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Postings from July 2000
At 20:51 29/07/00 -0600, you wrote: Elaine -HFB- Ashton writes: >> Working Group - Vendor relations and advocacy >> Purpose - Compose ways to combat and convince groups that Perl isn't >> totally bonkers and unstable. A Perl Zen if you will. >> Members - I'd like to see Tim Bunce and Alan Burlison at least since they >> know the horrors of getting a vendor to 'see the light'. > >Sounds like the advocacy list's intent to me. > >Nat > IMHO, this focus on advocacy misses the problem. IMHO, again, Perl doesn't have a problem with its advocates, it has a marketing problem. Advocacy is the actual promotion of Perl, marketing is the necessary planning and definition of the message the advocates will help to spread *and* the necessary planning and definition of the right way to spread that message. Marketing is some means to reach Perl's goals. The first step would be to try to define our goals in terms of number of new users Perl6 should attract (and how to attract them, in other words, what these currently non-users need, from the language and the community, to want to be part of it), our goals in terms of existing users of Perl5 migrating to Perl6 (if Perl6 isn't 100% compatible with Perl5, it would be beneficial to actively promote the migration) and our goals in terms of number of new contributors to Perl and of vendors in the Perl camp. In corporatespeak, four different markets that need different things from us. IMHO, again, it boils down to users in the end. If users don't come, contributors will be scarcer. If vendors don't hear their users clamoring to get Perl from them, they will resist the advocacy. A properly defined and implemented marketing strategy will also dissolve the damaging perceptions about Perl that are the greatest (and very real) threat to its growth. It does so by substituting the false perceptions with new ones, far closer to the truth. Marketing is about finding ways to combat and convince groups that Perl isn't totally bonkers and unstable, and much more. So I propose to broaden the scope of this group: ------ Working Group - Marketing Purpose - Compose a marketing strategy towards existing and new users, vendors, future contributors to Perl and members of the Perl community. Members - Anyone interested in the planning of the promotion and advocacy of Perl, and anyone with experience with or knowledge about users, vendors and contributors. ------ Does anybody think like me, or am I the only one? ------------------------------------------------------------------- Jesús Quiroga (jquiroga@pobox.com) ------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------- Jesús Quiroga (jquiroga@pobox.com) -------------------------------------------------------------------Thread Previous | Thread Next