[IAEP] Kickoff meeting: Sugar Labs Marketing Team

[Greg Dekoenigsberg]

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&year=2008&hour=16&min=0&sec=0&p1=0

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