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 -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to marketing+h...@global.libreoffice.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/marketing/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted