Re: Count me in - Mailing list pgsql-advocacy

Greetings,

* Valeria Kaplan (vk@dataegret.com) wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 18, 2019 at 1:52 PM Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net> wrote:
> > * 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 ).
>
> That's a cool example! Agree, something like that would be great.

Yeah, I don't think it'd actually be all that hard to add support for
pulling that information from the PGLister system to populate a webpage
on the main site (of course, Magnus will probably correctly point out
that those are different systems and it won't be as easy as I'm
suggesting, etc, and then someone else will complain that maybe not
everyone on a given mailing list should be listed as a member of that
'team', and then we'll get some additional bikeshedding happening...).

Perhaps we should take this particular part of the discussion out of
this thread and start a new thread with it on -www, so we can argue to
our heart's content about it?

> > 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.
> >
> Oh man, it's a shame you couldn't come to Milano :( , you'd be a great
> addition to the group.

I'm doing my best to try and be helpful even though I wasn't there. :)

> I'm putting some notes and action from our meeting here together and we'll
> be sharing once they are final with the mailing list early next week.

Yes, I saw those, thanks for that!

> > > 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.
>
> yup, my thinking exactly.

Great.

> I didn't realise there is also an annual (developer meeting) gathering
> where one could report about advocacy was in place already, that's cool.

Well, it's only happened once so far that advocacy was explicitly
brought up as a topic and included/reported on. :)  I'd like that to
continue, as I feel it's an important part of project maintenance, but
that meeting is pretty difficult to work out who should/shouldn't be
there and we can't really make it a larger group than it is without it
becoming quite difficult to actually manage the discussion.

> > > 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.
> >
> I'm planning to put our minutes on wiki once they are finalised.

Ok, thanks.  Let's try to focus on specific, actionable, tasks and then
get assignment made for them- and let's try to make sure we include
relevant individuals from the NPOs too when it comes to things like
meetup.com and such.

Thanks again!

Stephen