[Spi-private] Re: Inviting questions from SPI

[Anthony Towns]

On Fri, Jul 13, 2007 at 07:44:41AM -0700, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
> * A more physical presence of SPI and the associative projects at well
> known events such as OSCON, LinuxWorld, and USENIX.
> 
> * Working in FOSS hubs (such as S.F., Seattle and Portland) to foster
> workshops, talks and training opportunities not only for new FOSS
> community members, but also businesses that can help in the market drive
> of FOSS.
> 
> * Work with SPI members to sponsor individuals to give talks related to
> FOSS at every possible legitimate opportunity.

So presumably that ends up meaning "to give talks promoting FOSS to the
broader public at every possible opportunity", or something. I'm not sure
that SPI has the funds to do that to any significant degree at present,
but if SPI were visibly active in some way that's independent from its
member projects, I suspect it'd be easy to raise funds to support that
sort of stuff.

> * Work to have all associative projects work together to provide a more
> influential presence to communities, governments and businesses.

So I guess my question is are you willing to make those sort of goals
independent of your election? They all sound pretty interesting and
sensible expansions of SPI's mission to me, to the point that I'd like
to see them happen even if you miss out on a board seat, and presuming
whoever's elected isn't actively opposed to those sorts of ideas, it seems
like something you could lead as a "promotions committee" or something.

So ignoring the election part and endorsement as an official SPI activity,
what's it going to take to actually get this stuff going? Do we need
money or sponsors first, or do we need people to do these things, or a
strategy of what to try promoting first, or what?

On Fri, Jul 13, 2007 at 11:32:16AM -0400, David Graham wrote:
> We have to decide as an organisation if our purpose is to influence the
> community or simply be the wall the community can lean against while it
> does its work. 

As a community member, I don't want to feel like I've got my back up
against the wall ;)

Personally, though, I'd put that differently, more as SPI being one means
by which the community influences others -- which from SPI's perspective
still means trying to publicise and advocate various ideas, but with the
focus being taking those ideas from the free software community rather
than trying to push them onto the free software community.

> I believe that we should make every reasonable effort to assist our
> associated projects in doing any advocacy they wish, within the bounds of
> their budgets and our charter. I don't believe our role is to be an
> independent lobby group, but our projects are free to be with our backing.

The difference there is that having projects do advocacy rather
than SPI removes the opportunity for SPI to actively help projects
cooperate. SPI's in a position to have a broad overview of the goals of
an already somewhat wide range of projects and notice similarities and
help them speak with one voice; which is a bit harder to achieve from
a single project's standpoint.

Cheers,
aj

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