[wplug-plan] PR committee ideas

[Vance Kochenderfer]

Hi everyone,

Greg Simkins and I discussed some possible first steps for the PR
committee to undertake.  Unfortunately, I will be out of town until
the 15th, but hopefully the committee will have a meeting within the
week anyway.  Dave Ostroske has already sent out a list of potential
tasks for us to work on.  I think this is a great starting point, and
that we should seek to get a few concrete items going from this list.
Some early action and successes would be a good thing.

More broadly, I think the committee should have a conversation about
what its duties are and start to develop a plan extending further into
the future.  The concept of "public relations" begs the question of
who exactly you're having relations with.  To (hopefully) help with
this process, I assembled an outline, and filled in some possibilities
under some of the categories.  To be clear, I'm not suggesting that we
we need to have an active relationship with an entity in each category,
and some of the examples I have given may be unsuitable.  It's just a
thought exercise.

Ideally, there will be some entities on the list that people already
know and/or are obvious targets for WPLUG.  It seems natural to work
on the low-hanging fruit and go from there.

Feel free to add more examples under categories as you think of them.

-Media
  Newspapers: P-G, Trib, City Paper, Pennysaver
  Radio: public stations, college stations, commercial stations
  TV: WQED, local commercial stations, cable access
  Web: local bloggers

-Companies
  Users: Sungard, Pair, (likely many more)
  Creators: Timesys, others?
  Ancillaries: Riverhead Training, others?

-Education
  Colleges: CMU, Pitt, CCAC, Carlow, Chatham, Point Park, Duquesne...
  Public Schools: K-12
  Private/Parochial Schools: K-12
  Cyber/Charter Schools?
  Carnegie Science Center

-Government
  Municipalities
  County
  State
  Federal

-Libraries

-Associations
  User-type Groups: Perl Mongers, Parsec, PittJUG, (add to this list)
  Industry Groups: Pittsburgh Technology Center, (likely more)
  Professional Associations: Quality, Chemistry, Engineering societies
  Unions

To kick off the discussion, from my perspective the Pittsburgh Perl
Mongers seems like a great place to start and a natural fit for WPLUG.
I think it would be beneficial for both groups for WPLUG to help out
at the Pittsburgh Perl Workshop coming in September, which would be a
good opportunity to market WPLUG.  <http://pghpw.org/>

Vance Kochenderfer        |  "Get me out of these ropes and into a
vkochend at nyx.net          |   good belt of Scotch"    -Nick Danger