Hi,
On Sep 5, 2008, at 9:54 AM, Charles-H. Schulz wrote:
Benjamin Horst wrote:
One of the benefits of Launchpad is that it's a central place for
all projects to work together. Thus, installing a separate
Launchpad instance for certain projects could serve to fracture it
and make it less useful globally, right?
I don't think so, as Launchpad uses an OpenID system for
authentication.. and I'd hazard a guess that any Open Source system
that they pump out should be able to integrate with the mothership
- in that Launchpad.net OpenIDs could work (once registered) on the
OOo site, therefore making it a satellite, rather than a parallel
entity.
Excellent! I'm a fan of OpenID and distributed systems, so I'm glad to
hear they will implement it this way.
The part of this that I'm focusing my thoughts on is the marketing
and promotion side, since I think we are at the "chasm" where we
need to get the word about OOo out to non-technical, normal
computer users. Firefox crossed that chasm but many great foss
projects have not, so I have looked to methods they used, like
Spread Firefox, as an example for OOo. Just like politicians are
building for themselves, we want a set of online tools that people
in the real world use to coordinate actions and interpersonal
communication. Real-world, actual human contact and communication
is essential when crossing the chasm!
Yeah, the chasm is about getting to that critical tipping point.
Students go back to University in the UK over the next couple of
weeks. Pushing OOo as a valuable resource for them requires human
contact (at some level). Posters such as "Spent all your student
loan on booze during freshers week, and can't afford to buy your
Computer Software? Don't download illegally, download
OpenOffice.org for FREE!" could be quite catching.. however, the
scale on which they'd need to be produced in order to be succesful
is prohibitive (I'd suggest).
This is exactly what political campaigns and Spread Firefox are doing
to great effect. The scalable way to do something like this is to
create PDFs and have local representatives print and distribute them
in their dorms and around campus, and provide a local support contact
for their community.
Lightweight project management and discussion tools could be
sufficient, but social networking would add a new layer of
interest to casual users and promoters, and help them plug in more
quickly to the nerve center of the marketing and PR efforts.
Hence, Elgg or a Drupal site like Spread Firefox seem to be the
tools to consider from this side.
Are you suggesting that the social network site be a quasi-internal
method of communicating, or something you'd expect end-users to join?
I don't think that would be something to do right now, but at least
for certain portion of the web site it could be a great idea.
Some thought of secundary importance just crossed my mind: if we
implement this network right, using sets of tools such as DiSo
(mostly microformats et al) we could get some really good buzz about
OOo.
I'm not familiar with DiSo, but microformats seem to be the way to go
in general. To my understanding, Elgg works with them (as do other
FOSS social networking projects like NoseRub and others), so it's
likely to be future-proof in that regard. And, yes, implementing
something like this could bring extra attention to the OOo project,
which is part of the reason for doing it too!
Cheers,
Charles.
I'll check in with the Elgg developers to see whether this project
excites them. If they want a nice example of their site in action to
promote to others, we might be able to combine forces to build it.
Benjamin Horst
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