[IAEP] (engineering) capacity building

[Sean DALY]

> I wasn't thinking either of posting articles about recruitment on
> those places, rather to get our organization known. Most of the people
> that know that Sugar exists think we are part of OLPC, or that we have
> funding and a paid development team or that we have abandoned the OLPC
> cause and are focusing on the "rich kids".
>
> Once FLOSS people know that we are a global grassroots organization
> working on an exciting technology that can have a bigger impact that
> any consumer product, we'll be in a much better position for asking
> for help.
>

Well, there's no difference between getting Sugar Labs known and
getting Sugar Labs known; there's just the question of targeting and
how we go about it. The hard part of marketing is keeping the message
clear, consistent, understandable, and attractive, then repeating it a
zillion times in a million ways until it sinks in. In our launches we
have been targeting tech and education journalists/bloggers and
education departments/ministries; for now, with few exceptions only
tech writers have written articles. However, at this point we are
extremely well referenced in search engines and that's not likely to
change - we are very easy to find for people who hear about us.

There's no question Sugar has suffered from OLPC's image difficulties,
but I firmly believe Sugar's success is good for OLPC and vice versa.

Visuals and logos are key to raising unaided awareness. What most
people remember about OLPC is: small $100 laptop with a crank. Many
journalists and bloggers are unaware how big the installed base is,
and what countries have massive deployments, and that Windows has not
gone beyond pilots at this time; most know that the XO runs "Linux",
without further information (you have to see and touch Sugar to
understand it). There are several reasons for this, but one is the
scarcity of XOs outside deployments. Even single loaner machines are
not as effective as they could be, because it's the networking and
collaboration that demonstrates Sugar's effectiveness.

The press and blogs are a very efficient way of becoming known since
they are indexed and findable. We have had excellent coverage in the
specialized tech press, some excellent coverage in the mainstream tech
press, a small bit of coverage in the mainstream press, and no
coverage in the education press that I know of. In the press releases
(which are often digested verbatim in the press) we always say we are
a nonprofit and the About section tells the story (we added Local Labs
in the last PR footer), but even with that, many journalists in a
hurry call us a company.

Our website is an organic hodgepodge people get lost in and although
we are nearly ready to mitigate the most serious navigation problems
with the sitewide navbar, beyond that (and optimizing certain key
pages) I don't advocate investing energy redoing our site at this
time. With one exception: I support the suggestion of letting people
"try" Sugar online. This could have major impact in allowing people to
see and "touch" Sugar and, closely associated with the Sugar on a
Stick download and install, and documentation including curricula
support, could multiply our reach by exciting curiosity. Perhaps a
design project for the SoaS v2 release?

I don't think anyone who attended LinuxTag missed the Sugar Labs
booth; it was an efficient way for many developers to see and touch
Sugar. I had a table full of both XOs and netbooks (
http://www.flickr.com/photos/39656470@N02/3666862229/ ), everyone was
curious about the XO. Since March we've had three articles in Ars
Technica, two in LWN, Slashdot, etc.; there are a great many FOSS
projects who have more users but less exposure. There's always a way
to do better, but I'm not sure what we can do beyond what's already
being done plus placing blog posts/IRC into the mix?

Sean