FYI: the LinkedIn group site is here:
http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=1233197
-David
On Nov 12, 2008, at 12:50 PM, David E Jones wrote:
One of the things discussed at the recent conference (OFBiz
Symposium @ ApacheCon US 2008) is to do more marketing of OFBiz. One
of the weaknesses of the community-driven software model is that
there is no central organization that consolidates profits from the
software and can use them to market the software. While there are
many advantages of community-driven software (and IMO that is why
OFBiz is some of the best ERP/etc software available), marketing
isn't one of them.
Or isn't it? One thing was discussed at the conference and that may
work well is some community driven marketing for the project. There
are 2 different forms of this discussed, and there could be many
others:
1. grassroots "viral" campaign: the tag line is "I am Open For
Business"
1.a. the first idea is to post this on social and business
networking sites (facebook, myspace, linkedin, etc, etc), and to get
others to do it as well, even if they aren't quite sure what it
means (because it kind of sounds funny); if people google "open for
business" ofbiz.apache.org is the first result; if people also link
to ofbiz.apache.org then we'll have an even stronger position on
google and other sites; I have already added this to my facebook
account (just "is Open For Business" in the "What are you doing
right now?" thingy, and on LinkedIn I'm not sure where is best,
perhaps as a current position as it's most visible, and I've added a
new group call "I am Open For Business" that everyone should join
1.b. to extend this the more gregarious among us should create funny
videos and upload them to YouTube and similar sites, and funny
pictures and upload them to Flickr and similar sites, and hopefully
others will see these and make their own and share them, again even
if they don't know what "OFBiz" even is; the videos or pictures
should have someone in the foreground saying or holding up a sign
that says "I am Open For Business", plus optionally something that
describes what they are doing/showing, and something in the
background that is related to a business they actually run (in front
of the business, by products made/sold, in a warehouse or call
center, etc), or to just a hobby or something they enjoy doing
(bungee jumping, working on a laptop at Starbucks, whatever); in a
way this is a variation on the "I am a PC" thingy, but actually this
idea pre-dates that ad campaign... still that campaign may make this
all the more interesting and successful
1.c. if you post things anywhere that represents a group, feel free
to use "We are Open For Business"
2. paid advertisements driven by any company that wants to get
involved; these can show collaboration and also further demonstrate
the community driven nature of the open source project, ie with the
open source project in the middle and not any company or what what;
the adds we have a big "We are Open For Business" and would have the
OFBiz logo in the middle (yes, we'd have to coordinate through the
ASF PRC), and logos of each company spread around the add, and even
logos of end-users who give us permission either connected directly
to OFBiz or connected to one or more of the service providers; these
ads would be paid for be the service providers; as part of this I
think we should also add consideration for service providers who
can't afford to sponsor it so that they can be included in the ads
The general idea is to emphasize the community-driven nature of the
project. There is no individual or organization that represents
OFBiz on its own, it is an open project driven by a number of
individuals and organizations, so it's correct to say "I am Open For
Business" and "We are Open For Business".
On a side note, I think both of these have been discussed before...
so the main point of this message is to take action, now. So, go to
your public profiles and add "I am Open For Business", and take a
funny (or interesting) picture or video and post it around.
-David
============================
Related Note: OFBiz Alliance
Related to #2 there was also some discussion of some sort of "OFBiz
Alliance" that would be an organization that owns a trademark, is
run by all members of it, and the main points would be to qualify
vendors (service providers mostly, perhaps product companies and end-
user organizations and such as well) and certify them. This isn't
really an activity that fits within what a non-profit open source
organization is all about, ie I don't think we want the OFBiz PMC in
the business of creating a stamp of approval for other
organizations, so this would be something separate.
The main idea is that organizations could use the trademarked logo
if approved by the members, and conditions for that approval would
be things like using OFBiz internally to manage your business (eat
your own dog food type of thing, ie for project/issue mgmt, sales
automation, billing/accounting, etc), and to have a certain number
of customization projects completed, with case studies for at least
1-2 and preferably for all projects where the client allows the case
study, and perhaps also to have a regular stream of contributions
going back to OFBiz (preferably with committers on staff, or at have
people contributing and moving toward becoming a committer because
again it wouldn't be good to have an OFBiz PMC decision to be part
of this. While those are the main criteria, there might be small
fees to register and help protect the trademark and to maintain a
web site that talks about what the alliance is all about, who are
members, etc.
One neat thing that could come of this is an opportunity to
collaborate in a more coordinated way on larger projects. If all
members of the alliance are using OFBiz for their project
management, and we added some "distributed delegation" features to
the software, then we could do some really nice things with projects
that are larger than any single service provider can handle, or
where the client demands multiple service providers and common
practices among them in order to mitigate risk.
So, in general the idea is to give organizations an incentive to do
certain things that are good for them and for the community, and to
encourage collaboration and such that make OFBiz what it is. In
return they have access to a stamp of approval that prospective
clients can look for to help in their decision making. There were a
few people at the conference who expressed interest in this, so
hopefully in the not too distant future more of this will materialize.
