Re: gEDA-user: marketing gEDA

[Alex Perry <alex.perry@xxxxxxxx>]

> Ideas how to make gEDA market (i. e. have users) more:

Step 1: Expand visibility of the branding

For technical projects, the fastest growth in gaining new users
is to give presentations at relevant (non open source) conferences.
People have to become aware that "gEDA" even exists in the first
place, otherwise they'll ignore search engine hits for the site.

That's why I was inviting someone to give a talk at DMES before;
http://www.vts.com/delmar/index.html
These types of events occur everywhere around the country each
year, most of them are happy to have toolchain users as speakers
since the talks tend to be more interesting than the marketers'.

Step 2: Become accessible to the inquiring

The usual community route is to build a network of informative and
cross referencing websites and personal blogs so that the major
search engines rank the associated projects higher in their results.
Otherwise, even if someone suspects that there might be a relevant
option out there (from step 1 efforts), they may not find our sites.

Step 3: Enable fact finding and easy evaluation of relevance

Karel Kulhavy wrote:
> Write a table with two columns and many rows.
> Commercial alternatives in the left column, gEDA names on the right.

It might be worth having more than two columns.  One column for the gEDA
suite of applications, add one column for each other integrated suite,
and a final column for the standalone applications in each category.

> Write small pages about this (aka appnotes) with relevant links
> and link them from within the page so that search engine finds them

I think this could be easily set up as a grid of wiki entries.
Each entry in the table takes you to a wiki page that contrasts
specific features of the given gEDA application against the others.
This will grow quickly and become a user resource, as well as be
a ready source of material for the search engines to trigger on.

Step 4: Provide case studies for comparisons

> Publish working designs using free FPGA IP from opencores.org.
> Things that show an entire project from design to production.
> These are the things that users want to see and that they
> already see from commercial EDA vendors.

Step 5: Quickly deliver an easy to use evaluation version

I recommend having a persistent web page at the core gEDA website
that refers to whichever Knoppix derivative is at any time known
to have the whole gEDA suite installed and working.  That page
can change its contents any time, but all the links from member
projects, wikis and search engines will always be relevant.

Windows users may have suggestions to assist in installation.
For the Linux users, pointing out what the package name will
be for the various distributions will make things much easier.

Alex.


PS.
Karel Kulhavy also said:
> I hate the marketing as done by those well known
> agressive-style marketing salespeople

Unfortunately, the hate you experience to their efforts is actually
beneficial to their marketing, because it means you're more likely
to remember their message for a longer time ... even after you stop
hating the marketer for how the message was delivered ...