Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: Marketing and Advocacy

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Posted by Walter McGinnis on
Looks like Malte beat me to the punch. I was going to recommend quarterly bootcamps that are free or extremely reasonably priced with quality supporting materials that are easily found.

Bootcamps and Philip's talks were the best marketing tools that aD had. Interestingly they were under the banner of education. Oh yeah, the book makes that a marketing triad. All of the above generated press. The free aspect being one of the keys to gaining outside interest.

I must admit that my reaction to the periodic "we need marketing" discussions is a kind of nausea. OpenACS is simply a tool. When it stops being an effective solution for solving web based problems for me, I'll stop using it. It seems to me that the best "marketing" we can have is a community that is focused on improving the toolkit. A big part of that is reaching consensus on what problems we are trying to solve and what problems we have already solved well. Maybe an inventory of what we have is in order. This would be a nice complement to a roadmap.

Semi-related random thoughts:

I have a lot of respect for projects like Postgresql and AOLserver because they never forced themselves on me. They continued to stay focused on solving the problems at hand and thus continued to stay relevent, trusting developers that they were smart enough to choose the right tool for the job. A large community does not necessarily equal a better community. Here's an old chestnut, "small is beatiful".