Erwin's StarOffice Tango

Erwin's StarOffice Tango
Erwin Tenhumberg's Insights into Open Source and Dancing
... or why Open Competition matters

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Donnerstag August 25, 2005

OSS vs. traditional marketing
I just came across this entry in Laura Ramsey's weblog. Pretty interesting!

I'm currently also thinking about what open source marketing is and what it should try to achieve. If I look at "my" project OpenOffice.org, I'm wondering if I should "promote" the application or the project. Since the OpenOffice.org application is already well known and broadly used, I more and more come to the conclusion that it's time to focus much more on the project again in order to "recruit" more contributors.

Based on my experience with OpenOffice.org, I tend to believe that (at least) the folowing eight things are required to attract new contributors:

1.) Success (who wants to contribute to a project that nobody cares about)
2.) Visibility (i.e. make people aware of different sub-projects and contribution opportunities)
3.) Mentoring (i.e. help people to get started)
4.) Leadership (by helping with the tedious work without excluding volunteers)
5.) Project management (i.e. helping to coordinate/synchronize different efforts)
6.) Excitement (i.e. keep people informed about progress and successes)
7.) Friendship (i.e. get to know and care about the people you are dealing with)
8.) Fun (nobody wants to fight and argue in his spare time)

I'm sure I'm missing important items here, I definitely have to think more about this important issue! Actually, I already had to increase the number several times until I had my list of eight items.

Looking at the list, it's pretty obvious that attracting people to open source projects (= open source marketing) is different to traditional marketing. However, there is one exception. The first item, success, is from my point of view critical for attracting people. Therefore, some "traditional" marketing is still required to make the "product" of the open source project successful. However, those marketing activities are most times guerilla marketing activities since most open source projects don't have multi-million advertising budgets.
( Aug 25 2005, 07:55:09 PM CEST ) Permalink Kommentare [1]

The OpenOffice.org marketing lists explained
Here Jacqueline McNally, the OpenOffice.org marketing project lead, explains the purpose of the various mailing lists that belong to the OpenOffice.org marketing project. The full email thread can be found here.
( Aug 25 2005, 11:25:15 AM CEST ) Permalink