[JaxPM] About Jax.PM, general discussion...

[j proctor]

On the jacksonville-pm-list; Jax.PM'er j proctor <jproctor at oit.umass.edu> wrote -



> ORA offers advertisement, no cost to Jax.PM, plus they will donate books and
> what not - seems they have more or less taken over Perl.com (which Tom
> Christiansen stated would happen in an e-mail to PM Group leaders a while
> back) - now however, generally speaking, ORA feels that all the PM groups
> are ORA-sponsered.
> 
> I have asked for clarification on this matter as I was under the impression
> that each group was independently owned and operated, more like a mom-n-pop
> franchise...

Well, yeah, but just because we're not owned by "PM Central" doesn't mean
we can't be sponsored.  PBS stations are all local or state-level
franchises, and *they* get corporate sponsorship.  :)

If you approach this from the other side, what does ORA get out of it?  
They get some puffery about what a wonderful company they are for
sponsoring these user groups.  They get a tax write-off if we're a
501(c)(3) non-profit (which, in all fairness, they may ask us to become in
order to make the sponsorship thing really happen).  And they get good
juju with a lot of people who could be book reviewers, authors, or (I
smell the real goal here) customers.

What do we get?  I'm not clear what "advertisement" means.  Well, I know
what it means, but what media does ORA control (other than the annoying
little insert cards in their books)?  Would they buy an ad in the T-U?
Would we benefit from that, and would they ever recoup that investment? Do
we get a little ad tacked on the bottom of a page at perl.com?  Yeah,
that's useful.  "Of the umpteen thousand people who will see this page
today, if you're near Jacksonville, FL, you're invited to join Jax.PM!"

To the extent that the benevolent dictator is willing to listen to his
constituents, I vote that we wait for clarification. 


> I welcome additional discussion on this matter.  In the absense of such - I
> will move the project off SF.net and take it completely private (it sort of
> was a day-dream/mare I had anyways - no sense in perpetuating a hopeless
> cause  :)

I wasn't aware of that policy at SF (though I might've noticed it next
month, when I plan to move my thesis work there for ongoing development).

I am actually interested in participating, but I've got 16 more days of
coding something else that I consider much more important.

Ziggy's Apprenticeship Hour at YAPC was inspiring for many who were there,
but I feel that enthusiasm will have a hard time propagating back to the
PM groups.  Especially smaller ones like Jax, that don't have a cohesive
community amongst themselves yet.

If/as the project gets more momentum, it'll be easier to post little
things that beginners could try to code, in exchange for their name among
the authors.  If you start getting copies of books from ORA (or Manning,
or whatever), offer one as a prize for the first bug-free code that fills
some gap.

And maybe start actively looking for developers outside Jax.  "Advertise"
the project.  I'm sure there are Perl beginners and experts at a wide
variety of educational institutions who'd love to help replace WebCT, if
we can only get in touch with them.  SF is so bloated that posting
something there doesn't really get the word out, y'know?

Just starting is always the hardest part.


j


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