[Marketing] just some thoughts

[Alex Mandel]

I don't see us explaining Open Source as our main purpose but something
we have to be prepared to talk about in the various venues we end up in.
Yes, some still don't know Open Source but more importantly many still
have an irrational fear of what they don't understand.

We're not making flyers about Open Source itself or going to events that
are completely unrelated to our user base, ie I'm not going to table at
my local farmer's market for OSGeo but I do for my local LUG all the
time. But I am going to an academic geography conference and showing
people that they can do their studies without an expensive black box and
that if they work with gov/non-profits its a good option to keep on the
table when starting projects.

The other thing to realize is that there are non-technical
decision/influencers who might get the basics but have to convince their
techie it's what they want. Kinda like you asking your doctor about a
drug you heard about that might work for your condition.

I think we're making progress identifying the targets of our PR but it's
a little more varied than any of us individually thought and at some
point we will need a way to quantify returns on our outreach.

Alex

Michael P. Gerlek wrote:
> Okay, so I'm likely talking to the wrong people out there :-(
> 
> I just hate to see us have to spend time/money selling the general open source idea, when there are other groups out there are already doing that (and likely way better than we could).
> 
> -mpg
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Miguel Montesinos [mailto:mmontesinos at prodevelop.es] 
> Sent: Thursday, December 11, 2008 10:14 AM
> To: Michael P. Gerlek; OSGeo Marketing
> Subject: RE: [Marketing] just some thoughts
> 
>> This surprises/disappoints me.  Amongst the developer or technical decision
>> maker crowd, are there really still people who in don't grok at least the
>> overarching idea of open source?
> 
> Lots of them! Otherwise everybody would have massively come out from the dark-side and joined the open-source ;-)
> 
> Of course anybody knows about open source, but a strategic decission towards it is another question. And for these kind of decissions, I usually need to convince customers about the stability, quality, sustainability and many others -ity, regarding general open source and specific OSGeo projects.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Miguel
> 
> 
>> -----Mensaje original-----
>> De: Michael P. Gerlek [mailto:mpg at lizardtech.com]
>> Enviado el: jueves, 11 de diciembre de 2008 18:23
>> Para: Miguel Montesinos; OSGeo Marketing
>> Asunto: RE: [Marketing] just some thoughts
>>
>> Miguel escribió:
>>
>>> I usually come up against explaining both Open Source and FOSS4G. If we
>>> don't give some guidelines about open source, it may stop some CTOs from
>>> going to open source, and it makes impossible therefore to adopt FOSS4G
>>> projects.
>> This surprises/disappoints me.  Amongst the developer or technical decision
>> maker crowd, are there really still people who in don't grok at least the
>> overarching idea of open source?
>>
>> The people I meet may not know the geo world has such strong FOSS
>> offerings, and they may not be able to articulate the differences between
>> GPL and BSD licenses, but they definitely understand the general idea.
>>
>> -mpg
> 
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