2005-01-25 21:00 UTC Attendees: 19 NLC leads, including Charles Schulz, lead of NLC and Louis Suarez-Potts, Co-Lead.
This emergency meeting was called to address the issues raised by the Stylist/Style issue discussed on [email protected] and elsewhere and of particular concern to the NLC groups. Overview: The Stylist discussion has made evident discrepancies between the trajectories of the non-Sun OOo community, especially the NLC, and StarOffice (SO). The point of the meeting was to clarify those discrepancies and to suggest ways in which to resolve them. None of us wants for there to be hostile differences between StarOffice and OpenOffice.org; rather, we want for there to be more synergy and collaboration. ** We began by discussing two, very rough options, initially framed as: 1. Do we want to clarify, can we, what the "community wants", in terms of process and product? 2. Do we want to fix what is not working now, by working better with the existing processes? The first point emphasizes raising the profile of the NLC and its users in Sun's calculations of how it shapes the product, and in the process for making it. The second can include the first (these are not mutually exclusive options) but emphasizes improving existing processes and does not bring in raising the profile of the NLC and its users. No one was strongly in favor of creating a difference between StarOffice and OOo; rather, we were all interested in furthering collaboration so that both OOo and SO reflect the users desires and needs. "Users" here means users both of OOo and SO. * The key sentiment was that Sun's StarOffice was seemingly not paying attention to the tens of thousands of users the NLC projects work with in its marketing (and presumably product management). These are not merely individual users but often are enormous groups--enterprises, government agencies, and the like. They represent a very valuable base for StarOffice/OpenOffice.org, and more should be done to ensure that the product meets their needs. ** What was decided After some discussion, in which we weighed in on the shortcomings of the current communication processes (specs are difficult to read, proposing them is best left to developers, we decided on this course of action: * To bring to the attention of Sun's StarOffce marketing the markets that the NLC projects manage and deal with and to establish a process for closer collaboration. * Collaboration here means that when possible the StarOffice marketing team (and other relevant teams) should engage with the NLC leads early on. â Early decisions relating to specs (specifications) affecting NLC projects should be provided to the relevant leads, and â NLC leads should have an avenue allowing them to inform the SO marketing of what their users want. This avenue could be meetings or lists. This is because the users represented by the NLC number in the millions; they are not individuals. The RFE process, though useful for those, is inadequate to handle the mass needs of so many. ** What is to be done now: I will contact the StarOffice Marketing groups to see about arranging the details of these processes to improve communication between Sun's StarOffice marketing and the NLC. -Louis -- Louis Suarez-Potts Community Manager OpenOffice.org --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
