Safe as Milk

Marketing GNOME, Part 4: Hobbyists

June 22, 2006 10:45 pm Dave Neary gnome, guadec, marketing

Unfortunately, I won’t be doing the subject justice – by rights, this deserves two or three entries of its own – but I’d like to give an overview of things we can do easily to better market GNOME to hobbyists.

Remember, inform, listen, react is the order of the day.

When I’m talking about hobbyists, what I’m talking about are people just off GNOME’s radar.

• People who regularly buy computer magazines, and are interested in technology, but who have perhaps never tried free software
• Students, particularly in science and computing courses
• Momentum users – the type of person who has been using free software for donkey’s years, and who has perhaps not appreciated some of the recent noises coming out of the GNOME project
• Developers looking for a project to sink their teeth into
• Existing GNOME users looking for a way to help out

There are a massive amount of easy targets here, and typically what we’re missing is people to take care of them. What we need to do is start organising, both top-down and bottom-up, to improve our presence on the ground. What we need is information centralisation and organisational decentralisation – you are responsible for what you do in your area, but when you do stuff, you should make sure that everyone knows what you do, and how it works out. Here are just a few things we could be doing:

1. Contacting journalists in magazines to introduce yourself as a GNOME contact, and perhaps suggest including a LiveCD, or a copy of WinLibre or the OpenCD on the cover – we must centralise journalist contacts
2. Contact the local university computer club or LUG, and help organise some free software presentations. Invite a well known GNOME developer from the region to come and do a presentation
3. Use the database of presentation material that we have built up, and give some presentations yourself
4. Help improve the database of presentation materials that we have 😉
5. Write articles for the GNOME Journal, or a monthly GNOME corner column for local language magazines
6. Contact your local magazines offering to translate existing GNOME Journal articles
7. Start a Spread GNOME effort
8. Summarise negative and positive reviews of GNOME, and push your conclusions with the relevant developers
9. Work the forums! Get feedback from our existing users, and make sure that they’re heard
10. Offer to organise Friends of GNOME not just as a financial ressource, but also as a source of advocates for GNOME

So you live in the middle of nowhere, and you don’t know how to help. Contact your local LUG, contact the local university computer club, propose your services as a member of the GNOME community. Contact the marketing list, contact me, blog about your region, the LUG, the events you’re helping organise. Try to get a small microcosm of GNOME advocacy around your area. If you succeed, and we get lots of those microcosms, all of a sudden they start interconnecting. If there’s a GNOME user group in your region or country, sign up, join in. If there isn’t consider starting one. If you want a well known speaker for a presentation, contact the marketing list, or contact the board.

Everyone add yourselves to the GNOME map! This is our best view of the distribution of GNOME advocates, developers and users worldwide. I recently used the map to find someone in San Diego to man a stand. He couldn’t do it, but the map made asking him possible. I don’t see anyone on the map in Bhutan! Or Mongolia for that matter, Sukhbaatar.

As a summary for this series, the main points to take away are:

• Most people we deal with prefer a human and personal touch to a mailing list
• There are lots of things to do – far too many for one person, or even a small group of people. We need to build up a distributed marketing structure
• Luckily, 95% of what there is to do is easy stuff. One motivated person can change the image of GNOME in their area by getting to know their local press, geeks and politicians
• Marketing GNOME is about informing people who should know that GNOME exists, listening to the feedback of people using GNOME, and reacting to that feedback in a positive way

Looking forward to seeing you all at GUADEC for the marketing BOF. We’ll be holding it from 10 to 12 on Wednesday morning (although it might be Tuesday) – I’ll be posting the time & place on the wiki.