The Perl Foundation Marketing Committee

Tue, 20-Oct-2009 by Curtis "Ovid" Poe  edit post

Now that I've joined the Board of Directors for the Perl Foundation, my first action was to propose a marketing committee be set up and the board approved the proposal. It's an ambitious goal, but a useful one. In the past, we've merely had a single PR person such as Andy Lester or Joshua McAdams. The problem with this approach is that there is simply too much for them to do by themselves. The new committee is designed to break their roles down into various responsibilities, each of which has a clear, single goal. Those roles on the committee are as follows: # Blogmaster # Site design # Market research # Press releases # News articles # Social networking Dan Magnuszewski is the new chair for this committee. His responsibility is primarily to summarize the actions of those on the committee and to sometimes nudge them if we need more work in this area. There's also to be a "deputy" chair who has Dan's role and can step in if Dan is away or needs a holiday. The roles of the various people on the committee are also lightweight. They mainly need to find people to do work in the various areas and to sometimes nudge them to do their work. The committee and the various roles are designed to be highly autonomous on the theory that it's better that we push to get work done rather than have a heavyweight voting on each and every action. The committee is also set up with some structural issues in TPF. Currently, it's very stressful for some people because they can never delegate their responsibilities and they often have too much to do (it's very hard for a distributed volunteer organization to coordinate things). We'll probably need to adjust the various roles in the future and further tweak things to see what does and does not work, but we're already getting a number of "behind the scenes" things done. Hopefully, great things will come out of this and we'll keep you posted on the updates. #marketing

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Comments (9)

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[ 659 ] | Tue, 20-Oct-2009 by szabgab_myopenid_com

I am happy to hear this.

Are any those position already filled? For the ones that are not yet filled, are you (or Dan) going to approach people to fill the positions or are you going to wait for people to volunteer? If the latter, where should they offer their help? Could either of you give some more details on what would be the expectation from each person and what is the job of Dan?

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[ 660 ] | Tue, 20-Oct-2009 by pshangov_myopenid_com

What are the options for others to follow and contribute to the work of the Marketing Committee, without being members?

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[ 661 ] | Tue, 20-Oct-2009 by reneeb

Hi Ovid,

I've written a short news article on Perl-Nachrichten.de http://perl-nachrichten.de/index.cgi/details/579 (german).

I think one important thing is missing on your list of activities:

* Conferences

Maybe TPF Marketing Committee can coordinate and organize booths on conferences like OSCON and FOSDEM.

Gabor Szabo sent me an email yesterday about FOSDEM and a Perl booth. And I think that's a great idea.

These conferences are a good chance to break the echo chamber.

I'd like to offer my help: If you have anything that should be translated to German, please let me know.

- Renée

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[ 662 ] | Tue, 20-Oct-2009 by reneeb

I've written a short news article on Perl-Nachrichten.de
http://perl-nachrichten.de/index.cgi/details/579 (german) about this announcement.

I think one important thing is missing on your list of activities:

* Conferences

Maybe TPF Marketing Committee can coordinate and organize booths on
conferences like OSCON and FOSDEM.

Gabor Szabo sent me an email yesterday about FOSDEM and a Perl booth.

These conferences are a good chance to break the echo chamber.

I'd like to offer my help: If you have anything that should be
translated to German, please let me know.

- Renée

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[ 663 ] | Wed, 21-Oct-2009 by nick

Great to hear, and I'm interested to hear what the initial plans are. Is there going to be a lot of meat, outreach, and evangelism, or more crazy ladybugs?

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[ 664 ] | Fri, 23-Oct-2009 by reneeb

The Marketing Committee could be a point of help for Perl related projects that want to do more marketing - as promoting a project is promoting Perl itself.

How could the Committee help the projects?

They could give them a list of newssites where to publish news/press releases.

I'm always interested in news about Perl related projects. If I think it is interesting, I publish it on http://perl-nachrichten.de (german).

But where can I find these news? I could tell the Marketing Committee that I'm interested in news about Perl related projects and the Committee could tell the projects "hey, send your news to Renee. He may publish your news on perl-nachrichten.de..."

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[ 665 ] | Sat, 24-Oct-2009 by https___me_yahoo_com_a_tpj2spklw8jy_azm0cyfginu4j4ot2lxtme__ad653

Hello all!

We're still in the beginning stages of setting up the marketing committee and getting things rolling, but we already have some people come forward looking to help. This is good because there is a lot of work that needs to be done!

Gabor,

I think we will try to fill the positions by both advertising openings and asking those who casually participate to volunteer. It would be ideal to have a couple of people working in each marketing subgroup so that projects won't stall if someone gets busy with their job, life, etc. Each member of the subgroups should participate as much as possible with the various projects that arise from the tpf-marketing@perl.org mailing list. Ideally, my role would be coordinating the groups, their projects, and ensuring that I remove any obstacles that get in the way of getting their work done.


Nick,

I'll post the inital plans when I have them ironed out and polished.


Renee,

I like the conferences suggestion and I think we should call it something like "Conference Promotions". I would like to have a single place for Perl projects and the Perl community to post news through the Perl Foundation and we can do a lot of the work of getting their press releases more exposure.

I look forward to working with you more on a Perl booth FOSDEM, if you're interested :-)


For anyone who wants to help with the Marketing committee, we have a mailing list setup for discussions of various marketing ideas and projects. Just send an email to:

tpf-marketing-subscribe@perl.org

Dan Magnuszewski

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[ 666 ] | Sun, 25-Oct-2009 by reneeb

Hi Dan,

> I look forward to working with you more on a Perl booth FOSDEM, if you're interested :-)

to be honest, the Perl booth at FOSDEM wasn't my idea. It was Gabors idea. I think, you should talk to him!

But nevertheless, I would be happy to help you and Gabor to make this happen.

Cheers,
Renee

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[ 667 ] | Tue, 27-Oct-2009 by https___me_yahoo_com_a_tpj2spklw8jy_azm0cyfginu4j4ot2lxtme__ad653

Yeah, I know that Gabor brought up the FOSDEM idea - I was just trying gauge your interest in helping out :-)

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