Discuss what position Promo should have regarding Make It Linux and/or promotion organizations between projects
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Backstory: MakeItLinux is a very new project which defines themselves as "A collective of creators dedicated to driving mainstream awareness and adoption of desktop Linux as a fast, easy, beautiful alternative to Mac OS and Windows". They host the "Sunlight Manifesto" here, which essentially describes an organization which would aim at making Linux more popular and changing the general opinion of what Linux is.

There are some good parts, some more debatable parts, but I think we can all agree that a larger Linux desktop market share would be beneficial to the KDE community market share as well. It might make sense to organize with promotion groups of other DEs and/or open source projects in general to investigate what could be done for reaching that goal and working on it. This is, generally speaking.

Now, we could contact MakeItLinux to try to form such an organization. Since the project seem to have not begun yet, and since we are KDE, we could ask them to change some points or aims, e.g.: not focusing just on creators but contacting organizations promotion groups as well, such as the GNOME Engagement gorup. Of course, this raises question, more specifically:

  • What do we want to achieve
  • How the collaboration help us achieve it
  • Steps we can take to make the collaboration happen
paulb added a subscriber: paulb.Mar 12 2020, 11:35 AM

I have currently linked up to James Mawson on LinkedIn and he has sent me the following email:

Hi Paul,

I've cc'ed in Jason Evangelho, the admiral and spiritual guru of our "Make
it Linux" campaign.

Thank you for reaching out :)

At the moment, all I really have planned to further this notion is to
continue publishing the ideas and pursuing schemes to drive beneficial
attention to them. My reasoning is that, until there is a critical mass of
businesses and open source projects expressing some small interest, it
isn't yet real.

So far we're only a few days out from having published anything and you're
the first person from a project of great reputation to contact me.

I also will be completely transparent that setting up a global consortium
is a thing I've never done before. I don't have an exact roadmap. What I
have done many times before is craft persuasive documents and drive
targeted web traffic to them, and I think that's probably at least a useful
starting point.

It helps greatly to have recognised names and brands in the desktop Linux
space engage with this. Even if they're not offering any specific
commitments to the project, if all I can mention is that we have been in
communication, that definitely helps signal that this is worth further
attention.

My hunch is that those with most ability to aid this work are already quite
busy and distracted by many competing demands. In that circumstance,
judicious name dropping can be quite useful to prompt a closer look :)

Regardless of what ends up happening with the specific proposal of a
marketing consortium, I will consider my time on this to be well spent if
the underlying ideas reach parts of the ecosystem where they can be truly
useful is growing market share. That's about a wider idea of what's really
holding back desktop Linux from reaching a mainstream audience, a wider
idea of what can be done about it, and a wider idea of how that could be
bankrolled.

What are your thoughts and ideas?

James

I will point him to our goals that may help give their own initiative a bit more structure. Meanwhile, this is all very much in an inception stage.

  • What do we want to achieve: bringing more users to KDE
  • How will it help to achieve it: sure, we can fight to get more users in our 2% marketshare, but expanding the linux marketshare will also help bringing new users. The main aim of this organization should be to organize efforts of various promo groups to have a bigger impact on the general public. See the Windows 7 campaign as an example: we did a great job on our own, but just thing what we could have done by organizing the effort and making one campaign pushed by all big DEs and organizations.
  • How to make the collaboration happen: they seem to be very open, and this is good. We should though set some guidelines for our partecipation, stuff like "other big DEs promo/engagement groups should also be on board".
aronkvh added a subscriber: aronkvh.Oct 3 2020, 5:43 AM
paulb closed this task as Resolved.Sep 17 2022, 10:37 AM