[Marketing] Status of the Marketing Committee

Jody Garnett jody.garnett at gmail.com
Sat Nov 12 07:59:46 EST 2011


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> Jody:
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> What do you think is the barrier to attracting/motivating people to this?
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There is a simple gap - neither committee wants it :-) So there is no place to volunteer... If we start talking *what* we want to communicate on welcome list I am sent to the marketing committee.  If we start talking about changing template we are sent to the webcom committee.

I would like to make it so marketting committee is deciding *what* needs to be communicated; and webcom decides *how*. Perhaps that has a better chance of success? Example: direction about the branding - we sorted our branding for conference presence (yay conference committee) and need to package that up for the web comm committee  (say use these visual elements - choice of technology does not matter just make or presence consistent)

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> To put it another way: do you think the volunteer people we need are out there and we’re just not reaching them somehow, or do you think this is not a task OSGeo-type folks are likely to volunteer for?
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The question is wrong; there needs to be something to volunteer for that is rewarding and has benefit. It is our job as the marketing committee to think about what is needed; and then sort out a good motivational tactic to reach that goal.

In short we are responsible for "likely".

To pick on myself for a moment compare the motivation differences between (http://www.osgeo.org/geotools) vs (http://live.osgeo.org/en/overview/geotools_overview.html).

I have lots of ideas on the motivation side of things; however each involves a compromise. I will choose just one example for now - we need to have some content in the form of white papers. Whenever I sit at the OSGeo booth it is one of the questions asked at the end of each conversation; basically do you have a bit of paper with a pretty diagram that I can take home to my boss.  

It is a fair request - and something the technology industry expects.

How could we motivate the provision of white papers? Well any case of motivation involves having something to trade. In the following examples we could trade exclusivity for content. It is way easier to ask for content for a prominent and promoted page; then it is to ask people to submit white papers to a wiki.

1) Collect a round of white papers from sponsors; maybe give each sponsor a page to talk about how much they love OSGeo (and list some of their white papers at the bottom of the page)
2) Let that sit for 6 months; let the complaints stack up as that is a good thing. Answer any question about participation with join the marketing committee  
3) Invite incubated projects to submit a couple white papers to their project page; ask the project officers to handle the communication on this one (but make sure they have support in rolling out the initial content)

Importantly we should try and collect the white papers for our website; this is not an excuse for sponsors or projects to link people away from OSGeo.

Thanks for the discussion :-)

Jody
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