Vince,
> Here are my main problems with it.
>
> 1) They're marketing to those that are already sold on it.
First off ... not "they", "you". I'm a member of Advocacy; so are
Robert, Justin, Neil, Marc, Bruce and several other members of this
list. The advocacy group is not some privately sponsored bunch of
marketeers; *we* are your fellow contributors.
Yes, we should have released a different version of the announcement to
the internal lists. I believe that I have already explained how that
happened.
> 2) They are, or at least were, insisting that I join their list to
> stay informed on what they're doing.
Unless you don't want to stay informed. In which case, you're welcome
not to, and one or more Advocacy people will join wwwdevel to keep
links synchronized. Nobody's going to make you do anything. This is
Open Source.
> 3) They need to learn HOW to market from someone who knows (not me)
> how or they'll never be taken seriously.
One of our volunteers is a professional PR person. Two are periodical
writers. I started (with 2 partners) the OpenOffice.org Marketing
Project, which was cited by one columnist (Amy Wohl) as a better
volunteer marketing team than Sun could put together for a
million-dollar budget (paraphrased). 3 of us are small business
owners. I think we have as much or more combined experience as the
marketing department of any start-up, without the baggage.
Also, half a marketing effort is better than none. At the very least,
we need to keep Postgres in the press, else we are likely to see
PostgreSQL fade into permanent obscurity. The technology world is full
of technically good but poorly marketed products -- FoxPro anyone?
Paradox? Beta video? Amiga?
Last week I got a 5-page long database developer survey from EvansData.It mentioned 10 other database platforms --
includingIngres! -- but
not PostgreSQL. I personally don't want to see that again.
Sure, we got off to a rocky start. However, I will point out that our
first release happened to fall on a major American holiday; this made
it extra hard to organize the effort, and things didn't work out well. But the answer to that is not to abandon the
effort,but to plan and
prepare better in the future.
I would also be grateful if us folks on the Advocacy team could look to
Hackers to make sure that we *aren't* going off on a tangent, or
pushing Postgres in a way that's inconsistent with the development
goals for the database. We *want* Advocacy to be an integral part of
the Postgres community, serving the general goal of making Postgres the
best possible ORDBMS in existence.
-Josh Berkus