On Thu, 2005-12-15 at 19:35 +0000, Mark Harrison (Groups) wrote: > I market OOo here in the UK. I'm not particularly high profile (I work > in a particular vertical market, and have clients who don't particularly > court publicity about their office systems). I don't claim to > "represent" OOo in any way - I just market it as a product that I > believe will be of significant benefit to my clients.
Excellent - I don't think anyone on this list will criticise you for doing that (but it is an open-source community, and as such, always full of surprises :-) > I had hoped that a "marketing list" would help me to work out how to > improve my effectiveness, better articulate the benefits to specific > markets, and generally have an area where I could bounce questions / > ideas off other people who also "marketed OOo". You're on the right list. From your contributions I suspect you're in a specialist market, and not one of OO's target markets - but we still value your experience on this list. There's also a 'bizdev' project for people developing business propositions around OOo, but last time I looked it didn't seem very active. > As a marketeer by training and profession, I've tried to get involved in > a couple of discussions on this forum, but I've generally got the > impression that my viewpoint wasn't particularly wanted. In fact, I'd go > further - I got the impression that DISCUSSION wasn't particularly > wanted, and the purpose of this forum was more to communicate to us what > the "central team" (which seems to be some mix of Sun marketing staff > and the community council) are doing, and something between advice and > instruction on what we should be doing. This list has a reputation for being very 'noisy' at times. On-topic discussion should always be welcomed. There is no central team, no Sun marketing people paid to be here (you may find some hanging out in their own time, but that's ok - having your mortgage paid by Sun doesn't automatically disqualify you from being an OOo volunteer :-), and I think the Community Council are more than happy to let the Marketing Project get on with the business of marketing... [snip] > Do I have the time or ability to add to the work that the "central team" > are doing - definitely not to the first, and probably not to the > second :-) However, I am after a resource that helps me market solutions > based around OOo to my clients. The most effective open-source projects give most weight to those who (as you put it) do "add to the work". As the Apache Foundation says: "Projects are normally auto governing and driven by the people who volunteer for the job. This is sometimes referred to as "do-ocracy" -- power of those who do. This functions well for most cases." We aren't anywhere near as good as we should be at harnessing the power of all the people who have the time and ability to "add to the work". It's only too easy to lose sight of them among all those who only add to the noise. John --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
