[HCoop-Discuss] Recruitment and Fundraising

[Aaron Hsu]

   Date: Sun, 19 Nov 2006 14:02:27 +0100
   From: Davor Ocelic <docelic at mail.inet.hr>

   The only problem with recruiting new members are the target user groups.
   I don't think we should go into general advertising (just yet, at least).

   Someone here listed us under Python hosting and that brought some new
   members. I like this kind of promotion best. We could do this for all
   software we use, and then maybe even find a few prospective ones that
   we could start supporting.

I agree, I think a grass-roots style advertising would be the most
beneficial way for HCoop to expand. I'm for sustainable and
maintainable expansion if it will help provide more resources for the
improvement of the infastructure and the capacity of the servers.
However, I don't want HCoop to be burdened with the increased cost and
associated troubles of broad mass market advertising campaigns. For
one thing, that will generally lead to less "qualified" individuals
signing up. Right now, the fact that the services are oriented towards
more experienced administrators is a definite plus in my mind, since I
can actually do what I want, and not have that overhead of huge
advertising, large "user-friendly" systems which I wouldn't want to
pay for anyways, and other such generally popular but geek-unfriendly
niceties that I anticipate would follow a large and broad marketing
campaign. Using a grass-roots expansion method would help maintain a
nice, natural method for filtering users, and should still create
enough of a growth rate (since many members seem to be willing to do
their parts) to ensure improvement of services.

Just a thought.

- Aaron Hsu