GUADEC Marketing BOF

This BOF was first proposed on the guadec.org website.

The GUADEC marketing BOF will take place in a prominent common area in Villanova from 10am to 12am on Wednesday of the conference.

A rough agenda for the BOF, which will be primarily an action-oriented planning meeting, was outlined on marketing list at the start of June (but the archives appear to be in some trouble still).

Here it is again, for reference:

BOF agenda

I'm sure that we're all more or less tired of discussing target markets over and over - I'd like to propose that we organise a strategy for attacking 3 major markets -

Third party developers

• will need co-ordination with platform developers
• Preparation of material showing the benefits of developing on the GNOME platform
• Laying out and printing the platform overview that Shaun wrote
• Setting up a decent feedback loop from third parties (the board can help here, we're in contact with the advisory board on this issue)
• Co-ordinate participation in future OSDW sessions

Public administrations

• Spanish, French, German and Asian organisers needed
• Collect addresses of public officials inquiring about free software or planning migrations
• Contacting people responsible for announcements of free software adoption to offer help and get feedback
• Feedback loop - working with the development community to address concerns we hear about from administrations
• Focus on South America, India, China and Europe
• Set up reporting so that everyone knows who's talking to who (shared address book and contact management solution - Drupal?)

Hobbyists

• Early adopters - synthesising feedback and pushing it back into the system
• Hobbyists - working with computer magazines to get free software on the cover disks and get articles published (article writers needed here!)
• Trade shows
  • organising the event boxes, working on budget for stand rental/construction and getting volunteers for trade show stands
• Getting promotional material printed and delivered in a timely fashion
• Merchandising - let's leverage the passion!
• Working with people like Canonical to co-ordinate presence at trade shows
• University outreach - contacting local university user groups - see

Jono Bacon's UK tour, or the BadgerBadgerBadger tour as good examples of possibilities - encourage your local LUG to have open door sessions, and get a "big name" to come & present

• University outreach 2 - contact teaching heads of local colleges and push open formats and free software for college exercises and training
• Co-ordinate all these contacts and events - Drupal maybe?

This is a huge amount of work, but luckily, it's broken down into small chunks, which can have bite-sized micro-tasks - for instance one person can organise a GNOME presentation at the local university and get a GNOME developer to come & present. One person can contact the Sao Paolo government. One person can organise trade show presence.

If we do this stuff well, it will make a massive difference to our marketing. Even if we do one category really well, it will rock GNOME's world. Even if we do half of each category well, we change everything.

Let's get moving in the right direction. I will not be surprised when we change course during the voyage, but let's haul anchor, hoist the mainsail and drift off into the sunset.

Attendees

If you are interested in this session please write your name and any contact details that you feel are appropriate below. If you can attend, write in the "Physical" section. If you would like to attend but cannot, please write in the "Virtual" section. If enough people show an interest maybe we can convince the GUADEC organisers to stream (or at least record) the session.

I (John Williams) have taken the liberty of adding the names of two people that I happen to know will be there

Physical

• Dave Neary
• Federico Mena-Quintero

• Murray Cumming

Virtual

• John Williams (live.gnome.org/JohnWilliams). I would like to see a concrete plan of action for research into two areas. Firstly, getting a reasonable estimate of the number of GNOME and GNU/Linux users world-wide. Secondly, research into the factors that would promote switching to GNU/Linux in general and GNOME in particular. Any reasonable plan would have to include some committment of resources. Specifically either cash (to pay for focus groups, telephone interviews, mail-out questionnaires, content analysis etc.) or computing resources (hosting on-line survey and data-processing system, for example.)

  • John, we probably have no idea how that would look, how to get that done, or how much it would cost. I think we need you to help us with that. I guess that some cash is available for this, but I guess this usually cost millions. MurrayCumming.

    • Yes, I can help with that. As for cost, we are talking in the 10,000 USD range, not millions. The cost can be driven down by not using commercial market research firms, but instead using academic research resources. Then the labour cost goes toward zero, and all remaining costs are for postage and printing etc. If the data-gathering is on-line, the cost goes down even further.

References

Dave Neary's series of blog entries on marketing GNOME:

• Third party developers

• Certification

• Public institutions

• Hobbyists

John Williams' series of GNOMEJournal articles on marketing GNOME

• http://gnomejournal.org/article/26/marketing-gnome

• http://gnomejournal.org/article/39/marketing-gnome-part-two-segmentation-targeting-and-positioning

Various l.g.o pages:

• http://live.gnome.org/RealMarketing

• http://live.gnome.org/CountingUsers

• http://live.gnome.org/MarketingTeam/SurveyUsers

• CategoryMarketing