Open Source and Free Culture’s Weakness is Marketing
I would go a step further than Rudd-o’s statement that Open Source’s weakness is lack of marketing and PR by stating that this is a problem for the superset of Free Culture.
I have spent much time trying to hone these skills through working on Inkscape, Open Clip Art Library and now at Creative Commons I totally agree with Rudd-o and feel that once Free Culture (including Free Content, Open Content, Free Software and Open Source Software) figure this out, or rather more people like myself and Rudd-o promote this heavier and provide solutions, Free Culture will master marketing and PR.
We already have proof that this type of “Spread” project like Spread Firefox works majorly well…so how do we duplicate this?
This reminds me that I need to put the big push back on for Spread FreeCulture (which will hopefully lead this charge).
Also, I would like to address how I create projects like Spread Free Culture. I have been explaining this a lot lately. Here is my strategy:
- First do massive research on what already exists and put this on a wiki (unless a wiki page on this exists somewhere else).
- Then, if a project already exists which does what you want, then merge your efforts in with this (merging is a HIGH PRIORITY TO CONSOLIDATE RESOURCES)
- Only if a project does not exist, then start fleshing out your project online on a wiki and make a few public announcements about this developing project to get other ideas.
- After this, then begin to implement what you and others have planned on that wiki.
[...] Jon Phillips stated a great idea on his blog, create some sort of effort to unify ideas about what is to be done in the Open Source world. [...]
Pingback by Open Source massive unification « Webcitizen FelipeC — September 23, 2006 @ 2:47 am
Your four bullets of advice are all right on (but point two is missing a wiki! :-)) but I’m not sure why marketing should be singled out as good’s (my abbreviation for open source and free culture) weakness. And Rudd-o’s suggestion seems to amount to handing out CDs to friends — the guerilla version of AOL’s carpet bombing, but neither is very compelling.
In my opinion if one can’t code the best thing one can do is to become an expert user, so that when someone amenable to using open source has a quality helping hand. Handing out software that people have no support network for (unless the software is nearly flawless, as software goes anyway, like Firefox) is just the open source version of the hard sell, not useful to nor appreciated by anyone.
Finally, what proof is there that SFF works majorly well? The website gets a dribble of traffic compared to mozilla.org. The website looks really nice and there’s lots of chatter, but … I’m probably just being too skeptical.
None of this may apply to Free Culture, the culture of which remains pretty mysterious to me. The stuff about support networks is much weaker for culture, certainly, though I think the analogue to being an expert user is being an expert in the free culture offerings available in some genre, so that your recommendations are good and trusted. Anyone want some libre avant-noise music recommendations? I’m working on that tiny niche.
Comment by Mike Linksvayer — September 23, 2006 @ 10:28 pm
After the Bzzzagents discussion some of us worked on a “SpreadCC” page on the CC wiki. I reformatted it into a section of themed pages and - then it died. It’s not on the CC Wiki now, or at archive.org, but perhaps someone at CC has a backup? There were some good ideas in there even if I do say so myself.
The index URL was: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/SpreadCC
Comment by Rob Myers — October 10, 2006 @ 7:51 am