[cc list snipped]
Quoting Deepak Saxena ([EMAIL PROTECTED]):
> As you can see from the announcement I just sent out, I'm trying to
> get people to go out and do something to coincide with the Win2K
> release.
As chance would have it, this is two days after the first anniversary
of Windows Refund Day.
> I am also looking at other possible dates throughout the year for
> massive advocacy events.
It seems timely to mention some of the lessons of Windows Refund Day.
The event was declared unilaterally by Matt Jensen of Seattle, who
put up a Web site suggesting that people who had bought x86 machines
with unwanted MS Windows preloads all separately, and with a total
lack of coordination or publicity, descend upon the separate OEMs and
demand a refund, on Monday, February 15, 1999. The page was immediately
Slashdotted, with the predictable horde of people declaring this a RAD
K00L idea.
In setting this up, Jensen was somewhat handicapped by lacking Clue One
about planning, publicity, organisation, and even use of calendars (as
I shall explain).
Looking on this spectacle from the San Francisco Bay Area, a number of
us saw considerable potential for disaster. Reporters used to toeing
the Redmond party line seemed likely to portray Jensen's event as a
software bootlegging scam on a massive scale, giving a black eye to
(particularly) the Linux community in so doing: All such a reporter
had to do was find _one_ kiddie bragging about scamming money off
Microsoft Corporation while continuing to use his Win9x installation
thereafter, which the reporter could then sell as representative,
because large parts of the populace take as given that a machine is
useless without MS Windows.
So, Bay Area Linux publicist Don Marti recruited me and Nick Moffitt to
run a Bay Area Windows Refund Day information site and newsletter, and
start planning a local event. Since hundreds of computer geeks
individually banging on OEM coutertops in obscurity was an obvious PR
loser, we replaced this notion of Jensen's with one of a mass visit to
a local Microsoft office.
Simultaneously, Don's New York City associate Jim Gleason got the LXNY
group and Jay Sulzberger involved to plan a local event at a Microsoft
office there, and Orange County Linux activist Deirdre Saoirse
volunteered to do likewise in Irvine, California. At the same time,
Jensen asked someone to take over his Windows Refund Day site, since
he wasn't prepared for either the traffic or the maintenance work, and
luckily Mark Bolzern volunteered to take it over at his Linux Mall site.
Total elapsed time for arranging all this via group e-mail discussions:
About three days.
So, I then checked my calendar, and found that Monday the 15th was going
to be Presidents' Day, a public holiday in the USA. I mentioned this
to the other planners, and Matt Jensen reacted as if this was calamitous
news, saying he was going to change the date (with publicity for the
event already well under way).
I replied that we were _not_ going to change the date, not least because
Jensen's accidentally picking Presidents' Day turned out to be a stroke
of good luck: Many businesses would be closed that day, such that we
stood a good chance of having high turnout at USA locations, _but_
Microsoft Corporation offices were going to be open. Good planning
includes checking on such things.
Eventually, we attracted equally meticulous planners of local Windows
Refund Day events in New Zealand, the Netherlands/Belgium, France, and
Japan, and coordinated with them via private group e-mail discussions
(_not_ via public mailing lists). We were also extremely careful to
avoid this being portrayed as a Linux-only event, thereby drawing in
activists from the FreeBSD, Solaris, NetWare, SCO Unix, and BeOS
communities.
My point, in part, is that considerable damage control was necessary,
to repair Jensen's poorly-thought-out idea, and give the publicity
effect some helpful spin control instead of leaving that entirely
to chance and the sympathies of reporters, a minority of whom were
outright Microsoft shills. A potential PR disaster was turned into an
event with a very clear and dramatic message. (Hundreds of people
attended the march to Microsoft, in Foster City, near San Francisco --
where we held our press conference and presented our written request for
reimbursement and justification for it, since, as expected, Microsoft
reacted to our presence by hiding in the building's upper floors and
locking those floors out of the elevator system.)
My point, with more specific application to the present situation,
is that any Win2K event had better have a well-thought-out, local,
physical focus at one or more places. There should be a coherent
message for the press. There should be contact telephone numbers.
(If you plan to make news, you need to be accessible to reporters.)
There should be people in charge, who know how to talk to the press.
It's best to have publicised Web sites with FAQs pitched to the level
of the target audience. The event should be reportable and packaged
as _fun_, colourful news, not just yet another boring and confusing
nerd non-event. And planning should be among a manageably small of
people, and in private.
Above all, y'all need to think through what _specifically_ you're trying
to accomplish, where, with whom, and how. Logistics, calendars,
project planning -- all the tedious, necessary stuff. If you aren't
prepared to start tackling those tasks starting _now_, don't even bother.
You could end up being an object lesson of the _other_ side's publicity
campaign.
(Presidents' Day, 2000 is Monday, January 21, in case anyone's curious.
Microsoft's Win2K launch is scheduled for the preceding Thursday.)
References:
http://LinuxMall.com/misc/refund/
http://linuxmafia.com/refund/
http://zork.net/refund/
--
Cheers, My pid is Inigo Montoya. You kill -9
Rick Moen my parent process. Prepare to vi.
rick (at) linuxmafia.com
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