[ILUG] [Fwd: Linux on TV3]

[Donncha O Caoimh]

Yup, that would be me. I'm the PR person, but as with the rest of the
committee I have a day job as well. We do what we can with the resources
we have. I've spent plenty of nights and lunchtimes and spare moments
doing work on the linux.ie website as have other members of the
committee and the admin staff. What many people haven't seen is the
behind the scenes work that's been done on a web-based editor by myself,
Ken Guest, and others, or the huge amount of work being done by John
Looney on Midgard.

The first I knew about the TV3 program was the email to the list, I
don't watch much TV anymore, too bloody busy coding at night, and as
with the rest of the committee I rely on others in the community. 
When I do see opportunities for promoting Linux I take them, just last
week I contacted Media Live in an attempt to have our site listed on
their "top 40 Irish sites", it would have been in the late 20s because
of the impressive amount of traffic we generate but the request was
declined because we don't accept banner ads. I've spoken to the CEOs of
training and recruitment agencies who want to advertise on our site, or
at least get listed on the site but that's an idea that's not popular
with many people. Still, we have/had ideas for such a section that would
be ranked by the visitors to the site. Of course, this has the obvious
drawback that chances are nobody will use the thing except the marketing
staff in the companies. Nobody else will be interested. (scrap that!)

Marketing is a full time job. Lots of techies think it's simple, "oh,
write up some stuff there on how good we are, use big words, cut and
paste it from somewhere else", but even Dilbert recognised the
importance of marketing staff in a cartoon a long time ago when he
visted a company with a marketing department(mind you, the techies in
that company jumped out the windows to escape the prospect of working
with marketing!) Kenn, can you remember that one?

Part of the problem is a lack of communication. How many times have we
heard people bemoan how off-topic this list has become? In fact, how
interested would people be in discussing what we can do to make Linux
more prominent in Ireland? I find myself having second thoughts before
posting a mail to the list about anything not 100% technical, even
though it might be 100% related to Linux. There have been flame-wars
here over less. Last week a thread on the education at linux.ie list I
suggested we look at why Linux is so successful in Mexico and Brazil
(and now France, in schools, IIRC), and got one reply. People have their
own lives, and life in Ireland is hectic enough without worrying about
some far off ideal that won't immediately affect our comfortable working
life.

Bit of a rant, I'm out of steam for the moment, back to work.

Donncha.
ILUG PRO.

Noel Carroll wrote:
> 
> I thought there was a public representative or something ont he committee to
> take care of all of these kinda things and look out for this kind of stuff
> ahead of time and to act on it.  Doesn't look like whoever's doing it is
> doing much of a job.  I apologise if its you Donncha, but I don't think it
> was.  The site is so bad that you can't even find out the members of the
> comittee.  If I was a TV researcher the linux.ie site tells me nothing.
> Why can't the PR person on the comittee do their job?   If you want a
> figurehead comittee member, get a statue but as long as you have someone
> like that you aren't going to get exposure//
> 
> Noel
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Donncha O Caoimh [mailto:donncha.ocaoimh at tradesignals.com]
> > Sent: Thursday, February 15, 2001 6:03 PM
> > To: ILUG
> > Subject: [ILUG] [Fwd: Linux on TV3]
> >
> >
> > Hope this comes out as normal text, here's the reply I got