Re: On what we want to support: travel? - Mailing list pgsql-advocacy

On Monday 30 October 2006 01:13 pm, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 30, 2006 at 11:59:20AM -0700, Josh Berkus wrote:
> > So far, the consensus is that our priorities are as follows:
>
> I don't see any consensus at all.  So far, almost everyone who has
> had anything to say about this is in fact a member of the funds
> group.  That makes me pretty uneasy.
>
> > I haven't seen any disagreement with that specific ranking of priorities,
>
> I have: we just had someone objecting to the very idea of either
> speaker subsidies or trade show booths.  And that was one of the only
> people who are not part of the funds group to speak.
>
> A

In response to Andrews request for input from non fund group members I offer
the following.

1) The issue of consensus from the Postgres community. At one time I recall a
number of 21,000 for subscribers to pgsql-general. By the time a consensus
was reached on a issue the issue would be moot or the money would have turned
to dust. The present set up of a select group making final decisions works
for me. The community is sufficiently vocal, that I anticipate no shortage of
feedback on the wisdom of the choices made. Further, my experience to date is
that people in positions of authority in the community are by in large
responsive to the  thoughts/mutterings/gripes of the community.

2) My thoughts. I am writing this as an end user and as a member of the
Organizing committee of LinuxFest NW  (linuxfestnorthwest.org/). Last year
Jim Nasby spoke at LFNW, funded by his employer Pervasive. He was the lone
Postgres speaker in a conference that had a team of people from MySQL and
another team from Oracle. Oracle and MySQL are planning on returning,
Pervasive is out of the Postgres business. In my role as organizer I would
like to see Postgres represented, but money is short. So my vote would be to
fund speakers. Short of that promotional materials would be nice. Something
to counteract the Oracle and MySQL names floating about on t-shirts,bumper
stickers,coffee mugs,etc. The Live CD was created too late for last years
Fest but I am looking how to incorporate it in this years event.
As an end user, I have some other thoughts. A lot of the discussion I see here
and on pgsql-general seems to revolve around a change in end user. To me it
seems Postgres is making the transition from experimenters/early adopters to
a more conservative group of users. By this I mean users who are interested
in safety in numbers. These users want assurances that other people are using
Postgres, and that there are companies/people available to guide them. To
pull in these people case studies, usage statistics and support lists are in
order.  So I could see money going to increase these areas.

Thank you,
--
Adrian Klaver
aklaver@comcast.net