Hello Sherman, thanks a lot for your input. You do have some great ideas. See my other comments inline.
> > "To support and accelerate the growth of OO related companies by > providing an array of targeted services and resources." interesting way of stating the project's mission, indeed. > > This parallels the mission of most business incubators. Specifically > I think the most important services are/should be: > > 1) The Business Directory > > The business directory as it stands, is written by consultants, for > consultants. A potential client is not going to enjoy parsing > CPSHILT. It needs to be formatted with it's prospective audience in > mind. Also we need to consider how this audeince locates this list in > the first place... google? openoffice.org? ask on the mailing lists? Hmm, we had a long conversation about this at the beginning of the project but I don't remind what actually came out of it. I think we were looking for trackability and exhaustiveness more than interfacing with the broad community and people out there... Might be worth reconsidering this question, though, if the project leads wish so. > > > 2) A Community for Consultants > > This can be provided with a mailing list, forum, or any number of > technical implementations, but growing an active community isn't so > simple. We need to find ways to reward participation. We also need a > core team, to help the community build steam. That was actually part of the initial plan. We have so far failed and I think this is really what Louis was talking about in the first place. There is unfortunately no magical solution for this. This is obviously community building, and I wasn't that good for the bizdev in the first place, I reckon. > > 3) Featured Business > > I think we need to highlight one exceptional business on a regular > basis (weekly/monthly). A short article, pictures, a little technical > information, how to solve a specific problem, advice on dealing with > clients , etc. The featured business would supply most of the > content. This creates positive exposure for the featured business and > provides incentive to create content. The content provides > information for new businesses, and stimulates activity and dialogue > in the community. Some of the items you mentioned definitely belongs to the Marketing sphere, others are indeed meant to be here. But it is a great idea, indeed. > > I suggest working on these three, as this projects core missions, > until it is successful enough to take on others. Yes. > > I also think this group should stay seperate from marketing, although > we should move projects like whitepapers etc, to marketing, and > concentrate on business community development. Whitepapers and such > cross over, but I think should fall under the mission of marketing. > > Does anyone agree? Is there enough of a community out there now to > make this work? If not can we recruit anybody? I'm all for it, and I'm ready to help depending on my time spent on other OOo areas (the NLC and the newsletter) and my other occupations. But the project leads here should really tell if they feel it's worth giving this project a second chance. Best, Charles. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
