[Linux-aus] Media Officer Now

[Paul Shirren]

Pia Smith wrote:
> 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
Yes. Media monitoring parallelises well. Beowolf of media monitors 
needed and an easy way for them to submit news. A Drupal/Nuke/Slash 
submission queue is an easy way to do this, and story comments are an 
easy way for people to contribute opinions.

If anyone thinks a mailing list would work better than a 
story/comment/blog engine for advocacy, I direct them to http://groklaw.net/

Deanspace is worth a look too.

There would seem to be some really simple ways we could tie LA, AUUG, 
ACS, LUGs etc together with syndication while we are into all this 
community building. As long as it doesn't end up like Planet Gnome ;-)

> 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.

While I think you have to give the sub-ctte some power just to get on 
and do stuff without referring everything to list. I think we have a lot 
of knowledgeable people who would like to contribute opinion and 
knowledge outside of the ctte. Groklaw keeps popping into my head as an 
good example of open community advocacy done well.

> 
> 
>>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:
What I like about the Open Office thing most is that they have more 
diversity than the usual news, press releases, tshirts. They have 
brochures I can download and print. They have a school logo competition. 
Having someone talking to the press is very important but it isn't the 
totality.

> 
> - 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.
Yeah. Go ACS.

I love mailing lists. Very flexible. But I think things like 
input/drafts etc are possibly better handled by more specialised tools 
(Drupal/Slash/Nukes/Geeklog etc). DSL tells me merging OOo revisions 
suck, so perhaps Wiki, cvs, or diff/patch might be the go for 
collaborative text.

I think anyone volunteering for this sub-ctte should have to swear 
something like "the market is a conversation, and PR hacks are evil 
lying bastards" over a copy of the Cluetrain Manifesto before being 
allowed to join up ;-)