Your open source project competes with millions of others for users, contributors, and perhaps financial support. To stand out from the crowd, your project needs… marketing. If that term makes you shudder, or you simply don’t think you know how, this talk (aimed at anyone involved in open source) will help you understand the why and the how of open source marketing.

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Deirdré Straughan, Open Source Content Lead, AWS
With thanks to Charles Dorner, Amazon
Marketing Your
Open Source Project

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Ugh. Do I have to?

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There are millions of open source projects
Github hosts over open source repositories
SourceForge is home to open source projects
Apache Software Foundation now has committees managing
projects and another projects in incubation
Eclipse Foundation now has projects and new projects in incubation
OpenStack has project teams working on project repositories

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Open Source Development is Accelerating

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Open Source Leadership Summit 3/6

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The components of open
source marketing

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Readme

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Documentation

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28. * Thanks, Kathy Sierra!

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Beyond GitHub
• How to’s, blueprints, architectures, etc.
• Blog
• Videos & screencasts
• Articles and press (trade press, scholarly
journals, refereed conferences)
• Books
• Education
• Logo/mascot

35. Refereed Journals
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38. • Tutorials
• Workshops
• Classes
• Certifications

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Time needed to create different kinds of content:
• Managing a whole blog:

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Places to Put Content
• GitHub repo
(necessary, but not sufficient)
• GitHub pages
• Other website and/or wiki
• Blog
• YouTube

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Search Engine Optimization

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Meetups, Talks, and Conferences

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This one marketing secret will change your life…

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The air travel experience

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Community

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Brilliant Jerks
Wired on the GitHub Open Source Survey

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You are already doing marketing

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Are you doing it well?

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Open Source Marketing Checklist
q Customer
q Code
q Documentation
q Technical papers
q Blog
q Video
q Trade press
q Books
q Education
q Logo/mascot
q Events
q Social media
q Discussion forums
q Community
q Culture

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Thanks!
to
• Charles Dorner
• Brendan Gregg
• Laura Ramsey
• Participants in the Marketing Open Source
discussion session at the Community
Leadership Summit who shared many ideas
and helped refine mine.

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References & further reading
Diversity in Open Source Is Even Worse Than in Tech Overall:
wired.com/2017/06/diversity-open-source-even-worse-tech-overall/
GitHub Open Source Survey: opensourcesurvey.org/2017/
Building Compassionate Communities in Tech, Isaac Schleuter @izs
youtube.com/watch?v=8kLIonLrKdQ
Kathy Sierra’s old “Creating Passionate Users” blog
headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/
Kathy Sierra: Badass – Making Users Awesome amzn.to/2J7xed3

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Addendum from Q&A:
How do you measure results?
Content:
• Traffic metrics (page views, time on page)
• Social engagement metrics

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Project Metrics: Popularity

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Project Metrics: Activity