Forum OpenACS Q&A: Copenhagen - Marketing OpenACS

The OpenACS community is a thriving, vibrant development environment. However, there does seem to be a disconnect between people who use OpenACS everyday, and the people kind of people who could fund them to do exciting projects. To be sure, there are individuals who are extremely clever at aligning the requirements of an organization with the capabilities of OpenACS, and good luck to them. But good solid financial inflow to the community, spread amongst many developers would strengthen everyone involved, and make OpenACS a really incredible system. Everyone would win if more people paid for more projects. So the question is: how do we connect developers to people who make decisions about commissioning new work? How do we connect the potential of OpenACS to real requirements held by real people?

These are the audiences that we might want to talk to:
They could actually be a range of people. Within an organization, they are middle managers, who need web applications to achieve particular goals. They know their own needs backwards, but may need some guidance in translating that into a technical brief. The audience may also be people who are semi-technical. Whatever happens they will have to sit down and justify the reasons to go with OpenACS to people who do not understand why having an ‘ad_form’ feature is so good. Another slice of the audience may be the VERY techie people, who know and like the framework of OpenACS, who need to know the language and the justifications to convince their own people internally.

One interesting reflection from Al Essa was that a middle manager may not be the person that finally makes the decision to go with OpenACS and the language we need to speak to each person may need to be very different. For example a decision maker would typically be a CIO, or Executive Director. They would be looking for case studies, return on investment, and examples of other big organizations using OpenAcs.  A middle manager might be trying to research if OpenACS (or .LRN) can provide solutions – they might be looking into specific packages in detail.

Outside of organizations the audience we need to speak to more is the open source movement itself.

Currently, if you look at the web page of OpenAcs it is heavily pitched to hard core developers. Don suggested that as an example we look at the MySQL site vs the Postgres site. While it is true that whereas one site is the product of a community (and maybe more anarchic as a result), and the other is a product of a tightly branded and controlled company, what is apparent is that one site is instantly more accessible for both the highly involved development community and people just coming fresh to the site to check it out. It does both well. What we really need to achieve on the front page of OpenACS.org is to communicate that how OpenACS can solve your business requirements.

Rightly, a question was posed by Malte; should we try and market OpenAcs or should we really be trying to market different vendors? It’s a good question considering that OpenACS can be hard to sell – products built on top of OpenACS are much easier to represent. Al’s answer was revealing; as a marketing strategy it would be better to leverage the robust community as a whole, rather than concentrate on atomic units within it. Reason? Most clients would feel more confident in trusting a larger stronger entity – small development firms come and go, and that’s a risk most firms don’t want to take.

With the launch of .LRN hours away, it’s a good time to reflect that up till now we’ve been trying to justify why investment in the OpenACS architecture is a good idea. We will probably see in the future more and more emphasis going towards platforms built on top of OpenACS, like .LRN, .WRK and possibly even .NGO. This will effect how we communicate to potential investors and all members of the community. It was suggested that to an Open Source audience, we could talk happily about core OpenACS development, whereas to organizations and businesses we should talk about the business requirements that are met through using products like .LRN. What did become clear was that inspiring a sense of trust is critical and that by openly promoting the universities, organizations, non profits and businesses that do already trust the OpenACS path we will strengthen where we are currently.

But for now, attention was turned to the practicalities.  It was tremendous to see the brainstorm response of a few of us sitting around a pokey couch to try and come up with a few ideas on how to do that. To better communicate the potentials of OpenACS, someone mentioned that what decision makers might really want is a place to play with .LRN, for example. We hit upon the idea of a test server. Don mentioned that we’d win quite a strategic gain if we could convince the AOLserver community to campaign to be included on the Linux distribution networks.

Tapping sources of knowledge in the community was enthusiastically received, with mentions of asking Reuven Lerner if he can make available some of the stuff he has already written, but to rewrite it for a less technical audience. As a follow on, perhaps because Reuven’s articles are very good and very detailed (aka long) someone said that downloadable summaries of all documents should be available, (because in many cases decision makers will probably be handed materials collected by their personal secretary.)
Jeff mentioned that screenshots were always appreciated by people looking to get a feel for a product. All materials do need to be held in a central place.

Some of the commitments that we can expect to see over the next few months towards a collective creation of items designed to ‘open up’ OpenACS will be:

An FAQ page from Malte, answering succinctly some very basic questions. Malte will also finish a knowledge management document he has started.
The creation of a central space to house all the stuff we do should be done by Mohan and Jeff Davis
Al Essa said he would write a business case for going with an open source solution
Carl Blesius said he would look into trying to set up a clone site of an existing site full of content to use as a test example. This would involve asking permission from an existing university. Carl also said he’d create some templates to use for case studies, and forward these to certain people.
These institutions have committed to writing case studies (using Carl’s templates):
MIT Sloan, Greenpeace, Heidelberg, a non profit known by Talli, Sussdorf and Roy and Collaboraid.
Peter from Collaboraid said he would make public all the marketing brochures for .LRN available so we could all use it when communicating to clients.

I hope you all had a really good time in Copenhagen 😊

We are really pleased to hear that a discussion about how to market OpenACS/dotLRN has began at the meeting in there. With Rafael, about some months back we started collecting case studies from higher education institutions currently using ACS/ACES and dotLRN.On our first attempt we contacted Al (MIT), Caroline (MIT), Carl (Heidelberg), John (Cambridge) and Emmanualle (UNED, Spain) to start putting together some case studies. It took some time, but Carl helped us a lot to get the ball rolling. In addition, we added a conceptual analysis of the dotLRN and its design. And here is the final paper, and with the permission of the collaborators, we submitted for AUSWEB, a major e-learning conference here in Australia to contribute to the evangelization of dotLRN. Note: copies were also sent to all the collaborators, and Al insisted that the case studies would go to the dotLRN site soon.

In addition, we just finished another case study with Gustaf Neumann and Peter Alberer from Vienna University. They have put together a class A OpenACS system that suits their need just perfectly, an gives a great boost to the open source (white box) initiative. Moreover, we are currently working on two others: Galileo University -Guatemala- with Oscar Bonilla (thanks to Rocael), and Birzeit University -the first university in Palestine- with Marwan Tarazi.

We wanted the case studies to be written with the or senior management perspective, so all of the people we have written these case studies with are IT unit directors or senior project managers responsible for the implementation.

In the next few weeks, I hope we can finish another paper we have in the pipeline that summarizes the benefits of all these case studies and presents each of the, hopefully by then, eight cases in particular.

Rafa also has written a good number of papers for OpenACS (technical and also business oriented) that have been published in education and tech magazine worldwide. Here are two that I know of:

The OACS application framework. AusWEB 2002
R. A. Calvo and D. Peterson
The OpenACS e-commerce solution. System Administration Magazine. February 2003
R.A. Calvo and M. Aufflick.

As soon as we manage to finish the once we are currently working on, we will submitted to the community as well.

Thank you,

Ernie