got up today at 5:30 and had breakfast with t. this allowed me to get in an hour or so of work before the p-man woke up at 8:00. after getting him ready for and dropping him off at school at 9:00, i came back to deal with various marketing questions such as how to get OSDW some more press. then i had a scheduled phone interview with certification magazine about the open source desktop. it went rather well; the woman doing the research and writing the article said several times that she was grateful to have found someone who could communicate clearly what open source was, what kde is and why it all matters.
i'm also getting used to answering the "what is your job title and what company do you work for?" question despite my non-standard circumstances. "i am a full-time kde core developer whose efforts within the project are sponsored by trolltech." i even remembered to spell out "Qt" (capital queue, lower case tee) this time. the monkey can be taught!
of course it did get me thinking about about what is kde. now, i don't mean what it is to me or to any of the others involved in creating it. i think it has a number of different personal meanings to various people, and that adds depth and flavour to the project. but what is KDE to someone out ... there? (he asks waving his hands about in the air)
one thing that was brought up in malaga is that kde is not a "project". a project has a defined end. it has a single purpose. kde is so much more than just a project; it is made up of many projects, to be certain. but kde itself is an ongoing endeavour.
within kde we have a development platform, a desktop environment (which, in KDE4 parlance, is the "workspace") and a set of application stacks. we also have a culture, a community and an industry.
we also have an identity. one that evolves over time as we and kde itself does. imho, one of the goals for our emerging marketing team should be to bottle that identity and communicate it clearly to world via the web, print and word of mouth. this message needs to be shaped into a few different forms so it resonates with impact when we're talking to app developers, or when we're talking to end users, or when we're talking to institutional adopters or when we are talking to OS vendors. or ... when we're talking to a journalist who is just learning about this whole "open source" thing for the first time.
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4 comments:
IMO, KDE is an effort to build the best desktop environment in the world. That means having the best platform, the best desktop interface, and the best applications.
Mark
While I agree to most of your post, I cannot resist the impression that you're mixing promotion / public relation and marketing most of the time. The latter is quite some more than just PR, it's much more about getting to know what you are and what your user (or, in marketing speech "target group(s)") are (and what he wants!). PR is just a means to do marketing, though, but it needs a good foundation to be successful.
@sebas
well, yes, exactly. what i was getting at is that we need more marketing. we're doing better all the time with PR (though we can improve there as well), but the area we have only begun to explore is marketing.
KDE is a country my friend!
;-)
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