Re: iSociety Welcome page

["Trevor Perry" <tperry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I see there is some confusion to be removed.

iSociety is a community of websites and people. There is no one person 
running it. IBM is not in charge. Nor is COMMON. The iSociety Welcome page 
was designed to bring it all together with ONE face. There ARE a lot of 
tidbits - because iSociety is engaged in fostering a System i-minded 
community to bring all these bits together.

iSociety is not ~one~ thing - but contributions from a lot of people. Some 
of the initial contributors are:
- COMMON is part of iSociety, and they provide the My iSociety pages - 
including membership profiles.
- System i Portal is part of iSociety, and they have gathered System i 
specific information from all over the web and the planet. This is a new 
resource, which was built to support the development of iSociety.
- Midrange-L is part of iSociety, and provides System i mailing lists and 
information from all over the web and the planet.
- System i for everyone is part of iSociety and provides a means to publish 
marketing ideas developed by anybody and everybody.

iSociety is YOU. If you feel out of it, then join. Contribute! The My 
iSociety home page is hosted at COMMON. While there are teething issues - 
some related to logging in, etc - COMMON is working hard to enhance that 
experience and provide a means for all members of iSociety to have a 
membership profile and connect with each other.

Aaron, this is not a marketing initiative. It is designed to be a community 
that grows. It is getting more traffic as people become more aware of 
iSociety.

My personal contribution is time. I do believe strongly in the power of 
community and am supporting iSociety. It needs two things to grow - 
recognition and contributions. The contributions are coming, and the 
recognition is also starting to take hold. If Joe Pluta would contribute to 
iSociety, that would be a huge positive. If Aaron Bartell would contribute 
to iSociety, that would be a huge positive.

For yourself, Aaron, go here: http://www.systemiportal.com/isociety/members 
and register your web site as one of the iSociety Member Sites. That would 
be a great contribution - and actually may lead to more people benefitting 
from your good work - which is the goal of iSociety.

Hope that helps reduce the confusion.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "albartell" <albartell@xxxxxxxxx>
To: "'Midrange Systems Technical Discussion'" <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, December 21, 2006 1:11 PM
Subject: RE: iSociety Welcome page


> I get the feeling that iSociety "came out" before it should have.  Being
> that it is largely a marketing initiative I would consider it lacking.  I
> still remember getting a flyer from a "moving ad" at COMMON Miami and I
> immediately went out to isociety.org only to find that they didn't own the
> domain yet - ouch.  When I finally figured out how to sign up for it I was
> confused that I needed a COMMON Id to do so, or rather they were going to
> create a COMMON Id for my iSociety membership - very confusing.  Now when 
> I
> click on some links on the isociety.org page I get routed to COMMON.  Why 
> is
> COMMON putting their stuff all over everything?  And like Joe is saying, 
> why
> all the links to systemiportal.com?
>
> I don't get it (or rather I catch small tidbits here and there). Too many
> faces/facades.  But maybe they aren't trying to market to me, an iSeries
> developer.
>
> Aaron Bartell
> http://mowyourlawn.com