On Mon, Jan 11, 2010 at 7:17 AM, Sophie <sgautier....@free.fr> wrote:
Hi all, Sorry for jumping late, I've health problems and I'm not really available. But this is important. Florian Effenberger wrote:Hi Alexandro, first of all, thanks for agreeing to the funding of the meeting. I hope that we can go on with the process now and that nobody is upset. In good faith, I just booked the hotel and the train, so prices don't explode. :-)I rather move the conversation to a new thread, about the discussion on face to face vs virtual meetings. Is easy to say that face to face is better, is harder to justify who should be involved into this face to face and why. Does his tittle makes him eligible just because he is the lead, or his nearbyness is the main factor that can make him viable for him even if he/she is not the best person just because "face to face is better".Well, in the past we never judged a funding request by the title or role of a person. Sure, we checked who requested the funding, but we never looked at titles to base our decision on. I agree that often people with titles/roles request funding, but that's mostly due to the fact that active people usually hold these "jobs" inside the project, and therefore also have to request funding quite often.From what I see, most of the active community members have no lead role in the project. Most of the people doing l10n, QA or documentation have no other title than community contributor but each of them is as important as any other. The issue I get with those face2face meetings organized in Hamburg is that they are often organized off list. Rosana came last week with the request of funding a team, great and nothing to say about it, but what if some of us would have been willing to participate, even on our own budget ? This has already been the same with the QA meetings, UX and may be others I forgot about. For me, it's very difficult to feel that I belong to a community process when I'm not able to take part at the heart of it. How do you feel involved in that case ? It's not only a marketing issue here, but branding is not only marketing also, it concerns the art project, the NLC, UX also. This is something frustrating for those who are willing to invest time and/or resources/money in a project or a decision process and they are not invited nor informed to participate to an important part of it. Virtual conferencing system should be evaluated also as a tool for the OOo project and not only on a marketing point of view. It should be evaluated at a infrastructure level to enhance the community participation and reinforcement. So the budget should be supported as a community wide one and not only on the marketing one. The marketing action here is marketing the community ;)
That's why I feel about investing much more money shouldnt come from the Marketing budget but from the infrastructure budget, and that's why I feel more investment should take place like buying VoIP phones, or quality microphones to the people the matter the most to the project. While at the same time invest into an infrastructure that is sufficient to pay for the minutes and services or the management of a VoIP (asterisk) infrastructure for such phones. I am not a big IP Telephony guy but I do know that there are free alternatives like TinyChat, Stickam, Ustream and others, however usually I found people with not the correct microphone, bad connectivity or have to rush into setting up their systems.
I participate with organizations like my stock brokers that use a lot of Webinars through WebEX and GoToMeeting, I hate them because is a Windows/OS specific, but I do know that there are alternatives like Elluminate that handles Linux as well (but sucks at it on my distro). So I don't have a silver bullet here, but I know that this is possible to do cheap or on the free side.
Kind regards Sophie --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@marketing.openoffice.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@marketing.openoffice.org
-- Alexandro Colorado OpenOffice.org Español IM: j...@jabber.org
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