I just put together a simple mockup of this kind of a flyer. Please take
a look at
http://www.jsdiinc.com/harmony/ossjava.html
What do you think?
Dmitry Serebrennikov wrote:
Greetings,
Here's an idea that occurred to me yesterday after reading Geir's post
about booth at Java ONE. I think this is a good opportunity, but needs
more thoughts.
You know how James Gosling keeps saying that Sun's customers tell them
they would run for the hills if Java was opensourced, etc., etc.?
Well, JavaOne is a gathering of just these types of customers, and
they will be walking around the pavilion, possibly stopping by the
Apache booth. What an opportunity to validate (and hopefully disprove)
that assertion! If we could just come up with a way to poll people as
they stop by the booth, we might have an excellent argument to
counteract Gonsling's FUD/misunderstanding (whichever it is).
Not only that, but at the same time we could actually educate people
on (a) what OSS is *really* all about, (b) what Apache and Harmony's
intentions are for Java (no incompatibility, just improvement), (c)
about work that has already been done by other OSS projects in the
Java VM field (gcj, classpath, etc).
Without the booth, there will be a few people that come the
OSS-related sessions, fewer still will be at the Harmony session. But
the booth changes things. If we conduct this kind of poll at the
booth, and generate buzz about the booth at the sessions, we could
reach vastly more people! Of course the booth is meant to be shared
between all Java-related Apache projects, but isn't Harmony kind of an
overriding umbrella that relates to and benefits all of these
projects? Logically, it makes sense to have Harmony represented at the
booth at all times, even if politically this may require negotiation.
But maybe having a poll station and a stand with questions (see
below), even as the rest of the booth is devoted to other topics,
wouldn't be that difficult?
Isn't this an exciting opportunity? What I envision is something like
this. Like I said, this requires more thought on exactly how to do this.
We present people with a series of questions, maybe 3 or 4, designed
to spark their interest and explain benefits of a fully-compatible OSS
Java implementation to them. At the end, we ask - Would you support an
open source Java implementation that delivered the above? Yes / No.
This could be printed on a largish poster so that people see it over
the heads of others and also printed on postcard-sized sheets of
paper. Under the poster and next to these postcards we put two
fishbowls with big "Yes" and "No" scotch-taped to them. They grab the
postcard, mark off their answer, fill in a comment if they want, and
drop it in the right bowl. It might be good to ask for their name and
org, but I'm not sure. Having that would help with legitimacy, but
it's too much work to fill out and will cause lots of work for us to
sort though anyway.
I don't suppose we are going to have one of those card readers there,
will we? I think they cost extra.
Now, the postcards have an additional benefit. It's a matter of funds
to print more of them, but the more we have, the more we can use them.
We can distribute them at the entrance, cafeteria, etc. We can
distribute them at sessions. The cards would also have the booth
number on them to draw people in. They could even be as small as
business cards, but they will be hard to see then. This would also
just draw people to the Apache booth in general, so other projects
might even be interested in supporting this idea as well.
So, what about the questions? Here are some ideas.
At the top, in large font, a big draw-in header. Something like: Is
Open Source Java a Good Thing?
Then something like this:
<bold>Have you ever found a bug in Java that broke your application?
You could have just fixed it, but had to work around it
instead?</bold>
OSS Java will not only let you fix it and distribute your code with
your application, but you would benefit from other people making such
fixes, while you can just focus on your work and stop wasting time on
workarounds!
<bold>Do you work with a platform that Sun's Java does not support?
Have you ever wished that someone would just write a good
JVM for it?</bold>
OSS Java with a vibrant community will provide an incentive to do just
this. Because codebase is shared and understood by many people, the
cost of adding a new platform becomes smaller over time, while the
benefits become larger!
.....
It needs a third one, but I can't think of one right now. I think we
absolutely need to emphasize rigorous compatibility. But I can't think
of how to put that in this format at the moment. Thoughts? Comments?
What other benefits do we want to highlight?
Regards
Dmitry
Geir Magnusson Jr. wrote:
All,
The ASF will have a booth at JavaOne this year. We will be staffing
the booth with projects, each project there for 2 hours or so to
tell people about the project and the ASF in general.
If anyone would like to volunteer to help out, add your name here :
http://wiki.apache.org/jakarta/ApacheAtJavaOne2005
geir
