Hi Lars, all,
I haven't been able to join this discussion earlier, so I'd like to
focus on a few points about this specific meeting not already covered IMHO:
Lars Nooden schrieb:
Alexandro Colorado wrote:
... Is much cheaper to improve the [online] communication up to
become good enough than to spend most of the budget on
transportation and accommodations.
It depends on the goals and the possibilities to achieve these goals.
I agree very much with that and vote no, also. I'm not seeing a
case for using the budget on transportation in this particular
instance.
Perhaps you have not been told clearly enough why some people including
myself think that this meeting is important:
Nobody here probably disagrees on the fact that OOo branding needs
improvement. We don't have a consistent branding that covers the product
as well as our website, marketing material, official documentation and
so on. Please have a look at
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Design_Artwork_and_Branding_Project_Proposal
We can't get such a branding, if we don't include all the relevant
groups working in this area in our discussion and decisions, and one of
the most relevant groups is the Design and Art Team at Sun.
And as Sun is our trademark holder, they are very much involved in
branding based on our trademarked logo.
Even if phone calls and online meetings are possible to coordinate a
collaborative work in such an (IMHO) important area, there are a few
things physical meetings are superior to virtual ones:
People learn to know their discussion partners much faster and more
thoroughly than on mailing lists, phone or video calls, IRC and other
online tools. Misunderstandings can easily be laid down (sometimes
supported by a glass of wine or beer).
For a common branding we need such knowledge about each other -
otherwise we will not be able to work really together in this area.
We don't have a lot of time to establish a strong branding: OOo has
become too large, mighty and well-known in public for our competitor, so
we can imagine that they try to fight us in every possible area. Without
a professional and consistent branding it's easy for them to say "look
at OOo, they are just kidding around".
The second point is specific for a graphical based task: Every virtual
white-board is less effective than going into a huddle over a real sheet
of paper and sketching drafts and graphical ideas.
I don't say that it is impossible to reach our goals without personal
meetings (even if I think that not every Sun employee working on OOo is
interested in online activities), but it will take much more time and
might be less productive.
Let's use this meeting as a means to get some of the online
conferencing tools off the ground instead. Somewhere there must be a
machine we can use to host Asterisk or another tool.
This would take weeks (at least) to decide on the tools and have them up
and running - this task should not wait for so long. (And I would have
wasted an appreciable part of my holidays in vain...)
Here we have an opportunity to reduce the distance between Sun and the
volunteer driven part of our community in an area where this distance
has been quite large in the past. A comparable step has been done by the
UX project some time ago and it works quite well.
Perhaps something similar is possible in marketing and branding too.
Best regards
Bernhard
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