openSUSE Collaboration thrives!

Earlier this week, the openSUSE Marketing Team held the first of a series of Collaboration Days in December. This was, without a doubt, a success with many of our team members showing up as well as many newcomers offering to lend a hand.

[caption id=”attachment_5864” align=”alignright” width=”300” caption=”Apparently not build in a day”][/caption]

The focus for the 6 December event was to review existing support materials for our Ambassadors. Moderated by Kostas Koudaras and Carlos Ribeiro, a variety of assignments were tackled, from a list that included booth design and organization, kits for Ambassadors, presentations, talking points, 2011 planning and much more. To be sure, not everything can be accomplished in one day. Heck, even Rome wasn’t built in a day! Still, this day was long - after all, we’re an international bunch, so there were a few more hours than usual :D

But the coolest thing was that at the end of the day people volunteered to take on the assignments that were not done and committed to finishing them! We’re confident that in the very near future, we’ll have just about everything on the list of last Monday will be finished. Koudras and Ribeiro are busy sorting out the “dones” and remaining to-dos and the results will be posted on the marketing wiki.

More Collaboration Days coming!

Meanwhile, Linux Journal is noticing the spirit of openSUSE - mentioning the Collaboration days in the linked article! The team feels full of energy and is looking forward to the next two Collaboration Days scheduled for this month. On Monday, 13 December, we’ll have the Marketing Materials Review Day and on Tuesday, 21 December, we’ll have the PR and Social Media Review Day.

To quickly summarize again what we’ll be doing on those two days:

Marketing Review Day, under guidance of Chuck Payne and Bryen Yunashko, will review current posted materials including, but not limited to, brochures, slide presentations, talking points, etc. with the goal to strengthen existing materials and add new materials where needed. Moreover, the wiki will be, where needed, reorganized so things will be easier to find.

Manu Gupta and Jos Poortvliet will host a Social Media day to focus on improving our press/media communication, especially through social media outlets like Twitter/Identi.ca, bogs, Facebook and more.

If you’re interested in helping out, just do so! It’s great fun and we are getting things done.

How it works

The day begins at 9:00 UTC and ends at 24:00 UTC in the #openSUSE-Marketing channel on Freenode IRC The moderators of the day will post the list of suggested assignments. When you come by, simply review the list and volunteer for an assignment to complete. Or, if you feel there is something else more relevant to your preferences, you may create your own assignment.

At the end of the day, the moderators will review the day’s accomplishments and list what has been completed and what needs to be completed. This subsequently will be posted on the marketing wiki.

This is an opportunity for people to come together, not just marketing folks, and provide their expertise in their areas, whether you are an OBS expert, openSUSE expert, design expert, etc.