Marketing GNOME, part 3: Public administrations

June 21, 2006 11:35 am Dave Neary gnome, guadec, marketing

A fairly obvious principle when talking about target markets is to look at your existing user base, and try to categories and generalise from that. If 80% of your users are 18-25 year old college girls, then if you are targetting 50-65 year old businessmen, you’re probably on a loser.

In GNOME, we have a luxury – lots of people have already installed our software without us having to ask them to do so. So we have a decent sample of the kind of people who are interested by what GNOME has to offer. And a big identifiable group in the free desktop user base (and GNOME in particular) is public administrations – national or local governments (Largo, Birmingham libraries, the UK’s NHS, Itaipu in Brazil), school districts (Extremadura and Andalucia, Tyrol, Macedonia, China), city and state funded social projects (Sao Paolo, Bahia, Linz).

Many of these installations have happened with no help from us – either distributors who base their product on GNOME sold their product and we came along for the ride, or the local governments made their own decisions, usually without managing to contact the GNOME community at all.

Governments are clearly interested in free software, and we should make sure they know about GNOME, and have a place to go to ask questions. That place should be a personal email address, and not a mailing list, because governments can be quite edgy about going public with things like this. And also because, in the words of Tristan Nitot from Mozilla, “Guys are really shy – it’s the Munich Linux thing… They start talking about it and suddenly Ballmer comes in and twists your arm until you cry”.

To get the message out to governments, here’s what we need to do:

  • Get information from existing projects to find out why we were chosen, and model our message based on the feedback.
  • Follow the news. Whenever there is a project in the news about a pilot or a minister talking about a strategic decision to use open formats or free software, follow it up.
  • Co-ordinate. If the contact is in South America, a Spanish speaker should make the first contact (preferably a South American). If in France or North Africa, a French speaker. If in China, a Chinese speaker. When you mail a deployment, mail marketing-list automatically to let people know. This gets the email address and the contact into mail archives. We should probably move to a relationship management module in Drupal sooner rather than later.
  • Keep contact with your local politicians. Send an email to your mayor, or phone the local city’s IT department to invite them to your local user group conference. Send a letter to your minister for technology (or equivalent) proposing a phone call to explain the benefits of free software in government.
  • Keep Dr; Edgar Villanueva’s letter to Microsoft pinned to your wall!
  • Don’t forget the feedback loop! If you get information back from a local government (good or bad), send it back to the marketing mailing list so that we can react to it – either explaining why impressions are incorrect, or working to figure out how to address the shortcomings.

The GNOME Journal articles written by Murray Cumming and Arangel Angov are excellent examples of the kind of feedback which works well – human, and presented to a wider audience than the marketing team.

But we shouldn’t focus too much on creating the message – we have a decent idea already why governments are interested in free software, and if we find that other points are interesting, or points we thought interesting are not that relevant, we can modify our message from that.

The marketing theme can be nicely summarised by a tripleverb.

  • Inform: Make sure people likely to be interested in GNOME know about it
  • Listen: Get their reactions fed back into the system
  • React: Consider modifying our software (or our message) based on that feedback

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