[Grok-dev] Re: Another idea for promoting Grok

[Martijn Faassen]

Kamon Ayeva wrote:
[snip]

Yes, it's a chicken and egg problem. There are a number of places where 
it needs to be tackled: on the internet, at international events, and, 
as you point out, locally.

On the net: As an example, my blog gets picked up by planet.python.org, 
planetpython.org, planet.zope.org and planet.plone.org, so if I write 
about Grok I know I'm getting a bit of an audience about it. Just 
mentioning it regularly keeps it in people's minds. The more this 
happens in blogs, the better, of course - ideally we get a few more 
widely read bloggers in your community, but if you already have a blog 
there are some simple things you can do. Obviously you can talk more 
about Grok, but what you can also do is make sure your blog gets picked 
up by a wider range of feeds. If someone sees a diverse group blogging 
about Grok, they will get a good impression about the reach and activity 
of the Grok community.

At conferences: another more "broad" approach is to talk about Grok at 
EuroPython (last year, and hopefully again this year, I submitted a 
talk). A lightning talk about something Grok related at EuroPython is 
also a good idea - you get a really wide audience at the conference that 
way, so I hope we'll get some people to do it. We need better 
representation about Grok at Plone conferences too, however. I think the 
Plone conference in Italy and the Plone seminar going on right now 
presented opportunities that we could've exploited better. I wasn't 
there though, so I can't complain too much. :)

Now on to your point:

> What do you think about more regular meetings where some volunteer could 
> present Grok to the others, like what Peter did at the London Python 
> meeting.

> I think it should be centered around Grok (and let say you will have 2 
> or 3 presentations of 30-mn each). More importantly, this would happen 
> in countries (with the help of a Python User Group or a local Zope 
> company). The point really is getting Grok to people (local presence) 
> instead of having the people meet Grok developers and promoters only 
> once a year if they get the chance to go to a Zope or Python event.
> 
> In my case, I can look at an opportunity to have such a session in 
> Paris, lead it and communicate about it. If this could happen in a 
> bi-monthly base and spread all around the world, it would make us more 
> visible as a community. More, it would make us approachable.

> What do you think ? Of course, we can also have sessions where you have 
> a mix of Django or Pylons presentations with Grok, so that the attender 
> can compare ! What is imporant is to make Grok visible.

I think this is an excellent idea. Giving people the feeling that there 
are people locally that use Grok should help quite a bit to gain wider 
attention and thus hopefully adoption, I think.

It's a good point in the evolution of Grok too. I think technology-wise 
Grok can compete with anything else in the Python world at this point; 
since we're building on top of Zope 3 we're probably starting to pull 
ahead in some areas already. That doesn't mean we should stop improving 
Grok (or its documentation!); there's still a huge amount of stuff to 
do, but we should recognize we're actually doing quite well.

I haven't paid enough of attention to local events here, but that's a 
mistake, I think. Accidentally almost we've had a semi-local event here 
due to the Grokkerdam sprint, and I did talk about Grok in its very 
early days in late '06 at a Dutch python user group (PUN) meeting.

You mention a bi-monthly base. Do you propose people organize such a 
thing in their local user groups every two months? In many places 
(including the Netherlands), we're lucky if we get python user group 
meeting twice a year. :)

This might be a good way to drive up the frequency, though. I'll kick 
off the organization of another PUN meeting.

By the way, if local users groups want to invite me to give a talk and 
they'll help a little with the costs of travel and such, I'd be happy to 
come over and give a talk. (If you want to do more, we can talk about 
organizing a training session, too.)

Regards,

Martijn