Global Membership & Connections Committee Meeting Minutes

Membership & Connections Meeting Notes

Date: February 15, 2012

Time: 12pm EST

Location: GoToMeeting

Attendees: Kelly Santalucia, Jim Manico, Ludovic Petit, Dan Cornell, Bill Lessard (PR with Brains), Helen Gao and Tom Brennan

Dan - Engaging with a PR firm would certainly expand OWASP’s needs, but we need to be in a better position to move forward. We need to be able to provide what we need to make it successful

Jim - Believes we need less PR and more marketing

Ludovic - agrees with Dan and Jim. We need to think globally and answer the one main question: “What is the benefit of me to join your organization?”

Jim- thinks what Dan has expressed is on target. We need to come up with ways to make it more enticing for corporations to join OWASP. We need tactical support specializing in individual membership, corporate membership, support for our conferences. We need a professional graphic arts designer and a professional marketing person to guide our efforts

Bill - explanation of proposal - we need to tell a better stroy simplify our website create a PDF for membership promotion of each global AppSec announce all global AppSec’s for the year begin to promote each one seperately develop a media calendar announce any new announcements that have formed since the initial announcement

Jim - believes it will be hard to simplify the website since we are using a media wiki which is editable by almost the entire community.

Helen - we need to delegate individual tasks how to improve our website membership drive

Bill - his focus to get people involved is through media. We need to define our goals and work backwards and see how a PR person could benefit us.

Helen - we need to compose a list of “must haves”

Jim - agrees with Helen 1. our national conferences 2. corporate and individual membership 3. general PR to increase visibility Any PR that comes to work with OWASP has to realize we are a very unique organization with hundreds of people and hundreds of opinions. OWASP can have a voice when it comes to technical, but even then there will be many opinions. We will never find an “official OWASP opinion” about anything only have individual members with various opinions which makes it difficult on PR.

Helen - Kelly and Helen will compose a list of “must haves” improve our website collateral budgets timelines

Dan - is concerned that we are unstructured as to what we are doing with PR. OWASP needs to be better organized before we bring in a PR associate. He thinks it will be difficult to “fix” the website. He also feels that we have a solution to not a very defined problem.

Ludovic - First thing we need to do is to define membership

Bill suggested that if we have collateral for the organization it will be a good start

Tom - suggests that having a 3rd party coach that is not associated with OWASP is needed. It is needed for promotion of our upcoming conferences and training events, with local chpater awareness and raise visibility about membership. It is the first proposal put forth by anybody in the world. He strongly suggests that the committees take a close look at it.

Tom - Fist step is that we have to agree that we need PR to help better OWASP and second he suggests we fund this at 2K per month asking for 12K from the chapters from the 138K in escrow and 1K a month from the 2012 marketing budget of the OWASP Foundation.