOo on a mobile phone? If I go and promote my wigit and phone and its reason for being is OOo, its quite difficult to separate the two things. Whether I'm on an OOo booth saying by the way have you seen this natty widget or on a natty widget booth saying look I can run an office suite on a phone, its good for both products and its very difficult to promote the widget without promoting OOo. The only way would be to port a different office suite to that widget which would be a bit counter-productive. Of course in the absence of the widget OOo can be promoted widgitless but at a mobile phone convention, for example, that would be missing a significant opportunity. So I think it rather depends on individual circumstances. The prime question should be is this good for OOo? > Another question might be, what events we "officially" want > to support, i.e. fund with money from Team OpenOffice.org, > mention on the OpenOffice.org home page, etc. > > There are probably some key events that we should focus on. > I'm not sure what the selection criteria should be, but > enough local "human resources" could be one since flying > people from Germany to India or from Russia to the US just > to do booth duty is probably to expensive, at least if > these people receive some kind of sponsorship. The thing about NEA is that I did fly from Europe to LA and I did pay all the expenses because education is important. Ok, Sun didn't think so and that's fine, but if people can prove expertise in the focussed market and they can raise their own funding it seems rather silly to say it can't be done because it wasn't on a planned list. Again back to the fundamental principle. Will it help promote OOo? > I'm looking forward to you open and friendly feedback as > well as your proposals how to answer these questions! I hope that is friendly enough :-) The feedback and proposals are intended to be constructive -- Ian Lynch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ZMSL --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
