Envagalism, or Spreading the Word.
Personally I'm not one to go round envagalising, its pretty against my nature, in a croweded room I won't stand out, I'll quietly and anonymously make my way to the bar and sit down with friends and chat about mountains, flying, family and computers over a beer. My guess this probably applies to most in this community, save for different hobbies and family ;-)
Envagalism also can take various forms, especially in these days of the internet. Spreading the word about the OpenSceneGraph project currently happens through news of new releases and events that pop up on various tech websites, and to this end I set up the SpreadingTheNews page on the wiki. For the last couple of releases it be me who's done the bulk of spreading the news, I was hoping that others would pitch in a bit more enthusatically, but I guess most of the community are too busy learning and coding, spare time is a very rarified commonity.
Search engines also bring new people to the project, as to permanent links to the openscenegraph.org website from other tech websites. The more of these links the higher the project bubbles the top in searches, and also general awareness of the OpenSceneGraph "brand". So users can help here, if they frequent certain places on the web that you think a mention of OSG should go then post it.
Then there are forums that are out there, gaming centric ones poliferate. I don't tend look at forums day to day, save for perhaps checking OpenGL.org forums a couple of times a week. Out of curiosity I have just done some searching on games websites. It looks like occassionaly you'll get topics that cover the OSG or other graphics toolkits. Sometime you'll see reasonable comment, but then you just as easily see ill informed commentary on the OSG, scene graphs, or OpenGL. All three are dear to me, so it would be good to see better industry/hobbiest awareness of the real value of what OSG, scene graphs and OpenGL deliver. I can't spend my life chasing fleeting forum discussions though, there be only one of me, so I'd encourage members of the community to chip in where you see calls for further information, or if there is a particular hot topic why not post a link to it on osg-users for others to comment on.
Then there is organising ourselves to actively promote the OSG, I'm not sure this is really required, but it looks like the Cmake team take envaglism serious enough to create a mailing list dedicated to it:
http://www.vtk.org/CMake/HTML/MailingLists.html
Also as mentioned previously by, articles in online tech websites or hard copy magazines, chapters is general books like the Gems series. Articles could be technically orientated, or perhaps interviews with developers and users of the OSG might something interest to tackle. Open source graphics in the space or aerospace industry might be fun one to do, since there a number of groups in this sector that are very much part of the OSG users base/community and space stuff always is fun to read ;-)
Another area is conferences - BOF style meetings, posters, papers and exhibition stands, perhaps we could make it easier to provide mention and further information about the project.
And following on from this is merchandising. Don's done a few small runs of OSG shirt's for events like BOF's and training. Thoughts on extending this?
Finally branding. Some people call the OpenSceneGraph project "Open Scene Graph", others OSG. Doing searching for the OSG on the web pulls up all three, but if someone is one the web searching for stuff about OpenSceneGraph then having to check all three makes this task more difficult. Sticking to OpenSceneGraph in online publications would streadily help consolodate this, and make it a little bit easier to track things.
Ok enough random thoughts. Again please come forward with your own thoughts.
Robert.
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