[IAEP] (engineering) capacity building

[David Farning]

On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 4:22 AM, Tomeu Vizoso<tomeu at sugarlabs.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 12:57, Sean DALY<sdaly.be at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 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?
>
> I'm not totally convinced about IRC, but if you go to planet.gnome.org
> you can find several posts every week about Moblin, Mono, Maemo, etc.
> I think that planets is perhaps the best channel to address people
> that can start today being productive and, more importantly, already
> know the FLOSS way of working together. I personally don't follow LWN
> nor Ars Technica and will only read an article there if someone refers
> to it from a planet or a mailing list.
>
> We already have contributors that are part of the GNOME, Ubuntu,
> OpenSUSE, Fedora, Debian, etc. projects and could work into extending
> the knowledge about Sugar in each of those sister projects of ours.
> What I'm asking is for someone to take the task of coordinate this
> effort.
>
> I'm a bit confused about which conclusions to take from your replies.
> Do you think the actions I recommended in my first email are worth it
> or not? Also, do you think the FLOSS community side of things falls
> into the marketing team's responsibilities?

Are you asking me or Sean?