Re: SEUL: Linux advocacy documents team?

[Brian & Kathy Wiens <wiens@cyberus.ca>]

Roger Dingledine wrote:

> Recently, it's become apparent that more and more Linux advocacy documents
> are springing up, but their creation and development remains uncoordinated.

<snip>

> 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 think that part of the problem with the categories of advocacy documents is
that we haven't clearly defined our target market in each case.  I would
suggest that a sys admin directed advocacy document would be different than one
for the media than one for M$ users, etc.  The needs of each of the targets is
significantly different and it would probably focus our thinking to consider
who we are writing each document for.

> 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 think that I addressed some of these points just above.  However, for
completeness, I don't think that each article will be useful in each market.
As an example, a media advocacy article would be liberally sprinkled with
anecdotal evidence from actual users that have switched from other OSes (be
they M$, Mac, Un*x or other) combined with some good sound bites from Linus or
easy to process statistics like the number of users or the average cost of a
distro.  On the other hand, a sys admin advocacy article would probably focus
on TCO, technical merits, ability to use older H/W, the migration process,
representative uptimes and similar installations noting network size and other
relevant detailed stats.  These are not the same nor should they be.  We have
to know what we want to achieve before we can effectively move forward in this
area.

> 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.

Dependent on your view of what I've said above, I may also be able to help on
the vision side.  My time commitments to these things tend to be very limited
(I dropped off the list for about 6 weeks and I've been unable to follow-up on
some proposed commitments to the edu side of things).  That said, please keep
me in mind.  If you think that my comments have some merit I may be able to
flesh out some of the ideas noted above.

Brian Wiens