Date: Sun, 10 May 1998 05:06:17 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: Amancio Hasty <hasty@rah.star-gate.com> Cc: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org>, Jason Nordwick <nordwick@scam.XCF.Berkeley.EDU>, The Classiest Man Alive <ksmm@threespace.com>, advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Linux as a Mozilla total reference platform Message-ID: <24956.894801977@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 10 May 1998 03:59:19 PDT." <199805101059.DAA01506@rah.star-gate.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
> For example, we *really* need to change http://www.freebsd.org > to convey a feeling of activity and success around FreeBSD. I posted > a simple request for someone to volunteer to revamp the web page and > got ZERO response. Why is that? Is it because the group is lazy when Argh... I'd think this would be one of those self-answering questions, especially for someone who's been around as long as Amancio has, but let me answer it anyway. Amancio might wonder why he got ZERO response but the answer is really pretty obvious: Simply stating that XYZ needs to be done, where XYZ is not something which requires a "mission statement" so much as someone to simply buckle down and do the drudge work, is almost *always* a fruitless exercise and essentially amounts to nothing more than hand-waving. If you want to actually ACCOMPLISH something, you've got to lead by example and can't simply stand around tossing off polished sound bites like "FreeBSD needs more books!" since that sort of thing is bloody obvious to everyone by now. It's equally clear that what needs to happen at this stage is for someone to actually _write_ the books or sit down and actually _make_ the web pages somehow, to put it in your own words, "convey a feeling of activity and success around FreeBSD." That's a lot harder to do correctly than it sounds, especiall for programming geeks who don't excell at marketing, or it would likely have been done already. Given these simple facts, what would have been a far more effective thing for Amancio to originally have said would have been something to the effect of: "We *really need to change http://www.freebsd.org to convey blah blah and blah, the diffs below representing my first attempt at grappling with this rather difficult marketing problem. Please give me feedback on the wording of this and I'll submit the final version of what we come up with to the docs folks and/or commit it to the web pages myself." It still might not have been enough to make it all come together, that is true, but it would have been an approach with a _far_ greater chance of success. To put it another way, you can either try to push from behind or lead (by example) from the front. If you try to push from behind, many FreeBSD folks will simply dig their heels in like mules and say "don't push me, damn it, why don't YOU do it if you want it so much!" If you lead from the front, on the other hand, then even if nobody follows you you're still going to accomplish _something_ (rather than "ZERO") and odds are good that someone will eventually take pity on the lone volunteer out there shoveling snow while everyone else is inside drinking hot cocoa and will come out to help. There's also no better way for a "leader" to establish his bonafides around here than to show that he's willing to do someone whether anyone helps him or not. That's why I've been sort of been deliberately playing the devil's advocate here in the -advocacy list about some of our more blue-sky ideas. It's not that I'm trying to quash people's enthusiasm so much as simply _channel_ it into more tangible and practical pursuits given that I know, from ample personal experience, that PR is one of those strange areas of the biz where it's quite possible to look busy as hell and still accomplish absolutely nothing of practical value. To avoid that latter scenario, we need to try and avoid getting caught up in feedback loops where everyone's spending a lot of time talking about what needs to be done and not enough time involved in the rather more boring mechanics of actually doing it. And on that note, I think I'll go back to work on my updated document for staying -current (and -stable) with FreeBSD now. :-) - Jordan To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?24956.894801977>