 I just looked at the schedule of which room to go to, like the schedule that's online. Okay, that one. And it said ELG 15. Yeah. I'm in the right place, right? You're in ELG 15. Because on the Drupal Camp London website it says, okay. Yeah. There's been so many talks about change to canceled. Okay. You're tied to the room and not tied to the room. Don't worry. All right. Let's hope that whoever comes is okay with talking about marketing. Once worked on a marketing department and it was only my first day that I realized I was on the marketing team. Because I could have been, I kind of, my role would have been marketing on comms. It just happened to sit in marketing. I've never been on the marketing department. Okay, that's great. Historically the comms in the marketing team were always kind of butting heads. Yeah. Yeah. And I had the same role on comms team before. So when I found out I was on the marketing team on my first day I was like, oh dear. It was good. Which company are you with? I was, well, back then it was Blomla Cart. It's like a big rideshare company. And I was photography manager. So it couldn't have gone. I couldn't anywhere from that. Yeah. So I took out all those builds. There were a lot of builds and build-outs. Oh, thank God. Thank you. They just end up making talks go slow. And they tend to lead the presenter to read the slides. Which is never good. Yeah. Chris did that a lot today in his keynote. Yeah? Yeah. So if nobody comes here after the hook. Yeah. And we have a talk, you know, ready. I hope the delivery goes okay. But I'm really happy that I came up with this. Nobody can draw hexagons. I told you that the other night. But check the big screen. So this is the right place for you to look. You have the original one advertised. So I've already figured it out. There's still a few people upstairs. Wait, does everybody think it's in a different room? No. Because you check the big screen, this is right. Okay. But if you check the original schedule, this is originally meant to be a talk. So it's not bringing in newcomers. So at some point there was a change of talks. Yeah. Some people dropped out. Yeah. So this is like a last minute one. Right. So is that on paper? That's the one about newcomers is what's on paper. And the one about marketing is what's on the big screen upstairs. Okay. All right. But. Well. You made online. Which is how I got the room number. Yeah. It's just, it's not the talk that people originally saw the sheet. So hopefully we'll get someone to turn up for it. But there's still a handful of people upstairs. That should be something. How upset are you going to be if nobody comes? Not very. Our team member was supposed to come and present this, but she got stuck in Ireland. So couldn't make it. We have our first. If you sit down, you're going to stay for the whole thing now. I'll stay for the whole thing. If you're the audience. It's still recorded, right? Is it recorded? Yeah. It is. How does that happen? From where? That one? Yeah. And then there's audio from the mic there. And then there's a couple of microphones in the ceiling. So we just go to. So you should do it because you can still watch it. I don't think there's a lot of discussion in this time. They want to go see someone. Yeah. It's kind of a scary work for a lot of people. See, but that's one of the fundamental problems in the community. And that's why. It's more because it's terrifying to be able to watch. Right. Okay. That could be you. Yeah. Well, it seems to be a really good opportunity for us. I don't think other people are doing what we're doing. Are you ready? I've got two minutes. Really? Five minutes. You can wait for the time if you want. I'm just going to go and message the group final instead. Oh, we've got one more. Sorry? I think two more people are coming as far as I know, so. Yeah? Okay. Should we wait two minutes then or? Okay. Okay. I'll wait another minute. Since it's 10 after, I guess I better start then. So we're talking today about marketing your open source project to increase contribution. My name is not Heather, like originally planned for this talk. My name is Tracy and I work together with Jam. We were the co-founders and partners of Open Strategy Partners. And Heather is our first full-time team member. And unfortunately her flight got canceled and she wasn't able to make it today. So I jumped in at the last second and I'm going to try and do my best to bring a similar perspective or a different perspective to a topic that Heather's actually taught us a lot about by joining our team. And I just wanted to mention that a lot of what I'm covering today comes from working together with Heather and learning about technical communications from her experience and her knowledge in this space that comes from over 16 years or almost 17 years in the Drupal space and working with developers on communication strategies. What we're going to cover, we're going to talk about your goals for your project, defining contribution, defining marketing, building your strategy and then talking about specific tactics. So I wanted to get an understanding of who's in the room and I guess this won't take very long today since we've got two guests. So can you tell me a little bit about yourself and what brought you to the session? Working at FMW, when it's Mikhail, I'm a technical tickly, but FMW has a few open source projects I'm contributing to so it's quite interesting to me how to make them Drupal. And how to get more contribution to those projects? Yeah, especially that. Okay, excellent. And over here? I'm Adrian, I'm from a company called Sofdescu and we are about to launch our first open source product. So I'm here to learn on how we'll be able to market to the larger community and our Drupal contributions going to be a few open source projects. So that's what I'm here for to learn. Okay, excellent. Cool. And you're in the right place. So to kick off talking about goals, basically in the experience that we've had, the conversations that we've had with strategy partners, most of the goals have come down to these three in some shape or form and they all sort of can be boiled up into these three goals. And the first one is deliver valuable technology, which is what your teams are great at, grow adoption and then grow community and contribution. And these end up being very sort of like a virtuous circle because as you grow adoption, you're enabling the growth of the community and contribution and the contribution makes better technology and better technology enables more adoption. And so just one way to look at it. So let's talk about what we need by contribution. So we've got things like monetary contribution, code contribution, fixing patches, things like that, feedback and testing, support, documentation, those kinds of things. Are there any others that come to mind that should belong on this list? I'm meant to organize it. Yeah. Mentoring. Social media, promoting it, talking about it. Yeah. Yeah. So exactly the two points that you guys brought up are marketing contributions and I think that a lot of the time those types of contributions seem to be quickly forgotten or there's a lot less focus on them so the focus is on the technical contribution but getting the word out and talking about how great the technology is and sharing your stories or your experiences with it. Event attendance, social media exactly and those kinds of things all contribute to or make better contributions and thinking about why we would want to contribute, there's a lot of different reasons but I think the important point is when you're thinking about the types of people that you want to get contribution from it's going through an exercise of putting yourself in their shoes to understand what's going to motivate them to contribute. What benefit do they get from it? Is it going to help them be a better part of the community? Is that going to appeal to them or is it that they want to demonstrate their expertise in a certain area and those are the types of things that are really helpful to keep in mind when you're asking for their help. These are some of the barriers to contribution that we wanted to go over slightly. Things like social interaction, if somebody feels unwelcome in the community that can be a barrier. If they feel like they don't have enough skill like you were mentioning earlier that a lot of people feel that they don't have marketing skills so they don't want to write their story you don't necessarily need to have perfect writing skills to share your story and then ask somebody else to polish the language of it. Maybe there's a lack of documentation or let's talk about what marketing is. From your perspective, what do you think marketing is? What is it to you? Does it change your product users? How do you encourage people to use your product? How to represent it? How to promote it? Yeah, yeah. Or how do you give it a name? Exactly. What I've seen in my limited time in the open source community is that a lot of people are allergic to marketing. Not without merit. I have seen a lot of the buzzword bingo or marketing bingo. There's a lot of corporate speak or marketing speak floating around there that sometimes doesn't have substance and it just creates a bad reputation for us marketers. So obviously we want to take a very different approach to marketing and we want to have authentic communication where we're talking about the value that technology brings to change the lives of developers or change or make a contribution to the community. So we can talk for a minute about what's gross about marketing and things to avoid. Things like manipulative tactics or buzzwords like we just saw thrown around and it gives us marketers a bad rap. And this is obviously all the things we want to avoid. So I thought I'd throw a little joke in here. What is the new Chips Ahoy Marketing Director do on her first day on the job? Any guesses? Enable cookies. I know it's terrible but it made me laugh and it was a great way to introduce one of the topics that we've been thinking about a lot lately and that's that more and more technical products need to focus their marketing towards marketers and marketing departments. And we've been talking with a lot of agencies and they're no longer selling their technology to the IT departments, they're selling them to the marketing departments because your website is your interface with your clients. Your website is marketing. It's a marketing tool. And so more and more the marketing departments are sort of merging as like marketing technologists or something along those lines and it's just more important to kind of learn to love marketers, I guess. And we've, you know, in the battle against Buzzword Bingo we've been doing a lot of thinking about what it means to have authentic communication and it's actually how I started a lot of conversations and the business with my business partner, Jam, sort of grew out of these conversations where he was talking about having both compelling and accurate communication and talking about his ideas about how that, you know, his approach to that and it basically, you know, goes through these three main components and, you know, it's really understanding who your audience is and what they really need from your product. It's not that you've solved every problem in the world for them but, you know, what benefit, what value do you actually bring to them and then having like genuine hype-free content and one of the ways that Jam has done this for the last decade is actually going out and speaking to the people who built the technology getting their perspective why they made a feature a certain way or why they made certain technical decisions and translate that for the user and the benefit that that brings to them and taking that kind of an approach builds a lot of trust in your communication and obviously clarity in any communication needs to be very clear and we do this by organizing communication across themes and channels and this idea of, excuse me, this idea of authentic communication is something that sort of led to our belief that, you know, authentic communication it actually drives connection and it's connection that drives community and that community actually creates a lot of business value so let's talk about strategy so here, late last night, I put this together and it's sort of a collection of all of the components that you need to think about in your marketing, your contribution marketing strategy and these are all of the important pieces and I sort of took all of these different ideas that I, you know, spent a lot of time talking with Heather and talking with Jim and learning about what marketing is to get contribution and so we go through, you know, what are your actual goals? Who is it targeted towards? What are the vibrance of signals? Why your projects are your value proposition? Why people should contribute? How they can contribute? Where to connect with them and what stories to tell? So those are the components we're going to go through. First one, contribution goals. So just a couple of examples, you know, if you want to increase your code sprint attendees by 20 people get a new sponsor or ask a couple of people to share their story. Those are just some examples. So this is a commonly glossed over topic that people think, oh, well, it's just developers. I just need to reach out to developers because I want them to contribute code and if you actually think about your goals you might realize that you need some marketing people, you need some social media people, you may need some event experts and also, you know, that's just talking about the specific people but thinking about all of the community players and the people who might benefit from your project or that can support your project and so it's really helpful to kind of go through one of these stakeholder maps and just map out, okay, what groups do we have internally? What kind of customers do we have? What kind of projects in the open source, in the broader open source space are relevant to us that we can work together with, we can collaborate with and who are some channel partners that might be able to team up to, you know, for any number of reasons? So it's a really helpful exercise to go through. Vibrancy signals. This was super interesting to me because when Heather first started working with us she was starting to ask a ton of questions that I didn't realize were really, really important actually and from a market, like a traditional marketing perspective which is where I come from, you know, I thought your website, your social media, that's the kind of stuff that's important, that's the kind of stuff that indicates quality to anybody evaluating your project but what Heather brought in is well, no, you got to look on GitHub, you got to see how much activity is happening there. You know, things like, is the README file done well? Are the community guidelines documents? Are they done professionally and detailed? And all of those kinds of things. And so I would challenge you to think about what are those signals that you want to put out to the developers and or marketers or other personas that you want to attract and just to make sure that they're all clean, they're professional, they're communicating the message with intention. So why your project? This is your traditional value proposition understanding what value your technology and your project brings to the users and to everyone in that stakeholder group that you mapped out before. And this is a great example from Strategizer. I don't know if you know the business model canvas, it's the same guys that built that. Also have this value proposition canvas, which is really great. What we've found in working on highly technical projects is a very, it's extremely helpful to do a very deep technical analysis to start with. So we've done this for another open-source CMS and we've done this for our other client, DRUD, and going through and comparing feature by feature what value that brings. So with a spreadsheet of a few hundred things, but then going through that exercise and grouping those and comparing those and understanding what are the points of parity and what are the points of differentiation to what's already available in the market and developing your value proposition from that is an extremely useful exercise and will bring so much more substance to the messaging that you develop out of that. So why contribute? So I think this goes back to an earlier point that I was making to just put yourself in the shoes of the people that you're trying to get contribution from and understand what benefits it's going to bring them and build that right into your messaging. How to contribute? Having your contribution guidelines already and also thinking about where to connect. So not just your website or social media, but actually at the events, how you're representing your product and your project at the various events that you attend and every other channel. And then the biggest and most important part of the strategy is then what stories do you want to tell? And here's a few examples of different narrative lines that we built for our client. It's just at the table outside of the room. And coming up with not only the technology stories about what future sets you have or what problems it solves, that's all really important, but also narratives like, hey, we're actively involved in supporting these open-source events in your social media channels, celebrating open-source community leaders and interesting things that they've done. And yeah, so another example that DRED is doing is supporting and enabling open-source contribution sprints so they've built an entire sprint kit to enable the people in the sprints to get started a lot faster. All right, talk about some tactics. We wanted to look along the customer journey and which touchpoints are really important. And so we wanted to talk about the first contact, how they seek information, getting them to download and install the technology, seeking help, and then contributing. So first contact could be somebody within the community tweeting about your product. It could be a number of other things, but this was a great example. Other points of first contact could be at an event, a blog post, a featured interview if you're interviewed on somebody else's podcast or blog or what not, white papers, etc. And then seeking information and from what we understand people, so your read me file is like a brand landing page. And yeah, here's an example of one that our client has for DDEV and this is, it should clearly articulate your value proposition and the overview, which license you use, it should provide dependency information, what's supported, it should link to a contribution guide and let you know where to get support and help. Then hopefully they download and install it and give it a try. And I guess it's more likely that your users are going to download and install your project before they read much of the documentation. I don't know, is this your experience? Do you read about it first and then download and test something out or do you test it and then try to find out about it? I read first. Yeah, I think most people break it first and then read something. You think so? What about you? Yeah, I think I'm in the same group. Break it first and then read about it? Yeah. Okay. Sometimes I don't have the patient read the documentation, going out and try it and then I see it's stuck but I know from people that it works so I have to go back and read the documentation and take it. I think it depends on what we're taking about it. Yeah. Okay. As marketers and especially for Tracy coming in from a very classic business background it's really challenging to market this sort of open source technology because it's really, really self-service, right? Everybody just takes it and tries it and does it and to get people excited about it you have to have great documentation you have to have all this stuff in place on GitHub, right? It doesn't matter what sort of paper your brochure is printed on and stuff like that, right? It's a really interesting challenge. Yeah. I think in open source we have lots of options in general like for one particular problem there are like 10 maybe solutions so sometimes I'm in the position that I want to test out quickly as possible to get an opinion and then decide on what product I'm going to invest more in reading and documenting and contributing so that's I think one-on-one from the other side of the barricade there are many options so sometimes you don't need you don't have the time to go and document on what you are going to stick to. Okay. But really what I do I go to the GitHub or to some documentation and first read the key features of that or that too. To find out if it's worth your time to see if there are some specific features that I'm struggling with or is there a better solution for something. Okay. So. Okay. Okay. So the fourth touch point would be to seek help and so I think this is very clear that you should have clear support guidelines and letting people know how to get support for your project. This was an idea of Heather's that there's a robot called Hi5 that automates basic social pleasantries but I guess the point is to however you achieve it to enable quick reactions to support your support channels and things like that and then contribution. How they can contribute and making that really clear and being really clear about the guidelines and the development norms and in addition to sort of that technical communication aspect which was the last four slides enabling things like your content marketing your content strategy in something in a flow similar to this and what I'd like to do since we're in this interesting format we have two people here so we could actually go back through what I'd like to do is go back through to the strategy canvas and talk about your specific projects and brainstorm those together. Is that cool with you guys? Yeah, sure. Okay, I feel like that would be... There we go. Sorry, I forget your name. Michelle. Okay. And so you said you have multiple open source projects within FFW. Do you want to give us one example of your favorite, your most interesting? Yeah, but I will start with the one I am contributing more to or the one that was founded in Office I work so we have a docker-based environment for local development that's called doxel which uses docker but I will not speak about that I will speak rather about the thing called CI-KIT. CI-KIT? Okay. Yeah, it started before the doxel at some point doxel became more popular because it uses docker and we were using your program but it doesn't matter. So really what it gives you it gives you something that doxel cannot accept the local environment it also gives you a tool to build a set of machines for continuous integration. Okay. So it's not only about the local environment but setting up a set of virtual machines to build your code to get your PR builds ready to get your general environment Yeah. And what are your contribution goals? Are you trying to enable people to contribute code? Do you want them to provide feedback? Do you want... What are your... All of that actually. All of it? We want to encourage people to use it to contribute because the contribution to the documentation would be really great I think because from now it's very technical Okay. So it's okay when you just go and install and use it but there is something you want to change it the level where when you can do the changes is quite high. Okay. And so your audience is very developer focused then obviously. Okay. But for different types of developers do you... Well, major authorities when developers not only Drupal. Okay. So beyond the Drupal community so anybody doing web development? Yeah, yeah. Okay. It works with any PHP CMS or framework. And for you the vibrancy signals for your project the things, some of the items that I had listed earlier I can find those. Is it more than this? Is there more? Is there... Well generally it covers most of it because yeah the main hosting you have. Yeah. And in general it's for developers. What about the fact that it's supported by FFW that's a pretty large agency, right? Like that would be sort of a signal of how well the project is supported and that might be interesting and attractive for people to become involved. Is that... Yeah. What's the question? Is it like maybe that's an additional signal that you can think about the fact that it's supported by a large agency. That's something that potential contributors might find attractive. Yeah. And... Sort of the time that pull requests are left before review and you know how many documentation pages say API, TBD, right? Like this thing. The more that you have it, the better off you are. Yeah. And so I think we talked about a little bit about like what your project is and but what what advantage does your tool bring over other options that they have available? In general it's completely free and it gives you a whole setup of your local and CI environment in a few comments. Yeah. So there are a lot of options from hosting companies like Acre, Platform Stage, Amaze, EIO, Gion, etc. But in general they are not free to use for CI. So the main feature I found useful is that configuration of your local setup and configuration of the CI server is one file and it's the same for most. So you just run the common CI environment or the common CI environment and you know they are the same. Okay. Okay. And why should people contribute? What do they get from it? They will get some commits and github. Terrific case. Yeah. And they can improve the existence case because it's built on Ansible and Python. Okay. Yeah. So that's something you want to learn if you go a bit outside of the Drupal. Yeah. So Drupal is more about this project is more about the tools. Yeah. And I think so then the next steps would be to think about how they how they contribute that all of that is clear on your github page and where they should connect and based on that then what types of stories should you be telling and talking about and I just want to jump over five minutes left so I want to hear about another project. What was the tool called? CIG. CIG. CIG. Yeah. So sorry can you tell me your name again? Adrian. Okay Adrian can you tell me a little bit more about your project? Sure. We are building an open source tool called Open Story and it's basically at the simplest level to explain an interface for content editors to enter and manage content on Drupal sites probably in the future WordPress and other CMSs. We built that starting from our essay experience in the Drupal market that content editors find a Drupal interface to be a bit hard to use and lagging behind when you are comparing even with other open source solution like WordPress but even more if you are comparing with Adobe and Sidecourge have all much more nicer let's say user experience for the content editors. So we start to build this a couple of months ago and it's based on Angular so that means it's completely it's very responsive really fast and looks you know has a we invested a lot in the design and the user interface of this tool and it's kind of a big couple approach to the content management or content editing part of CMS so we envision that this kind of tool can be used to connect to other the couple CMSs in the future basically you are providing an authoring transparent or the same unified authoring experience no matter what kind of CMS your developers has decided to use. They want to use Drupal because it fits the needs for that project they use WordPress or they use Content and the other CMSs but for your editors they will have access the content editors will have access to the same unified experience for the managing part of the content so that's in short that sounds extremely attractive so we it's open source we envision that it's a tool to be used by the larger community we are building and supporting the development of course for that because it's something that someone has to start working on on some I like the idea of the marketing canvas and made me think on some good things that we are liking and should be addressing in the project what I want to add on the contribute part is that this is an idea born in the lab it's a shallow idea based on our assumption and on what we have noticed within the market however the idea is as valuable as the community behind it so that means from my point of view people who want to contribute or contribute back to this idea would be to make it more to adapt it to more larger cases that they have discovered through their own experiences there will be no recognition at the beginning from the community rather small but one reason for them to contribute back is to extend the use case and improve on the tool that has been offered for free so you can take a role and extend that to be more useful for your users' cases and for the others in general so that will be something that we will have to communicate in terms of why to contribute on the signals part I'm not very clear what they actually mean obviously there is an agency behind it and we have poor people working full time on it already to kick it off and go on a beta version and yeah it will be amazing to have one extra contributor outside our company but then we are months behind that so we'll see in the future it's challenging obviously when you approach an open source project from a company point of view somehow it's a cost because you take people from clients projects and it's not necessary investment because it's open source and there is no actually bringing a model out of the box so I would say this is I find it challenging from a point of view as an agency manager creating open source projects is rather difficult and expensive I think the hoof for you is quite different from Mikael's example because not only do you need development contributions but you need content editors you need marketing managers but also it sounds like you're looking for a partner so another agency for example to take a leading role and contribute to the marketing agency or something like that it's true our audience would be the content editors that should be able to request this from their developers and then should be also developers who would want to contribute back or implement this tool on top of their websites and just as one last question how are you trying to connect with them how are you trying to get contribution what stories are you telling we are writing some blog posts on medium regarding the need of such a tool and the reasoning behind that but it's still within the lab so it's not it's going to be announced in a couple of weeks or maybe up to Drupalcon National as a beta version but we haven't planned any strategy or any concrete actions for how to connect how to promote this we're still heavily focused on the tech side so okay and we have to continue the conversation afterwards if you want yeah sure it has been a useful action excellent I'm very glad to hear that over I guess I should wrap it up but thank you very much thank you guys for attending so I at least got to practice and go through the presentation and thank you for your patience thank you the vibrancy signals you know when you do the cutting around you get how it's really specifically done the vibrancy signals this is a lot of people working on it if you do something your effort is going to be multiplied there's going to be more happening people are going to be leaving from flights lectures the differentiation is in place she's just put that the adapter away all that like this is a lie jammed and human it's right exactly I think that's it how long should I ask I think the biggest question in my mind about your tool is sort of this is a real problem yes where do you want to take it are you building a difference model on it or is it just to make your clients happier or make your day easier what is the actual point for you definitely something that I want to make with our clients because lots of projects that we've done and for a couple of years they get stuck on the content editing product people are late with content we cast them to enter the content on the website they say it's complicated I have sent you this world file because we want to get the product the site on the market and on the production level on our side as a business obviously I have some goals and wishes for this on the long term maybe it will help us change with the model we currently are running but I have no idea how and when and you know the matter and obviously we have to market this of course even if it's a problem maybe that's not the correct solution for the problem that we found so it's complicated yeah for sure those are the at least you're asking a lot of my questions yeah for sure thank you of course I'll give you my promise I know Jim very well we run with each other in lots of events it will still happen yeah