Creating a framework for the Advocacy and Marketing project to operate with

Hi everyone,

After the email earlier today in regards to the creation of Guidelines
and Best Practise documents, people had suggestions (mostly about "it
could have been worded a lot better").

Am going to attempt to explain the thinking here, and use this (and the
feedback thus far) as a basis for going forwards from.

For some time now I've been a member of the OpenOffice.org Marketing
team (as have other members of this group).  Although not as active in
that group as previous, I still watching it's workings as much as
possible.

One of the thoughts that occurred yesterday is that, from watching the
Marketing efforts of the OpenOffice.org team, they've gone from a few
people when it was "extremely new and a good challenge" to hundreds of
people with weird suggestions (some good, some bad), people all over the
board, and so much un-co-ordination that it's only being about um...
5-8% effective action (that's an estimate), and is now very much
decide-by-large-committee.  It used to be about 75% effective action
when it was mostly sensible get-stuff-done people.

Additionally they don't appear to have any decent "metrics" in place
apart from overall project downloads.

There's nothing really in place (with maybe the exception of the new
OpenOffice.org User Survey) for measuring, or even attempting to
measure, how effective any particular advocacy/marketing effort is, and
how it can be improved effectively.

There are lessons to be learnt watching that group, both now and into
the future.  Whilst this email is mentioning some of the problems
they're presently facing, the point to it is that we can learn from
their experience and not suffer the same pains.

We want to be able to measure how effective our efforts are, know what
has and hasn't worked, where best to place effort, etc.

One suggestion is to start by agreeing on the overall Purpose of the
group, then moving on to establishing the principles we would like
to become known by, and take it from there.

So, throwing the question out to the group, what is the Purpose of the
PostgreSQL Advocacy and Marketing group?

:-)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

--
"My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those
who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
first group; there was less competition there."
   - Indira Gandhi