Re: Count me in - Mailing list pgsql-advocacy

Greetings,

* Valeria Kaplan (vk@dataegret.com) wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 17, 2019 at 11:50 PM Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net> wrote:
> > * Valeria Kaplan (vk@dataegret.com) wrote:
> > > I gave a talk at pgconf.eu about marketing and proposed an idea of
> > having a
> > > centralised working group that will be initiating and implementing
> > advocacy
> > > and marketing activities that will develop and strengthen Postgres brand.
> >
> > This sounds very much like what this list is actually intended to be,
> > with a set of smaller groups who manage particular activities (Press
> > Releases, Twitter, Updates to postgresql.org, etc).
> >
> > What would be different with this "working group"..?
>
> First, if there is a list somewhere listing all those different subgroups
> and who is a part of them can you please direct me since that would be
> incredibly helpful.

Unfortunately there isn't a public list that I'm aware of (I've actually
pushed for that in some discussions in the past; in particular, I
believe it'd be good to have something similar to:
https://www.debian.org/intro/organization ).

The closest that we have to a formal list of who is on what team is the
membership on the relevant mailing lists (... most of which are private,
and we don't disclose membership explicitly anyway).  There's some teams
we have where we duplicate the list membership (I believe anyway, I've
not specifically verified it) between the list system and the .Org
website (thinking of Core and Coc here as examples).  This would also go
towards improving things around recognition of contributions to the
project, especially when those contributions are not code and therefore
don't get recognized through our git history.

> The idea is to have a small group that can be strategic about all the
> different activities that need to be done for Postgres and will be very
> active (have regular catch ups and follow ups, will move activities forward
> and so on). One of the problems with a mailing list that there is a problem
> that people tend to "hide" behind the list if there is a need for some
> action. Also, it is much easier to have a manageable size group of up to
> about 10 people to actually function (that's from my personal experience so
> maybe you'd have a different opinion on that).

I tend to agree with the concerns about "regular/open" mailing lists,
and that each team should work to have a cadence of some kind, with
reports being made to a larger body.

This was attempted at the PGCon Developer meeting earlier this year,
though with an attempt to go across all of the teams we have in the
project (notes available here:
https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/PgCon_2019_Developer_Meeting ). Teams
were reached out to asked to provide a name or two to join the meeting
and then provide an update to all the other individuals invited to that
meeting, notionally to the project leadership in the form of Core and
the committers.

What's being discussed here sounds like an attempt to add a level
between the annual PGCon meeting (presuming it continues in a similar
fashion next year...  I don't know if it will, or not) and the various
specific teams (web, twitter, et al).  A more formal "advocacy" team
which has actual/regular meetings and works across the different
platforms to send a consistent message and has a higher touch frequency
than an annual meeting.

There's value in that in a couple ways.  First is that advocacy should
certainly be a discussion that's ongoing throughout the year, and an
annual touchpoint isn't frequent enough.  Second, the overall advocacy
team could provide a single report to the annual meeting and that might
be more efficient for that meeting (there's only one spot in the agenda
for that as recorded, though my recollection is that there was some
difficulty figuring out who from what team should be invited and asked
to provide an update as there's a number of different teams with
different individuals on them, not all of whom know what's going on with
the other teams..).  Having each of the working-level teams ("working
groups"?) having to regularly report up to another group would also
hopefully encourage them to have their own regular meetings and take
more responsibility to ensure that things are happening.

> This is not to say that there isn't a place for advocacy mailing list and I
> think it actually a perfect forum to bring forward the shortlisted and
> structured tasks that the smaller working group come with and ask for
> members on the list to join a specific activites (for example the Twitter
> managing team , as you have now).

Sure, I can agree with that, and the middle-level group being discussed
above could also be tasked to provide regular reports or meeting minutes
to this list.

> > > At the moment, Jonathan does a lot that has to do with press releases
> > (and
> > > more..) and there is a small group of people who maintain community
> > Twitter
> > > account where there is a lack of consistency there and need for more
> > > people.
> >
> > I agree that it'd be great to add more people to the twitter team, we
> > had some good steam there at the start but the folks currently on that
> > team (which includes myself) have gotten over the excitment of it, I'm
> > afraid, and aren't being as active (though there's been some recent
> > efforts to try and improve on that).  What is the lack of consistency
> > though?  I can believe that to exist, though I suspect it's largely due
> > to the people being busy and not as active with the account than
> > anything intentional.
> >
> The consistency it's exactly that, if people are busy there is obviously a
> need to maybe rethink how the group works and what can be done for them to
> be on the ball with Twitter content. Planning content ahead would help
> (with events etc. it's actually pretty straight forward), but also to make
> sure that if somebody is busy and can't do it there is a process in place
> to replace that person and get help from somebody else. So in my view the
> working group would come up with an activity and guidelines but for the
> implementation one will need a dedicated subgroup who will focus on that
> activity only.

We had been pretty good about planning content ahead and using tweetdeck
to effect that, but that does dry up eventually and there was some
concern that we were running out of good content for things like the
#TalkTuesday and #FeatureFriday items.  While the twitter team might be
able to come up with some novel content, that has a much higher level of
effort associated with it and if we have folks creating novel content
then we should be thinking about if there's multiple ways to push that
content out rather than just from one team.

> Since we all do this in an open source manner (for free) each single one of
> us can't be expected to do many activities. This will help to break the
> activities into bite size pieces.

Sure, I can agree with that.

> > > So there is a need to be a bit more structured about it and
> > > actually implement, perhaps even small changes that will help with
> > Postgres
> > > and overall community accessibility, transparency etc.
> >
> > I'm certainly in support of making changes that will make the community
> > more accessible, transparent, etc, though it's unclear what's
> > specifically being suggested here.
>
> It is about education probably more than anything. Will give you just one
> example, following my talk I've been approached by a member of the
> community asking me how they could get funding for a local meetup -
> form what I know you just need to ask, however, it's not clear from the
> website or if that information is there it's not easy to find.  So when I
> say transparency I probably mena that. To think about procedures and to
> make sure that information is very intuitively located.

I agree, though this gets into a larger topic regarding things like
Meetup.com and the community NPOs, since there's expenses, potentially
contracts/agreements, et al, that have to be managed when it comes to a
Meetup.  I'd love to have a better interface between the NPOs and those
activities and the project itself though and perhaps this is a way to
make that happen.

> > > A mix of technical and marketing people would be great, so let me know
> > > who's in.
> >
> > I'd be happy to be involved (and I would think we'd probably want to at
> > least ask the individuals who are involved in the existing teams who
> > support the existing efforts in this area if they wish to be...), though
> > unfortunately I wasn't able to be in Milan and can't join in person (and
> > the meeting might have already happened now anyway?).
>
> The meeting is later today, I'll add you in.

Thanks.

> If you can point me onto lists of people who are already doing advocacy
> activities please do. I just don't have this information at hand.

Jonathan provided the update at the PGCon meeting and I understand he'll
be at the meeting, so you might chat with him about it.  The teams at a
high level include at least: Twitter team, PGWeb team, Press team, and
one might be able to argue that some others would make sense to include
too (community conference teams, planet team, sponsors team, jobs team,
maybe even other list moderation teams?).

> We miss you here in Milan :(

I miss all of you as well and hope to see everyone again soon!

Thanks,

Stephen