I will see what I can do, but I personally for sure won't speak
in the name of the OpenOffice.org project of Sun. ;-)
Wouldn't that be missing an important PR opportunity?
Not necessarily, I can still refer to the local OpenOffice.org
project leads here in Germany or get Sun PR involved.
Yes, we might lose out on a few opportunities (although I'm not
sure about that), but at least our messaging would be consistent.
If I speak in the name of the community, I want to know what at
least key people from the community think. I personally also
could not really talk in the name of OpenOffice.org, because
the risk is high that the press concluded "Sun equals
OpenOffice.org" or cited me as the Product Marketing Manager
for OpenOffice.org at Sun Microsystems, but beside some
exceptions I'm not allowed to talk to the press.
I think everyone here trusts you to not say something wildly off base
when speaking for OpenOffice.org.
Very rarely it happens that I have to talk to the press as a
Sun employee with no Sun PR support available. For example at
the LinuxTag event someone from the most popular computer
magazine here in Germany wanted to see a demo of the new
StarOffice 8 features.
I did not feel comfortable, because it's hard to keep all the
possible side effects and the larger picture in mind. I tried
to be as conservative as possible. Fortunately it went relatively
well. However, I could have easily made very harmful mistakes.
The intention of Sun's "work with/via the Sun PR folks policy"
is not make life less fun for employees or to do less PR, but
to protect the individual employees from making stupid mistakes
as well as protecting the company against any wild messages.
If it had not happened with OpenOffice.org yet, I probably
would care less, but it has. Therefore, we need some policies
and boundaries.
Cheers,
Erwin
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