Safe as Milk

Marketing GNOME: third-party developers

June 14, 2006 2:02 pm Dave Neary gnome, guadec, marketing

Over the coming weeks in the run-up to GUADEC, I’ll be dumping my brains about some of the things I’d like to propose during the marketing BOF to develop the ideas I listed recently on marketing-list.

First up is third party developers (more colloquially, ISVs, but since most of our third-party developers don’t sell anything, that doesn’t seem appropriate).

Greg Kelleher from IBM told me that initiatives aimed at third party developers have three levels – high, medium and low touch.

1. High touch is when the person meets a developer or trainer in person – interractive training sessions and workshops, or conference presentations fit here. This kind of interraction is the most beneficial for the recipient, but is a one-to-few effort.
2. Medium touch is a rich, interractive experience without the human contact. Something like webcasts, conference videos and streaming, online seminars. These often provide the possibility for interraction, and allow a greater number of people to attend, with the loss of human contact.
3. Low touch is our website and printed supports. API and interfaces documentation, tutorials, books, training manuals, archives of previous high and medium touch materials. This is passive learning – the developer comes to us to look for what he needs, spends as much or as little time as he wants, and leaves with no human interraction whatsoever. KDE has started an interesting initiative in the area, aiming to produce high quality distance learning paterials for a full QT/KDE course.

So – how are we doing now? Not as brutally badly as you might think – our core APIs are pretty well documented (with some notable exceptions), we are building up some tutorials, GGAD is still a great reference book, although it could do with a freshening up (like many of the tutorials, unless things have changed since the last time I looked), we stream and archive GUADEC presentations.

But we are not doing any high touch training, we’re not organising any web seminars, we’re not yet doing anything similar to OSDW. Even though we have lots of documentation, developer.gnome.org is missing a bunch of stuff it really should have (how hard is it to add a Google search-bar to the site?). In spite of our rich bindings, it’s hard to figure out how the API docs map to each of the languages.

Beyond that, we don’t sell GNOME books or developer kits on the website, and we haven’t really tried organising our third party developers to get them talking to each other.

So that’ll do for training & information diffusion. I haven’t even touched on application certification, which is a huge opportunity for us, as well as being enormously useful to third party developers.