Pythonology Advocacy Guidelines

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How To Solicit Python Advocacy Quotes

If you have some contacts that might be able to provide quotes for the Python marketing effort, the following guidelines can help:

Indicate that you are volunteering to help increase general awareness of Python, and as part of that we're collecting 3rd party quotes for use in press releases. Note that the goal of this is to expand the Python users base and to solidify its financial and human resource foundation, which will lead to further improvement and development of the language and support libraries. The company providing the quote will benefit from these improvements and can use this as an opportunity for free press coverage.

Give an example to guide them:

   "We're using Python to integrate and gradually replace our
   legacy Cobol and Visual Basic apps.  Python's tight
   integration capabilities have made wrapping and incremental
   rewriting half as costly as maintaining the old apps.  We've also
   also been able to XML/web enable most of our apps much more quickly
   than we expected, thanks to Python's great support for this," said
   John Doe, CIO, Company X.

Other examples can be found in more recent PSF press releases. The key thing is to highlight why Python is working well for them and how they use it.

Most companies as a policy do not endorse commercial products. In asking, it's important to stress that you're volunteering to collect the quotes, that Python is open source, that the quote would be in press releases from the Python Software Foundation, which is a non-profit that holds the Python intellectual property, and that your own company name will not be on or associated with the press release in any way.

Once you have the quote, ask whether it's OK to post the press release on the python.org website, and seperately whether it's OK to include the quote in a python.org page that lists all those collected (we need to keep track of which quotes came with which permissions).

Also ask as an aside whether it would be possible to have the same group / quoter participate in the future in the Python Success Stories effort. This will involve being interviewed by someone that will write up a description of how Python is being used by them.

Please send the quote, contact info, any stated permissions and restrictions, and willingness to do a Python Success Story to python-quotes at pythonology.org. This information is entered into a database so we can ask them to sign off on use in a specific press release, and may be used to obtain additional permissions in future. Note that we must have contact information so we can attribute permissions to use the quote back to the company, in the event that there is any dispute about this in the future.