Kickoff meeting: Sugar Labs Marketing Team (fwd)

[Greg DeKoenigsberg]

Cross-posting this to folks in the Fedora world who might be interested in 
becoming part of the Sugar world.

I think that we've done an excellent job of defining the Fedora message 
over the past year, thanks in large part to all of your hard work.  Since 
you all have experience, maybe you'd be interested in using that 
experience to help another important project that I personally care a 
great deal about.  :)

To join the Sugar marketing list:

http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/marketing

Pardon the blatant cross-post.  :)

--g

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 24 Nov 2008 15:56:44 -0500 (EST)
From: Greg Dekoenigsberg <gdk(a)redhat.com&gt;
To: Marketing(a)lists.sugarlabs.org, iaep <iaep(a)lists.sugarlabs.org&gt;
Subject: Kickoff meeting: Sugar Labs Marketing Team


Hello all.  Reposting my blog entry from the other day.  If you care about
marketing, please read it, and then respond to my Request For Meeting,
below.  :)

===

In their excellent book The Starfish and the Spider, Ori Brafman and Rod
Beckstrom make the compelling case that, in large decentralized
organizations, the values *are* the organization. Which means that, if you
are looking to build a large decentralized organization, you must take
great care to articulate these values clearly. You must know what you're
about, and know it so well that you can communicate it with utter clarity
to anyone you ever meet.

This elevator pitch is therefore the first, and most important, task of
the Sugar Labs Marketing Team. We've got a lot of ideas for this message.
We had a design thinking session Friday morning, in which it became clear
that two messages resonate most strongly about Sugar: the Collaboration
message (which I interpret to mean "having kids use computers to
collaborate easily by default is a great thing"), and the Community
message (which I interpret to mean "anyone can help make Sugar happen,
which is a great thing").

I know that the work of "figuring out messaging" may seem dull. But it's
important work, because it is the basis of all other work: positioning to
partners, teachers, developers, volunteers of all kinds. For instance:
there are now laws in the EU that mandate students to prevent portfolios
to demonstrate progress. Not test scores -- portfolios. Similar
legislation will soon be proposed to the US Congress. As it happens,
Sugar's Journal functionality would be an ideal base for building digital
portfolios -- better than any other base, anywhere, ever. We may have one
chance to talk to a congressman in order to get Sugar funded... and it
could be anybody in the Sugar community making that pitch. We need to make
sure that pitch is right.

If you want to help us, you can start by joining the conversation. We can
certainly use the help, especially if you are a teacher or a school
administrator. In an effort like this, every person counts.

===

So now it's time to figure out when the Marketing Team meets.

Who's on the marketing team?  Absolutely anybody who cares about the Sugar
story and how best to tell it.

When shall we meet?  I would like to propose:

EVERY TUESDAY ON IRC AT 1600 UTC.

For your local time:

http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?month=11&day=25&...

Since most of our contributors are in North America, South America and
Europe, I'm shooting for meeting times that will mostly work for those
folks.  It is perilously difficult to find a time that works for
everybody.  That's the nature of global meetings.

If I get enough +1s, I will select this meeting time as a weekly meeting
time, and we will hold our first meeting on Tuesday, December 2nd.  Feel
free to submit alternate proposals for times.

--g
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