Re: Featured Users

Hi Justin,

> On Jan 15, 2018, at 7:21 PM, Justin Clift <justin(at)postgresql(dot)org> wrote:
>
> On 2018-01-15 15:43, Jonathan S. Katz wrote:
> <snip>
>>>> We could be included in the section "Government", under the name
>>>> "Natural Resources Canada, Canadian Forest Service”
>> The “Featured User” list is woefully out-of-date and we keep on punting the
>> issue of what to do with it. To keep it up-to-date, it does require determining
>> if the companies featured on the list are still using Postgres, etc., so we need
>> to make a conscious decision if this is something we want to support.
>> It does look good for the community to have such a list as it does show there
>> are people using PostgreSQL in real applications throughout the world,
>> but we need to make sure that we can accurately portray this list to
>> the community.
>> In summary: we’ll see what we can do.
>
> As a thought, for re-invigorating the Featured User list, it'll ideally
> be done by someone(s) comfortable doing "Outreach". eg:
>
> * Creating a list of potential users to contact (fairly easy to start
> with using any search engine)
>
> * Reaching out to them (from a @postgresql.org address helped when
> I was doing this ~15 years ago)
>
> * Determining if they'd be a good fit *and* if they have problems or
> general questions about things (eg "we're wanting to do replication,
> any suggestions?") then direct them appropriately.
>
> Note 1 - When I was doing this, it was extremely common for people
> to ask questions, so knowing projects/mailing-lists/people (etc) to
> point them at will likely be(come) a noticeable part of doing any
> outreach.
>
> Note 2 - It was also super common as things progress to come across
> others also experiencing similar concerns/problems (etc), which can
> lead into some good synergies when putting people in contact with
> each other.
>
> That's just the initial Outreach part. Writing things up from there
> eg into simple list, or going further into making Case Studies comes
> out of the result.
>
> For me, I mostly became bogged down in the Outreach part (it was both
> rewarding an fun though), as even back then there was easily enough for
> a single person to do (full time + extra as it was).
>
> That's the "doing it all properly" approach though. There might be some
> quicker/easier way to get things doing without going in-depth. :)

Are you volunteering? ;-)

I would be happy to help out as well, if you would like to work on this together.
I have a template I used for scanning the Professional Services list (another task
that needs to be redone!) that could help with outreach.

Best,

Jonathan