[Linux-aus] Media Officer Now

[Pia Smith]

On Wed, 2004-02-04 at 15:03, Paul Shirren wrote:
> I would like to see a small marketing committee running a marketing 
> website with press releases, facts, posters, school projects etc. 
> Perhaps off the opensource.org.au site or the linux.org.au site.

I really like this idea. Last year I was the media officer, and although
we got more media coverage than ever before, I would like to further
that role/responsibility this year (http://linux.org.au/press/ <- out of
date by a few months). Last year we all got so tied up with getting the
organisation fixed up that little time was left for important stuff like
media watching. I think having a core group of people actively working
at media issues is a good idea, with maybe people in the community
volounteering to 'watch' known groups of sites that tend to spread FUD
so we can quickly work on defensive action. I would personally like to
be very involved with such a group, and I have to stress that it is
important that such a group be accountable to the community. Perhaps a
sub-ctte of LA would probably be a good way to go.

> Perhaps using http://marketing.openoffice.org/ as a model.

I like this model. We need better ways to communicate with the media, as
everyone is saying :) Could I suggest from the thread that the following
is needed:

- Better recognition of and smiting of FUD when it pops up
- Better pro-active open source advocacy and education
- A more efficient point of contact for media

As Bruce mentioned, we've recently started speaking with ACS, and one
thing they've offered is media training courses. If we got such a
sub-ctte together, and got them trained up and on the same page, they
could actively start on this media group endeavour. They could
communicate directly with the lug mailing list for direct lug ctte
inputs to articles, and even bounce ideas/drafts around linux-aus when
necessary. We need to come up with more efficient ways of extracting
usable data from the community in order to strengthen our arguments.
Saying 'the Linux community believe ...' will always be wrong for at
least some of the community, but being able to say '80% of the Linux
community (x no' people) believe that ...' starts to become interesting,
especially the no' of people bit. Governments listen at least in part to
large groups of voters :) Some polling efforts were started last year by
Kim and a few others, maybe we need to explore how best we can extract
'leverage' data from our community.

Pia
-- 
Pia Smith <pia at linux.org.au>
Linux Australia