On 03/10/09 17:58, Patrick Finch wrote: > Hi, > Dude ... welcome back! Glad you came by ...
> It's a while since I posted on this list. Just thought I would add a > little of the thinking behind the Mozilla Community Marketing guide, > it was pretty much the first project I started when I landed at > Mozilla and it was heavily influenced by the OpenSolaris advocacy > community. That's nice to know. I've been telling people that we ought to model Mozilla (and Ubuntu and some others) to get a better feel for how more established communities do open community development and communications and such. > The idea was to put as much control into the hands of local people as > possible I would agree with this. Over the last year or so, Advocacy has really grown around the user groups and the user groups now make up the largest component of the Advocacy community. I've visited a bunch of user groups, and I actively participate in local user groups in Tokyo as well. And that experience has taught me that local operations have some real advantages. The people on the ground in any given area simply know their situation better than anyone else, and I'd like to see us move more in that direction. To decentralize even more than we already are. The OSUGs are, in reality, mini communities, and some are growing quite large. And very soon they will have the same status as Projects and Communities on opensolaris.org and under the new Constitution. But that doesn't mean that everything has to take place here on this site, and I think we are struggling with that a bit. How do we encourage community growth, diversity, and participation without the need to necessarily centralize things here? And here's why I feel this is an important point: when we centralize things, the biggest resource in the room becomes Sun and the discussion is focused around what Sun can send to the community. That`s fine as far as it goes but I don`t think it goes far enough because it ties the community to Sun too much. That`s not necessarily a bad thing, but I just think it`s too limiting and we as a community can do more. > and make marketing as approachable as possible (like the OpenSolaris > advocacy page http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/advocacy/help/ > - but unlike OpenSolaris perhaps, Mozilla has quite a legacy of > community marketing initiatives and so it can be hard to see the wood > for the trees sometimes.) > > Although the Mozilla project might have its own marketing messages > about Firefox and Thunderbird etc., they are not necessarily the right > ones for different cultures. For example, the relative importance of > security differs in different countries, and there is a tendency to > emphasise personal benefit in the western cultures, and more diffused, > social benefits, in the eastern ones. > > Similarly, although the project might provide resources for a certain > kind of activity, it is not necessarily the one that a particular > community member wants to undertake. > > So, the Mozilla guide is intended to provide a self-service model, and > make the resources available as atomic as possible, for localization > (beyond just translation) I like this self-service perspective. Interesting point on the localization. I was at a Mozilla event last year and it seemed to me that the a substantial number of contributions come from localization. I'd really like focus on this more in the upcoming year -- both with the new website (which will support localization, and also with the g11n community's new contribution webapp http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=94606&tstart=0. Some OSUGs already participate in localization activities. > and also to make it clearer what resources we do *not* have, so the > project knows what to work on next. > > The guide is only successful if it has a strong feedback loop from its > users, so we started in parallel a project-wide community mailing list > (like advocacy-discuss did, uniting a lot of efforts). So, do you think this is something the OpenSolaris community can do for itself, too? I think we already have some elements in place now, so it probably wouldn`t be too difficult to pull things together. I do, however, think it will be a slight change in perspective. Again, nice to hear from you. :) It would be very cool if we can continue this discussion. I think we`ve all seen the value of different communities sharing ideas and perspectives .... Jim -- http://twitter.com/jimgris
