Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-project (95 mails)

[Greg Freemyer <greg.freemyer@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, May 21, 2010 at 5:43 PM, Bryen M. Yunashko <suserocks@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Fri, 2010-05-21 at 23:12 +0200, C wrote:
> > On Fri, May 21, 2010 at 22:52, Andreas Jaeger wrote:
> > > > W: Novell is not seen - like Red Hat - as Open Source friend
> > > > `-> this is definitely true. Maybe Novell could act as Sponsor for
> > > > more oS events. But first of all, Novell should communicate their aims
> > >
> > > This is an interesting question in itself.  Will throwing money at Open
> > > Source events help here?
> >
> > That's a tough one... throwing money at it probably isn't the
> > solution... neither is ignoring it.
> >
> > Open source events are... in my opinion, under-marketed.  Take the
> > upcoming LinuxTag in Berlin.  Some of us (who are close enough to
> > attend) know about it... I go every year... but even though I know
> > about it, I tend to totally forget about it until it's almost too
> > late.. because it's not marketed.. it's not "in my face" so to speak.
> > It's a nice event...
> >
> > Or another.. the OOoCon.  This year it's in Budapest... how many
> > outside of the regulars know about it?
> >
> > What open source events, or openSUSE events are people going to be
> > interested in?  What target audience would we aim for?  The new user?
> > The developer?  How do you get the word out to that target audience?
> >
> > C.
>
> So, what is the end achievement goal that we want to accomplish with
> this?  Yes, I would like to see Novell and/or openSUSE Community sponsor
> more events.  Name recognition and mindshare is important.
>
> While our final strategy statement will certainly have some marketing
> requirements in order to effectively implement our strategy, the
> ultimate goal of a strategy is define how we do business amongst
> ourselves as a community.
>
> So, in the context of this particular topic (event sponsorship) we must
> identify what is the strategic strength we gain from sponsoring events.
> The answer may seem obvious in our minds already, but once we actually
> put it down into words, that's when it suddenly becomes even
> clearer.  :-)
>
> Keep this discussion going, we love it!
>
> Bryen M Yunashko
> openSUSE Board Member

Personally, I'm not that impressed by sponsorships, especially related
to OpenSource events.  It seems too commercial.  Swag is always nice,
but it doesn't need to be in our face and I'm not sure it really does
that much anyway.

For me the best thing opensuse could to is speakers at events.

==> For instance

Our local ambassador said he is going to have a OpenSuse booth at the
SELF event in the US in a few weeks.  (No idea if Novell is
contributing support / swag).

http://southeastlinuxfest.org/

But of the 50 or so speakers, none are talking about OpenSUSE, OBS, etc.

http://www.southeastlinuxfest.org/node/62

Admittedly only 2 on Ubuntu and 1 on Fedora, but both of those numbers
are bigger than zero.

At least for myself, I'd rather see interesting speakers / speeches
than a booth.  And I assume speakers cost less than booths and swag.
It could be as simple as tracking events like SELF and using the
various opensuse mailing lists to encourage a few speakers to
volunteer.  Who knows, if I'd known about SELF in time I might have
volunteered to give an OBS intro talk.  It's only a couple hours
drive.

I occasionally see a "call for papers", but that sounds like speaking
about new research/development activity to me.  I'm sure opensuse is
doing that as well, but what I'd like to see is speakers talking about
OpenSuse / Novells contributions to opensource.

For instance, there are a lot of Novell employed full-time kernel
developers.  I'd love to have seen a speaker at FEST with a talking
slot which simply summarized Novell employee contributions to the
linux kernel over the last 5 years.

Ideal in my mind would be to have someone travel the world to events
like FEST and give that same presentation, but if it can't be done,
make the presentation with good notes available and hopefully a local
kernel hacker could have been recruited to give the presentation.

fyi: Our local enthusiasts group (ale.org) had at least 3 opensuse
related talks last year, which is 25% of the total.  Very impressive,
but it was all local members volunteering to talk to a rather closed
group of people.  And we had to prepare our own materials I believe (I
talked about OBS as a last minute fill-in for a cancellation with a
totally different topic.)

I found a presentation that was given about OBS at FOSDEM I think it
was.  But it was really not designed for someone like me to pick it up
and run with it.  I ended up just picking a few slides from that and
doing a live demo.

Greg
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