Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-marketing (508 mails)

["Tim Serong" <tserong@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 2/10/2011 at 06:38 PM, Graham Lauder <yorick_@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: 
> > > We need to prepare earlier, I should have made more noise about it than 
> > > just putting it up on the events list.  I shall make a point of it for 
> > > next year. 
> >  
> > Please do, I don't think I'll make it again next year and we have more 
> > openSUSE people in Au - I know because I met a few. We 'just' have to get 
> > you all to talk :D 
>  
> I would prefer you to be there, consider this last one as an exploratory  
> trip,  
> there was no planning, no goals set so it only ended up as a flag waving  
> exercise.   I was struggling back when I first mentioned it, to convey the  
> significance of LCA, there was a tone initially that was slightly  
> dismissive.   
> You have, however, now seen it for yourself.  You also impressed in the  
> lightning talks, that's a plus, people remember that when it comes to  
> handing  
> out speaking engagements.... and believe me the speakers get looked after, I  
> was a speakers Limo driver in wellington!  :)  Go back over the speakers  
> lists  
> and you'll see what I mean, Linus, Shuttleworth, Maddog, Cerf, Phipps and so  
> on not to mention high powered Politicos and others.    

I've been to the last four LCAs (Melbourne, Hobart, Wellington, Brisbane),
and AFAICT openSUSE (or SLES/SLED for that matter) was almost invisible.
IBM, HP, RedHat and Canonical have often (always?) been sponsors at one
level or another, and (subjectively) most presenters seemed to be running
something Ubuntu/Debian-ish or RedHat/Fedora (or OSX).  The same is true
at LUV (http://luv.asn.au/) meetings in Victoria - RedHat sponsors the
venue for monthly meetings, and most presenters don't seem to be running
anything SUSE-related.

At LCA2011 I was delighted to see openSUSE mentioned as a fairy penguin
sponsor at the LCA 2011 opening (shame we somehow didn't get mentioned
during the close).  I was similarly happy to see Sander van Vugt's
"Setting up a HA cluster in 20 minutes" talk at the sysadmin miniconf
presented on SLES.  For the talk Florian Haas and I gave, my laptop was
running openSUSE, and the demo toward the end was on SLES 11 SP1 with
some openSUSE VMs (http://linuxconfau.blip.tv/file/4719948/ if y'all
are interested), but really this wasn't obvious except when running the
demo, due to the nature of the presentation.  Apparently there were a
few happy openSUSE users up the back of the room at the time, and Jos
and I met a gentleman (whose name I am embarrassed to say eludes me)
at open day who is/was a keen openSUSE/SUSE user, but who had lost his
local Novell contact (the latter moved interstate I believe).

So, yeah, I think we've got some work to do :)

> I can even see some topics in my minds eye already. 
> We go to LCA, we go for a reason and with a set of goals that would be good  
> to  
> achieve.  Given not so recent, almost ancient, history we have to sell  
> openSUSE to the wider linux dev community big time.  We have disappeared off  
> the map down here we need to re-establish ourselves.    

FWIW, I am aware of some reasonable-sized corporate deployments of SLES
in .au, but this obviously hasn't translated to mass usage or knowledge
of openSUSE.

> We could even give the trip a title:  "LCA 2012, Paint Ballarat Green."

Cute :)

> Raise profile, set a  
> different image in the minds of the conf attendees, provide some good high  
> value talks that people will talk about afterwards.  People see other people  
> committed to their distro of choice, having fun and creating an excellent  
> piece of software and they will want to participate. 

Agreed.

> We need to present a heap of abstracts from Community members, present a  
> miniconf proposal, tutorials and equip for big splash at the OpenDay.    
>
> They are out there, since LibreOffice forked under the Document Foundation,   
> the community has added 92 developers.   Mageia has forked Mandriva under a  
> similar community model and is looking like it will build similar numbers or  
> more.  So they are out there if they feel welcomed.      
>  
> I see Tim Serong introed as a new Ambassador, Helen has said she'll be in  
> Ballarat, presumably Tim will too, with that sort of commitment  I don't  
> mind  
> putting my hand up as well, but it's not worth my while for something half  
> baked, it has to be planned, effective and supported by the community and  
> the corporate partner.   

Yep, I'll be there.  Thanks for the ambassadorial welcome too, everybody :)

Regards,

Tim


-- 
Tim Serong <tserong@xxxxxxxxxx>
Senior Clustering Engineer, OPS Engineering, Novell Inc.


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