Submitted by A discussion on the Haiku mailing list about the recently announced icon contest has set off a somewhat controversial debate about communication in the project. The Haiku leadership seems to be of the idea that it is not yet a good time to the start PR machine, while the member of the community who initiated the discussion argues that, if done right, communication can be beneficial for the project at any point in time, and that it may actually help find the developers that the project so badly needs. Quite coincidentally, this article related to the topic of marketing open source projects.
PR helps.
The right PR at the right time helps most.
I suspect that Haiku is in need of the sort of targeted PR that is going to be hard to get right.
Setting expectations too high and getting people involved would lead to great disappointment and a backlash.
PR is good. But for Haiku they should still be targeting developers and those interested in contributing.
Users will have a bad experience, get burnt and not want to come back.
I’m not sure I agree with this. There is a set of people that aren’t developers but are technical enough to do things like hardware support testing, website content generation, etc, etc.
I think PR at this point has a point, and think the guy who suggested could do a really good job too
(But I might be biased, as I worked with him before)
I’m not sure I agree with this. There is a set of people that aren’t developers but are technical enough to do things like hardware support testing, website content generation, etc, etc.
Well, the thing is..there are plenty of those available already, doing nothing productive. At the moment, noone is actively channeling these people to do something productive..except for the icon and webdesign contests. There’s plenty of people, who, when asked, will say “Sure I wanna help! Like, translations or testing and stuff.”. But most people don’t know where to start or what to do first, and it takes a big time investment from someone in the core of the project, whose time might as well be spent coding, to make these people helpful.
This is anemic with many open source projects. I estimate the ratio of people willing to help and able to help about 10 to 1.
When it comes to FOSS, developers typically come from your pool of users.
If they’re honest, the people who try it will try it knowing it’s not production-ready and so they shouldn’t plan to use it for anything useful, and certainly shouldn’t wipe an OS install they needed for it.
It was my impression that much of the discussion on the mailing list is about getting developers and project contributors interested – not necessarily end-users.
You are correct – Haiku is not for end-users yet. But end-users can certainly get involved and spread the word, and contribute in some way if they want to!
Another problem is the large distribution of Haiku discussion – they are putting together a new website to hopefully help bring more of the community together “under one roof” – and I think that’s an important step.
Edited 2006-08-15 16:47
I would have thought that ‘see Firefox’ was the answer to this articles headline?
Firefox is proof the door swings both ways, your competitors bad PR is good PR for you.
1. Where can I get it so I can install it [Haiku]
If the answer to 1 is “no, you can’t get it yet” people won’t be that interested, really. You really need to get to 1 before you start having icon competitions or PR, otherwise people will just end up even more disillusioned:(
Wow, I didn’t expect the whole PR discussion to make OSAlert, anyway…
Officially you can’t get it, but of course – people interested in helping the project CAN get it, test it, and play with it.
I think that’s one of the issues that revolves around this discussion, is that there seems to be a slight separation that prevents people from coming into the project and getting involved easily.
I’m sure this is not an uncommon problem among open-source projects – but it’s a problem nonetheless.
There has been a lot of content added to the Haiku wiki to help newcomers get up and running with the code and pre-built haiku images – but most people don’t even know that exists, for example.
I was about to point out Firefox, but PJBonoVox beat me to it! Except, with Firefox they had a significant budget to work with and to buy advertising space with.
One original Be marketing tactic was the BeOS User Groups. They sent out promotional materials and let the fans promote their product on a local scale. I wouldn’t mind chipping in some money to have some promo packages w/ CD-ROMs put together. I do think that was pretty effective and I managed to get promo materials sent out to people that matter.
At the same time I do think that they should wait until they have a working product before they start doing any PR outside technical or special interest circles.
Firefox only started their massive publicity effort after their code was already extremely mature, polished, and professional. Starting a big publicity push before your software is ready, however, can be disasterous: once lots of users try a product and have a bad experience, they won’t come back again six months later after you’ve significantly improved the quality, because you have no credibility.
Valid points, but again, I don’t believe this discussion was about end-users – but rather about project contributors (or potential project contributors) and a lack of clear process and communication throughout the team and community.
Yeah, because that never worked for windows, Oracle, Linux, etc….
if (head_up_ass) {
try_remove();
}
Yeah, maybe it’s time for alfa cd images, as long as they’re clearly labeled as experimental. I’m sure at least the OSAlert crowd won’t let a bad first impression stand in the way of trying a later release.
I think you have valid points when it comes to PR for end users, but this discussion is more about attracting contributors to the project.
It was also mentioned that people and newcomers have a hard time understanding the decisions made in the mailing lists because there are a lot of mixed messages from different people and you don’t know whos points are worth listening to and whos isn’t. It’s hard to find the final word in the flow of messages.
My hope is that they will publish things that could be benefitial to newcomers, I’ve followed Haiku closely, and know a few guys, but even I feel confused about certain things.
For just coding the current communication works fine, for other things the mailing list seems a bit to inaccessible.
“I’m sure at least the OSAlert crowd won’t let a bad first impression stand in the way of trying a later release.”
I hope you are being sarcastic.
I’m not. Call me blue eyed. We need to get Haiku into the hands of more developers outside of the old BeOS community. Is it possible to do so without making a bad impression with a lot of people? I don’t have a solution to this problem. I think we have to take a leap of faith and trust people.
(We can’t just sit in the mine 10.000 meters below surface, making diamonds, expecting people to get excited. We should at least have a tour bus and an elevator.)
I grant you that it might be wise to wait for Axel & friends to fix the fork/leak bug, so that Haiku can survive the strain of building, selfhosted, and be distributed with gcc and all the necessary dev tools included.
This debate can be measured in months, not years.
Not long ago Haiku was just a command prompt and no-one was talking about shouting anything from the roof tops.
These people have stuck to their plans from Day 1, rewriting bits of BeOS while people said they were doing it the wrong way. I wouldn’t expect anything less than them single-mindedly sticking to that plan and delivering a great R1.
People are getting impatient because the end is in sight, but the developers have already proved their ability to deliver a project beyond all shadow of a doubt. They say when R1 happens.
Edited 2006-08-16 15:26