Forum OpenACS Q&A: Response to How long can the OpenACS community get away with being an island?

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7: Response to How long can the OpenACS community get away with being an island? (response to 1)
Posted by Malte Sussdorff on 07/17/02 11:17 AM
Thanks Peter for bringing this up. Now I think I get the context of the chat I stumbled apon last night 😊.

Do we need marketing for the Product OpenACS: YES, but why ?

  • We need to raise the awareness for OpenACS. If people talk about Groupware, Knowledge Management, Collaboration or E-Commerce they should talk about OpenACS (at least in the OpenSource realm).
  • If more people are aware of OpenACS they will come to the site to check it out, searching for:
    • What is OpenACS
    • Where can I get it (Am I the only one thinking about putting RPMs up for RedHat and SuSE to include in their distributions ?).
    • What do I need to do to install it (already there, though it is still to time consuming)
    • How can I put it into use (Use cases, might be fictious, might be case studies)
    • Who is using it (case studies)
    • If I use it, will I be left (numbers of companies, downloads, installations, see seperate thread) dead in the water soon.
  • Awareness raises the number of installations. Together with good training material it will raise the number of developers, which in turn will raise the number of available developers for the companies, which allows them to take on new clients.
  • Giving speeches at conferences, publishing articles in magazines, getting the OpenACS book out will raise awareness also in decision making IT folks. And it is easier to sell, if your potential client already has heard of OpenACS
  • Teaching material would make it also easier to adopt a curriculum for OpenACS in universities. After all that still is the cheapest way to get trained new developers.
Some steps I suggest:
  • If having marketing material and case studies at openacs.org prooves to be too much of a headache for the community, use openacs.com for this (if Ben is willing to provide the domain for that use to other companies as well)
  • Write up case studies with your clients. It is the best marketing you can hope for.
  • Write use cases for the toolkit (we are on it)
  • Get the new openacs site up and running. If the community (museatech in particular, thanks a lot for working on the new site) lacks graphic design ressources, I can ask our designer to come up with some ideas. But we should first agree on a structure for the site.
  • Think about fairs where it would be useful to have an OpenACS booth. Let companies interested jointly use that booth. (I propose Leantec 2003 as one option)
  • Go to your local university and ask them to teach a course about OpenACS for free (and / or sell a dotLRN installation to them 😊).
  • Write up at least one article each how to use OpenACS for the hot topics out there in the market (for KM I have one version which needs to be revamped to focus more on OACS at http://www.sussdorff-roy.com/resources/km-article. Furthermore I have a german version for groupware (published in a Linux magazine))
  • Issue press releases about great news (e.g. the release of dotLRN).
Now, who is going to do it? Well, obviously myself as well as Venkatesh are working on a bunch of marketing stuff at the moment for S&R {which, at the moment, means nothing else but marketing for OpenACS}. But if the community wants to drive a joined effort we are more than willing to participate and even coordinate. And I think coordination is crucial at the current (non existing) state of marketing so we don't do double work.