Hello, Packt Publishing has kindly agreed to let me run a contest with e-copies of my book as prizes: http://www.packtpub.com/apache-solr-for-indexing-data/book
Since my book is about learning Solr and targeted at beginners and early intermediates, here is what I would like to do. I am asking for feedback on whether people on the mailing list like the idea or have specific objections to it. 1) The basic idea is to get Solr users and write and vote on what they find hard with Solr, especially in understanding the features (as contrasted with just missing ones). 2) I'll probably set it up as a User Voice forum, which has all the mechanisms for suggesting and voting on ideas. With an easier interface than Jira.... 3) The top N voted ideas will get the books as prizes and I will try to fix/document/create JIRAs for those issues. 4) I am hoping to specifically reach out to the communities where Solr is a component and where they don't necessarily hang out on our mailing list. I am thinking SolrNet, Drupal, project Blacklight, Cloudera, CrafterCMS, SiteCore, Typo3, SunSpot, Nutch. Obviously, anybody and everybody from this list would be absolutely welcome to participate as well. Yes? No? Suggestions? Also, if you are maintainer of one of the products/services/libraries that has Solr in it and want to reach out to your community yourself, I think it would be a lot better than If I did it. Contact me directly and I will let you know what template/FAQ I want you to include in the announcement message when it is ready. Thank you all in advance for the comments and suggestions. Regards, Alex. Personal website: http://www.outerthoughts.com/ LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandrerafalovitch - Time is the quality of nature that keeps events from happening all at once. Lately, it doesn't seem to be working. (Anonymous - via GTD book)
