Hi Erwin, I'm not sure you're questions are adressed to NL people, but some reflections from my own experience in attending to several confs and managing booth for OOo.
Erwin Tenhumberg wrote:
Hi all, Due to the recent discussions there seem to be more general questions that need to be answered independently of the actual events and the people going to those events. For example, is it better being present at an event at all, even if the presence is poor, than having no presence?
It depends on the focus you put in the event. Some are not so crowdy but this is the place to meet other vendors, I mean for me IBM, Novell, Mandrake, HP, even Microsoft people and create a relation ship with them. I've met HP in july for the second time (during RMLL) and they will give us some material for our tests. IBM have sponsored Christian for a FOSS meeting in EC, etc... those contacts are very important for the partnership they can bring to our project. Meeting all the associations working around FOSS in the country is also one of the goal of those events. For example, I have had a meeting with Mutualibre which is now able to sponsor developments, OOo will be the first project that will recieve this sponsor. We also have put an interproject (Gnome, KDE, Mozilla...) globalization group in place with Traduc.org and Brigitte Le Grand (french linguist from Sun) will participate to this effort to harmonize our GUI/OLH translations and our glossaries through the different products.
Since we all want that OpenOffice.org appears in the best light possible, I think we need define some kind of minimum level of presence or engagement, in case we decide to go to an event. I'm not sure what this minimum level should look like. A simple table where 50% of the time nobody is available as a contact person because the booth is understaffed, is probably not something that puts OpenOffice.org in the best light (I'm not saying that this has happened!).
Yes and the organizers of the event won't invite you next time if you don't bring value to their event. This is why we need to organize them very early (most of the time we begin to organize major events 6 to 4 month before, this is the case for SL 2006 or Educatec).
Another question is, who may say what (as an "official" OpenOffice.org representative)? It would be useful to have some consistent messaging and a few official spokes people, e.g. the marketing project leads, community council members and maybe native-lang project leads.
I think this is up to the marketing project to define their representative, there is already Marketing Contacts (MarCon) and all the NL leads are following the marketing lines defined here.
From my point of view it does not work if everybody feels empowered to represent OpenOffice.org in press interviews without engaging an "OpenOffice.org official". An open source project obviously has less boundaries and restrictions than a corporate environment, but for example at Sun there are very strict policies regarding press interviews, etc., and I think these policies make sense. We probably need official press kits and press FAQs for those people to hand out who do not hold an official OpenOffice.org role. Even the "official spokes people" should not be allowed to say anything they want to about OpenOffice.org, because wrong or misleading statements from them can be very damaging to the project.
I completly agree with you and this is not an easy task. This is difficult to get an overview of the project, you need to read a lot of lists to quite know what's happening. The transversal communication is still difficult, even if there is a lot of efforts here, we still need 'reporters' :)
A question that affects me myself as a Sun employee is, how much a sponsoring company (Sun in my case) may promote itself when it is officially representing OpenOffice.org.
You may already know my answer here as you have came to the Sun/Cusoon event we organized ;)
Yes, I admit that I do mention Sun and I do let them look good, but I typically also try to include most/all other "good citizens", i.e. I also mention companies like Novell in my presentations. Novell (e.g. Michael Meeks) typicall mentions Sun. If I'm supposed to do an OpenOffice.org presentation, I'm not just using the StarOffice customer pitch, even though StarOffice is based on OpenOffice.org and Sun is still the main code contributor. Another question might be, what events we "officially" want to support, i.e. fund with money from Team OpenOffice.org, mention on the OpenOffice.org home page, etc.
Some of the NLC have their associations and Team OOo is not concerned by those events we are funding on our own. Cusoon this year has been able to fund developments (HSQLDB and Mac port), marketing material (banners, cds and T-shirts, flyers, business cards, posters, pins) and we will fund FR members that need support to go to OOoCon. So, we still have to define how our associations and Team OOo interact because we could share the Cusoon "success" with other groups ;), but this task is up to the CC.
There are probably some key events that we should focus on. I'm not sure what the selection criteria should be, but enough local "human resources" could be one since flying people from Germany to India or from Russia to the US just to do booth duty is probably to expensive, at least if these people receive some kind of sponsorship.
Well, it depends also on what you defined as a key event. From what I see there seems to be no key events in Francophone area from an international point of view, this is why I have put Cusoon in place ;) Seriously it depends of the focus you put in the event and the "aura" of the member you found to represent the community. For example, Christian Hardy or Eric Bachard won't cover the same area to represent the OOo project and product.
I'm looking forward to you open and friendly feedback as well as your proposals how to answer these questions!
Hope this help :) For information, our next booth will be in Paris for an international far trade event at the begining of October.
Kind regards Sophie
All the best, Erwin --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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