Hello everyone,
This might be a long thread and I wish we will all stay on topic, as it
is an important subject.
The Document Foundation and the LibreOffice project will soon be two
years old. Well, not TDF the entity of course, but the LibreOffice
project. Needless to say, from my perspective at least, it's been two
years that have changed me, taught me a lot and brought a lot of
happiness and good moment. We have arrived in many ways at the end of a
chapter of our story, and by that I don't mean that it's time to go to
bed and sleep :-).
The Foundation, as an entity, is properly established, although certain
processes have yet to be fully set. Some pieces are somewhat lacking,
but otherwise it's running well. The project is doing well, we have an
ever increasing flow of volunteers and developers.
What is missing, at this stage, is some blocks that are needed to take
the project to the next step. We have achieved an important thing in
less than two years: we have proved that a community-led project can be
strong, sustainable, and is able to turn around situations that were
previously deemed to difficult to change. We have stopped being seen as
the young and foolish dreamers that refuse the reality. We are now seen
as mature, and we have given the world the best free and open source
software office suite. We can be proud of that. But it's time to move on
to something bigger.
We have seen that the transition from OpenOffice.org to LibreOffice has
generated quite a lot of "creative destruction". We kept much content
from the former Openoffice.org infrastructure, and most of the community
moved happily to LibreOffice. But in several places, processes that got
disrupted never quite came back to what they were. And in others, broken
things or unreached goals have not been reached (yet). Today, on this
list, I would like to focus on something that took a long time to
achieve in OpenOffice.org, if it ever was achieved. I'm talking about
the need to define a marketing strategy. Mind you, we have marketing
material on the wiki. We have presentation slides, we have visual and
graphical elements, we have the calendar (thanks Marc!) , the web
clippings, etc. But that does not make a marketing strategy. What we
need is higher level goals most of us agree with, and we need a way to
structure the marketing team, who should not just be marketing contacts
for this or that region/country, but actual volunteers actively working
on marketing. Also, we need a way to ackowledge their contribution, or
rather we need to make their contribution rewarding and pleasant. But
that's another part of the discussion.
As I said, we need a marketing strategy. Right now everytime LibreOffice
gets released we have release notes. These notes are interesting pages
to be sure, but we need to think and decide how we position ourselves;
how we communicate our brand in order to raise its awareness, whether we
push forward a product or a community (or both). We need some higher
level churn up.
As for myself -but that's me- I am very interested in how we position
the brand positioning. I'm not so interested -marketing wise- in product
strategy, first of all because such a thing does not work in an open
source project (since you can't really tell a volunteer what to do
unless you find one that will work things out with you) and second
because LibreOffice is a complete and full featured office suite
catering to pretty much any existing and potential market out there. But
again, it's time to define this strategy and help grow the adoption of
LibreOffice.
Apologies for the long message,
--
Charles-H. Schulz
Co-Founder & Director, The Document Foundation,
Zimmerstr. 69, 10117 Berlin, Germany
Rechtsfähige Stiftung des bürgerlichen Rechts
Legal details: http://www.documentfoundation.org/imprint
--
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