SEUL: Linux advocacy documents team?

[Roger Dingledine <arma@seul.org>]

Recently, it's become apparent that more and more Linux advocacy documents
are springing up, but their creation and development remains uncoordinated.
All of you have written or maintain a well-written and insightful document
related to Linux advocacy. There are many such documents out there; while
many of them start out very thorough and up to date, it's very difficult to
maintain that after the initial copy is finished and released. 

Seul has such a document (http://www.seul.org/docs/whylinux.html) -- it
started out really good, but it's slowly getting out of date. That seems to
be the case for a lot of other documents I've seen. I'd like to gather
together some good writers and good thinkers, and figure out what needs to
be done wrt Linux advocacy documents.

At the least, we should come up with a list of the current good documents
that are available, possibly with commentary on each. We should notify
those people I haven't noticed yet, and try to help people become more
sychronized and aware of our efforts. I'd like this to be a group of
people who generally all agree on what advocacy means, and what the good
and bad aspects of Linux are -- discussion of the best way to present
issues is great, but debate on the issues themselves will slow us down a
lot. As such, it will be a closed group, and people can join by
invitation.

The next step would be to figure out which categories need to be covered:
a list of the pros and cons of using Linux is very different from a list
of common myths and counter-arguments to them, is very different from a
list of anecdotes or press articles describing Linux successes. We need to
come up with one or a few documents in each category, and make sure they
remain comprehensive and timely.

I have several goals in mind. First of all, we should provide (either
write or collect) a set of comprehensive and clear documents to help guide
Linux advocates, in terms of good arguments to make and good ways to
present them. These same documents would also be very beneficial from
the point of view of the press, because there would finally be a good
place to look to get "the answer" in terms of why Linux is better, or
why a particular claim about Windows isn't as reasonable as it sounds.
(Indeed, this implies that maybe we should contact places with misleading
advocacy and try to guide them to the light. But that gets much trickier.)
And of course, the documents would be useful for new users or companies
considering switching to Linux.

I can help out with some of the leadership for this (and particularly
the 'vision' side, though I expect quite a few of us have a strong vision),
but it would be nice if some others wanted to help out with leadership.
(Perhaps we would end up splitting it by category, though there will be
some overlap. My preference is in the "Why Linux?" direction; I also
expect that we will have to ignore some categories, because other people
are already dealing with them better than we can.) Anyway, if you're
interested in helping out to make this happen, even if you just have some
spare time to help edit what other people come up with, please contact me.
Once I've gotten some responses, I'll set up a list for discussion (private
list, publically archived) and send out another note with a pointer to the
list.

Thanks for your time. Comments greatly appreciated,
--Roger Dingledine, SEUL project leader

Following is a slightly outdated list of some of the advocacy docs I've
run across so far. It's in no particular order, and far from complete.

http://www.linux-center.org/en/politics/index.html
http://www.flash.net/~landley/linux/index.htm
http://www.croftj.net/~goob/local/why.html
http://www.seul.org/docs/whylinux.html
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Hills/9267/fud2.html
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Hills/9267/sstactics.html
http://www.KenAndTed.com/KensBookmark/linux/index.html
http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue25/sorensen.html
http://electriclichen.com/people/dmarti/linuxmanship.html
http://www.xunil.com/xunil/j4phases.html
http://metalab.unc.edu/LDP/HOWTO/mini/Advocacy.html
http://www.10mb.com/linux/
http://www.mwsoftware.com/linux/whylinux.html
http://www.linuxos.org/Why-Linux.html
http://www.ncworldmag.com/ncworld/ncw-04-1998/ncw-04-nextten.html
http://www.jimmo.com/Linux-NT_Debate/index.html
http://www2.computerworld.com/home/print9497.nsf/All/SL42migrat1692A
http://mnemo.mcs.muohio.edu/computing/linux/advocacy/
http://www.opensource.org/for-suits.html
http://www.redhat.com/redhat/reasons-for-linux.html
http://www.unix-vs-nt.org/kirch/index.html
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Haven/6087/
http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~conradp/linux/pr/
http://www.opensource.org/faq.html
http://directory.mozilla.org/Computers/Systems/Linux/Advocacy/