Heya marketeers,

Quickly as I'm new here: I'm Jos Poortvliet, openSUSE Community manager and 
I've been involved in KDE marketing for 10+ years. I participated in a 
discussion today at the qtdevdays about marketing the Qt project and I made 
some promises including sending the notes. I did write this out a bit to make 
it easier to follow - no bullets for now. Hope it all makes sense.

I was not there the whole meeting and I didn't take notes the whole time - so 
this is incomplete. But it's something which, as they say, is better than 
nothing :D

=============
We need to do more to promote Qt Project. With Nokia gone, dedicated 'just 
promoting Qt' resources are much more limited. For one thing, we need to build 
up a program of going to events and promoting Qt.

The companies and communities around Qt, like Digia, KDAB, RIM, KDE and 
others, can and should help with this. It is in their best interest. Right 
now, if we go to conferences, 80% of the message is Qt for each of us... We're 
at a conference 3-4 times, confusing the heck out of customers. If we would 
pool our resources, we'd be there 5 times as big and we'd all profit from it. 
But that is not an easy thing, some rules are needed.

There are two ways of doing events: bottom-up and top-down. As companies, 
there is a number of events we need to be at, to talk to (potential) 
customers. But there are also many events Qt needs to be at, more community-
focused events. And there is overlap between these two.

We need to think about scenario's on how to deal with these. At least, we have 
to create a Qt materials box and other online materials. That means Qt can be 
presented more easily at events only visited by the community.

But more commercial events where we have companies involved, how do we 
represent Qt there? If only one company is there, there is no way to guarantee 
they represent Qt and thus they should not be there as the official Qt 
project. But at many events, we can do a shared presence. Then, two or more 
companies, with or without community volunteers, CAN represent Qt. We need to 
lay down some ground rules for that and have materials etcetera.

Creating that in advance is hard. We should just 'start'! Organize a 'simple' 
community event like FOSDEM and a basic commercial event. With the first, we 
can see how we can collaborate with community, with the second we can have 
companies work together. The rules can be made up while we go and we can 
document it then for the future.

But it needs steering, who's gonna control this? There will be money involved: 
we have to buy and distribute materials, for example. And later, have a travel 
committee and things like that. Can the Qt Hosting foundation do this? Lars 
will look into that.

What is the Qt project in this, is it a meritocracy? Lars officially can step 
in but he wants to not interfere. We need marketing maintainers... The 
marketing team has a task here: become a moderator, planner, etcetera. We need 
to get a list of events our partners (commercial and community) want to go to, 
a reporting infrastructure, a way to disseminate money, things like that.

I (jos) offered some help as I've set up a lot of these things in openSUSE, 
building the ambassador program. We've got a travel committee, a way of 
sending materials, planning and reporting, etcetera.


Social media discussion:
Several people now update our official social media channels. But there are 
just a few people and we can do better. Growth has a downside: things can go 
wrong and we should have a kind of policy for them.
Kalle will write a proposal of a Social Media account policy:
* for our official project accounts:
** What is proper and what is not (Content has to be about Qt; no company-
specific promo; no more than 1 message/hour; etc)
* for the planet: what goes, what doesn't.


Have a lot of fun,
Jos

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