There is a need for a sub-community for non-tech people in this community. As discussed at the Heidelberg meeting of .LRN in spring 2004, end users should be able to find answers on their questions and there should be non-tech volunteers to contribute to this non-tech community. Currently openacs.org forums are not very useful to find anwers on questions like “which layout of portlets on the page I should better use for my system?” or “How to ease navigation on the system for user?”. Having such forum would be by itself a marketing strategy.
Otherwise there is a need for budget. Development of marketing materials, promotional tag-lines, positioning gudelines etc. requires time.
This discussion should be also brought to higher level – what is the legal body that could apply for funding on behalf of the community? Or are there any mechanisms for people to know which community needs to include into their applications for funding? It is not strictly marketing but it is where marketing efforts bring you to – submitting an application / proposal.
To Stan – in my opinion many of the options for marketing efforts listed in the posting should be left to the competition between different companies and/or individual OACS specialists in this community. Market should be left to market. However, I liked the idea of Stan to promote community to the developers. But it is a separate discussion alltogether.
Some other suggested next steps:
- Identify people behind installations of OpenACS (do not look for successful ones, as there are none, the better platform – more requirements are users putting on it – code is not available that fast - owners are never happy as a result), approach them and invite to the sub-community.
- Consider possibility of sharing bug reports across different installations [to the point of getting priorities of users]. I believe it is more a technical problem than anything else.
- Create calendar and list of events where OACS should be / could be promoted, at least for reference.
Hope this contribution from non-technical person would be useful.
Wishes,
Volodja
