Re: Enterprise Engagement, at the distribution level...

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

Hey,

On Mon, 2014-04-14 at 12:13 -0400, Alex GS wrote:
> Enterprise Engagement is a project that I'm working on focused around
> community outreach and collaboration with professional developers,
> start-ups and companies.  It's focus is on working with companies to
> optimize GNOME Shell as a tool they can use as a default desktop on
> their Linux/Unix workstations and encouraging the use of GNOME
> technologies in professional products.  The aim is to not only build a
> large thriving community of professional developers contributing to
> GNOME software but to build sponsorship opportunities for GNOME in
> terms of resources and finances.  My goal is to sign up a few hundred
> companies/start-ups/groups for this program.
>
>
>
> The immediate goal of contacting the distributions is that they have
> direct access to professional/corporate end-users and for this project
> to succeed I'll need to work directly with their desktop teams.

I'll bite.

You've sent me your "strategy" document (your words) that you won't
share with this list. Not sending it to the list is the first mistake.
If we were to go and contact partners, the rest of the engagement team
would need to be privy to the details of who was to be contacted, and to
discuss what.

It would also be a senior person in the engagement team contacting the
partners, either the Foundation ED, a Board member with engagement
experience or an member of the engagement team that the Board would
delegate to.

You have a section about action items in your document, which list
things like "Do a site wide survey of the current state of
[Documentation and Wiki]". This is something that Jon Mccann has been
working on for the past cycle, restructuring the whole Wiki. There's
also "Improve [developer.gnome.org]" which is also something that Jon
and Stefan Sauer have been working on this past cycle, moving the API
docs from docbook to markdown-ish, and redoing the stylesheets for API
docs.

Except that your strategy document is private, and that you haven't been
involved in GNOME for long enough to realise that people already know
about most of these problems and have already been working on some of
them without the need to contact partners.

Furthermore, you have a section about Partners, with names of contacts
and potential interests in GNOME. I'm not sure whether you realise how
much overlap there is between your list of contacts, and actual or
potential Advisory Board members. The ones already on the advisory board
would probably mildly appreciate being contacted to take part in a
"committee" that one doesn't need to pay for that replicates the AdBoard
but without paying any fees. And the ones that aren't on the AdBoard
have probably already been contacted and you'd be disrupting whatever
discussions are already in process.

In short:
- Do not contact partners on behalf of GNOME
- Make your document public
- Start helping out with some of the items you have mentioned in your
document

You seem to have a lot of energy, but you really need to start with
smaller goals, and help bring them to fruitition.

Cheers