[IAEP] (engineering) capacity building

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 23:23, David Farning<dfarning at sugarlabs.org> wrote:
> 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?

Sorry, was asking Sean, though I will appreciate more direct opinions
on my two proposals.

> From my pov this just was to help shift the conversation towards
> thinking about the impact people have on Sugar Labs.
>
> My take is that more people are not interested in Sugar because it is
> not useful enough for them, yet.  Writing software is hard and it
> takes time.

As an aside, I don't believe too much in the "scratch your own itch"
explanation for free software volunteer coding. If you go for example
planet.gnome.org and skim through the posts there while asking to
yourself why these people take the time to write free software instead
of watching TV, I don't think you will find many cases of people who
are hacking on things because they themselves need that feature in
their app.

I think that the itches they are scratching are more likely the desire
to do something fun and interesting and to do something more
significant than earning money in a bank by managing code monkeys or
writing software that nobody they know will ever use.

That's why I think that we can tune our message much better in order
to reach those people, I don't see why the GNOME desktop would have
more appeal to hack on it than Sugar.

> Another release at our current development and growth rates and Sugar
> will be pretty deployable.  Another release after that an it will be
> pretty usable.
>
> As developers, the best way you can engage more developers is by
> making Sugar great.  The most effective way for open source projects
> to attract and retain contributors is to have a good base of code and
> a healthy community.

Yup, totally agreed.

Regards,

Tomeu

> david
>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Tomeu
>>
>>> Sean
>>>
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>
>
>
> --
> David Farning
> Sugar Labs
> www.sugarlabs.org
>