On Wed, Dec 30, 2020 at 7:12 PM Gerald Pfeifer
On Sat 2020-12-05, Neal Gompa wrote:
Right now, our advocacy efforts are very haphazard and poor Doug does far too much on his own. This is definitely something we can do better. We have plenty of people who are passionate about openSUSE, but we lack an organized means to tell the world *why* openSUSE is awesome. I think this is something worth prioritizing to fix.
Yes.
What I would like to do here is evolve the structure of the project so that we have a dedicated sub-organization that people can collaborate under to drive advocacy for openSUSE. I don't know if you saw Ben Cotton's talk at oSLO on Fedora's governance[1], but he mentions that Fedora has a Mindshare Committee[2] which coordinates advocacy efforts around Fedora. I think this is something worth seeing if we can adapt into openSUSE and help make advocates of openSUSE successful in making openSUSE something people would consider in their top-tier choices (along with Fedora and Ubuntu).
[1]: https://youtu.be/wogwykobbr0 [2]: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/mindshare-committee/
I intentionally waited for the small window between the election period and results being published (which I'll get at the same time as you ;-):
Regardless of whether you are elected, regardless who is elected, what stands in the way?
I'm just wondering whether you envision this to be about enforcing the existing openSUSE marketing team, a part thereof with a specific focus, or overlapping (just hopefully not competing) and what you are looking for? The way openSUSE usually works, I'd say: go for it, propose, get others excited, get the work going...
(I don't see a formal structure with elections etc. as one of the first stages.)
You're right I can do this to some extent, even now. Some of this can be attributed to me just only coming up with the idea after attending Ben's talk at oSLO two months ago. Some of this also was waiting on some of the infrastructure improvements that Stasiek and I have just finished bringing online last month with openSUSE Code being soft-launched. But ultimately, I just don't have a fully formulated idea of how to do this just yet. I think that there are folks in the community interested in the concept, and a couple have reached out to me already after I posted that. I'd like to coordinate with Doug and reach out to Fedora Mindshare folks to learn a bit more about their setup and see how we can adapt it for openSUSE. The timing of restructuring our marketing efforts couldn't possibly be better: we have openSUSE Leap 15.3 coming, which is going to be the biggest change to openSUSE Leap since it started five years ago, and it's an opportunity to refresh how we present openSUSE to the world. We also have a number of variants of openSUSE Tumbleweed that need better messaging to convey their value to the public, and an emerging openSUSE MicroOS variant that desperately needs visibility to attract contributors to make it self-sustaining. We have the opportunity in the next year to pitch openSUSE as a premier platform to live, work, and play. We have some opportunities here, I just don't yet know how to take advantage of them, and I want to be able to effectively with the support across the community and with the Board's assistance as needed. Being a member of the Board I think adds some legitimacy to the public as being "supported by the Project", even if it doesn't materially have impact within the Project. Historically, people have told me they don't feel empowered to speak coherently to advocate for openSUSE, and I want to give a banner in which people *can* do that. And if it's successful, expand the program to further support community organizations that promote openSUSE, such as our friends in Asia (e.g. openSUSE Indonesia) and the Americas. What I want to eventually see (and I recognize this would be long past my term on the Board if I were elected) is the conversation changing from "oh, openSUSE isn't dead?" to "wow, openSUSE is doing something cool, I want to use it!". Proper broad community engagement is the biggest piece to making that happen, in my opinion. -- Neal Gompa (ID: Pharaoh_Atem)