[nl-discuss] Fwd: [libreoffice-marketing] Building a network of marketeers

Beste mensen,

Onderstaand een lang verjaal van Florian. Maar ik kanhet kort samenvatten:
Wat vinden wij er van als er een internationaal netwerk is van mensen 
die actief zijn. Het liefst twee of drie per land. Als primair contact 
voor  in allerlei marketingzaken. In ieder geval het verspreiden van 
aankondigingen en dergelijke.
Lijkt een beetje op wat we al doen ..

Zijn er mensen die wat willen meegeven voor een reactie aan Florian?

Dank,
Cor



-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [libreoffice-marketing] Building a network of marketeers
Date: Sun, 07 Aug 2011 20:33:29 +0200
From: Florian Effenberger <floeff@documentfoundation.org>
Reply-To: marketing@global.libreoffice.org
Organization: The Document Foundation
To: marketing@global.libreoffice.org

Hello,

since September 28th, 2010, everyone of you has done a fantastic job,
invested a tremendous amount of work, and has been contributing a lot to
make LibreOffice what it is today -- a software used worldwide, a
well-recognized brand, and a name people trust in, something that stands
for free software, open standards and a major productivity suite.

Many of you have recognized that we have not yet set-up fixed community
roles, official titles or named team leads. This has been on purpose, to
not create fixed structures from the beginning, and I have a feeling we
are performing very well with this approach. In the next months, I am
sure that we will see some more structure growing, but I hope it will
not be as diverse and large as we had it with OpenOffice.org -- to me,
the "flat" approach we are following at LibreOffice works very well and
keeps lowering barriers for people joining the community. When many
people contribute their amazing talent, creativity and a lot of time, it
is not necessary to have too many different "hierarchies" in the project.

However, there is one area where we should move forward and work for
more structures, and that is marketing.

Those who have been involved with OpenOffice.org remember our so-called
"MarCons", the marketing contacts, and I would like to start building
something similar in the LibreOffice community. We had various
discussions on the marketing mailing list on this topic, and there is a
common agreement that this approach is worth a try. For those who don't
remember, have a look at this page:
http://marketing.openoffice.org/contacts.html Don't be irritated by the
fact that some well-known LibreOffice people are still listed, it seems
that nobody updated the page since September...

So, in the following paragraphs, let me elaborate a bit on how things
work today, and what I would like to achieve for the future.

At the moment, there are four official press and media contacts for The
Document Foundation named at http://www.documentfoundation.org/contact/.
Although these contacts have not been officially voted on, but rather
had to be set in-place before the day of our launch, I would like to
keep them in charge for the moment. I neither do want to add many more
people to this list of TDF spokespeople, as these should speak
officially on behalf of the future *Foundation*, and by that also
representing the *legal* *entity*, which is a wide field that might
right out the project and the community. The final compilation of
official spokespeople, as outlined in our Bylaws in the officers
section, will be the decision of the future Board of Directors, so the
above thoughts are, of course, only a recommendation from my side to the
future BoD keep that list of names rather small.

What I want to do is to have a strong and solid network of marketeers
for the *LibreOffice* project. They do not represent the Foundation as
legal entity, but even more do represent the Community, the project and
the product.

So, in a nutshell, I am aiming for a distinction between the
Foundation's official spokespeople, and the LibreOffice project's
spokespeople. The rationale behind this is that in the future, the
Foundation might have several projects, each with their own contacts.

Ideally, for every international projects that we currently have -
http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Local_Mailing_Lists - we should find
at least two community representatives, ideally even three. They will be
listed on an official website, should get some official title that we
still can decide on ("Marketing Contact" might be a good choice, but I'm
open to other solutions), be elegible to use LibreOffice business cards,
and will be the first point of contact for any marketing, PR or
journalist-related inquiries in their area. So, while not legally
representing the Foundation, those contacts should be recognized as
officially spokespeople for the project and the community.

Their list of tasks is wide and interesting, like organization of trade
shows, translating press releases, giving interviews and answering
journalist questions. They will also have many important duties inside
the project, the most important one being a "gateway" between the
international marketing of LibreOffice and the local marketing,
communicating ideas in both directions and giving feedback. Marketing
heavily depends on the market and the area, and the better everyone
understands the situation of different areas, the more we can improve
our global marketing efforts.

Of course, and especially since this is a volunteer job, nobody has to
do the job alone. ;-) The most important is that there are trusted
contacts in each region who have an overview what is going on, who are
willing to coordinate things, and who can also cry for help in case
things do not work out the way they plan. Challenges and tasks will
heavily differ between various regions, but the core set of todos will
be rather similar.

In order to make that magic happen, I also aim for improving the
communication between the various international groups. One proposal
that we currently investigate is to transform the marketing conference
calls into some sort of monthly updates on what is going on in the
community. We will also ensure that all marketing contacts will receive
press releases before they are made public, so they have enough time to
translate them or, see above, search for another volunteer to do the
translation.

Before I start writing an encyclopedia on community marketing and make
everybody tired, I have some tasks for you. ;-)

I would like to ask everyone to discuss this idea on their local mailing
lists in their native language (feel free to translate my e-mail if you
want), and to hear what they are thinking. Share this idea with them,
let us know their questions, feedback, ideas and of course constructive
criticism, and ask if you have some people on the list who would be
willing to serve as marketing contacts. Ideally, we find a good
combination of newcomers and experts, in order to help new contributors
join our marketing efforts, while having experienced colleagues at their
side, helping them to find their way.

I will try to draw some graph illustrating my ideas and put it into the
wiki.

Ideally, the local groups will propose candidates and have a vote on
them in the neat future, and we then can start a kick-off meeting via
Skype, phone, or even face to face in Paris.

I would be honoured to work with a strong network of marketeers to shape
the future of LibreOffice, and I look forward to your feedback!

Thanks,
Florian

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