 Okay, it's exactly 145, so it's exciting to see all of you here, and we'll get started. My name is Nithya Ruff, and I work for Synopsys. I'm responsible for the virtual product, prototyping product line, and I've been doing open source in Linux since 1998-99, started at Silicon Graphics, where I was responsible for the Linux support and services strategy, and then worked at Tripwire, where we did open sourcing of Tripwire, and then since then worked at Vindriver, did Vindriver Linux, which is a commercial Linux, and then now I work very closely to enable embedded software development and open source developers through organizations like this. And I'm Tracy Irwe, I work at Intel Corporation. I work as a marketing person for Intel's contributions to the Okta project, and I also work on the Okta project as the advocacy team lead, which is our marketing group for the project. And I guess I started off as an embedded systems developer, and then my theory is that the marketing people get to wear better clothes, so I moved over to marketing. I didn't get any better clothes, I have to admit, but... And then I had the pleasure of working with Nithya on the Okta project when she worked for another company, so that's how we met, and we've been talking about doing this presentation for a long time. Hope you find it useful. Yep. So, Tracy? Oh yeah, so we're going to start off and look at how, you know, a project cycle generally starts off. Why no one typically does any marketing, or at least to date, marketing isn't really thought of in the open source community a whole lot. And what the objective really would be for marketing and open source. And really what this presentation does is call out the differences between marketing, if you're part of a corporation contributing to a project, versus marketing for an open source project itself. So we're going to do both pieces for you and call out the differences, because they do have differences, and it's pretty important to pick which side you're marketing from and do it consistently. And we're going to use the Okta project as a case study for us, and then wrap it up at the end and tell you all our pearls of wisdom when we get there. We were thinking about marketing in open source, and I know when Nithya and I first started working on the Okta project, we felt really alone as marketers, but also I think from a project point of view, if you put something out there and you're waiting for people to get all involved in it, and nothing happens, you too are very alone. So there's definitely a marriage that can take place here between the whole project and marketing points of view, and that's what we're presenting today. And typically what happens, it's our observation that open source projects typically start with a problem. So someone finds a problem that they have and they solve it by creating a solution. So in open source it's common to call it an itch to scratch, and then there's a tremendous amount of enthusiasm because they put it out there and they find kindred spirits. There's other people who have the same issue and same challenge, and then they group together and they start developing the solution and it keeps snowballing, growing bigger and bigger, till the point where the gatekeeper or the main person creating the solution realizes that he or she is bearing the burden of everything, of attracting the community, of marketing the product, of finding users, developing in the night in his basement or wherever. And so it becomes soon the reality that the burden of the project overwhelms this person who started out with so much enthusiasm. And the project then fizzles and then you find that it dies away. And there are many, many projects that we find die because of the lack of awareness or marketing or reaching out to others to become a part of this project. When we started talking about this, we thought, why isn't there more marketing with open source stuff? And we weren't even necessarily sure how to go about it. And first of all, it's not code, and you don't have any respect if you don't have any code associated with you. So marketing has typically been not trusted because it's associated with corporations. Corporations aren't necessarily having the same objectives as a true open source project. It's a little bit different now because corporations are really providing the grunt of the labor and a lot of projects. But even so, open source isn't proprietary. So this whole corporate backing thing is a very difficult one to approach. Are you working on this for your own reasons? Are you working on it for the altruistic open source marketing reasons or what? And so you're looking for substance. I think open source is all about substance. Is it real code? Is it really working? Is it really a good solution? And that's what you are looking to market. Right now there aren't that many people who really market open source. We'll talk about this a little further on, but there's an argument that you have even in internally when you're working with corporate marketing groups versus groups that do marketing for the projects. Because every step of the way the corporations are very interested in promoting themselves and that may not be to the advantage of the project itself. So we're looking for credibility. It became very clear right off the bat that no matter what you do in terms of marketing you can't market something into acceptance. It really has to be a good project that you're supporting and you're golden if you have one of those and you have one of those to market. Absolutely. That being said, marketing from our perspective is really all about the same things. You're trying to get people to contribute to the project. You're trying to attract people to help fund or promote the project. You're trying to get people to use it. You have to have users. You can't just create a bunch of code and nobody uses it. So you've got to have users and then you need the whole ecosystem because it all feeds itself. Developers, users, all the people that are creating the bits and pieces that tie into it. So there's a lot to the marketing for open source. So that brings us to the first set of constituents who market in open source and that will be commercial companies. So this is an example of another graffiti picture that we love. In 2001, you know, when Linux was just beginning to take off in corporations IBM was trying to get into Linux, especially Embrace Eclipse and start shipping their servers on Linux. And they wanted to break out of their blue suit, white shirt kind of a mentality. And so actually it was in San Francisco at Linux World. They paid an advertising agency to spray the sidewalks, I think in Haight, Ashbury and other areas with these logos of love, peace, Linux type of logos. And they got slapped with a huge fine of, I don't know, 2000 bucks or something by the city. And they thought it was well worth paying that because they got a huge amount of buzz in the industry and a huge amount of interest from people. And they really broke out of their image of blue suits and white shirts. The point is corporations absolutely market their involvement in open source and we'll talk about how they do it. One of the things that Tracy mentioned which is so important is it's not about marketing the company's products and services in a commercial way. So they have to be very different in the way they market themselves. So you'll see at ELC and LinuxCon as well. You'll see Intel, you'll see Qualcomm, you'll see TI and other companies. And what they talk about when they come to open source forums is about building community. It's about sponsoring the community. It's about their contributions to open source. And it's centered around how they are moving the industry forward and partnering with open source. And they don't overtly talk about their products or commercial technology. And I really have to commend Tim and the entire ELC as well. They're very, very particular about making sure that the speakers who attend the ELC also are not peddling and pushing a commercial message that they're actually imparting technical knowledge and moving the movement forward. And the whole tone of marketing when you see the OSTG from Intel or from Yachto or from any of the vendors who come to the show is all about very subtle awareness and education. It's not slick, it's not commercial, it's not marketing. And you know the other aspect of corporations which both of us have experienced is when we are inside the company also via marketing the open source movement inside of our companies as well because you do need the support of the entire corporate engine to support this level of messaging, this level of involvement, contribution and tone inside the companies as well. And then there's this T-shirt which is one of my favorites. So I was at Silicon Graphics in 1999, 2000, 2001. We were also trying to make a name for ourselves in open source and we thought we'd break out of our very corporate image by having this tie-dye T-shirt and this very provocative topic for the session. And it did grab a lot of people's attention. So corporations have either been very subtle or they've kind of completely changed the way they're imaged or they're branded in the industry when they market themselves to open source. The other aspect of corporations that Tracy and I were looking at was companies like Red Hat, like Windripper, like Montevist, etc. whose business model is based on building a commercial value proposition on top of open source. So they use open source as the source but then they build a product based on open source. And they also have to be very, very balanced in the way they market themselves. So on the one hand they have to say that they're leveraging open source and acknowledge where it came from but on the other hand they have to show where they are adding value on top of open source. So if customers have the opportunity to use open source as well, why should they buy commercial open source and where is the value add? And they also have to be very technical and based on merit and based on utility they need to market and not just based on religion. One of the things a CIO said to me was he said I am making a business decision and I know you're based on open source which is wonderful but I do need to know how it's going to benefit my bottom line and how it's going to return ROI to me and what are the features and functions and why should I work with you. And at the end of the day, one of the messages that really resonated with CIOs and corporate purchasers that I talked to was the fact that alignment with open source was an absolutely excellent business decision because it allowed you to leverage innovation, it allowed you to collaborate across the industry and it allowed you to reduce cost by pooling together mainline changes and innovations. So being standards based and not being locked into a vendor was also important to CIOs. So it's a subtle message between technical merit of the open source but the value you add and also how this value is important to the business that you're selling to. So with that I'm going to turn it back to Tracy to talk about the third constituents which is projects, open source projects and how they market. This is still my favorite slide to have to admit. I would go ahead to the next one anyway. So this is probably from my perspective the most... I'm sorry, Nithya, but it is the most important slide of the entire talk right here. And it's one that people came up to me the first time we did this presentation and said, oh, I keep thinking about that slide. And to a lot of marketing people this is probably not rocket science right here. But when you're looking at open source you may not really think about what it is that you want to accomplish and it's most important to start off with a strategic plan. And we are to the part where we're starting to talk about the Yachto project as an example of what went on but we very much approach things with the focus of what's our strategy, who do we want to attract, why do we want to attract them, where do we find them, what channels do we have to use to reach them and what can we say that really has value to them. And I think where we most often falter even if we come up with a strategic plan is when we get into the tactics and say what can we say that will really attract them. So figuring out who that market is, who are the code contributors, where are you going to find them and who are they and who do they... Now you have to even think about who do they work for. Is that important to the project or not? Who the end users are, just like any kind of segment analysis you would do in a corporate environment, you have to do this for your project also. Where is it most appropriate to use it? Who are those people and what are they building? Honestly, what are they building? Where can you find alignment with other projects and things? I'll talk about this a little bit in the future. You're looking for alignment anywhere you can because just like the code contributions in open source, the marketing really needs to be somewhat of a community effort too because you're not marketing all by yourself, you are marketing with a lot of other people and trying to get acceptance from a lot of other people. The channels are really crucial, figuring out exactly how you reach them and the positioning is very crucial too. I have been caught a number of times. It's very interesting how this has unfolded over the past couple of, I guess it's been about two years. I'm in a much different position now as a marketing person with the Yachto project than I was two years ago when I was an alien and someone to schlep around a couple of t-shirts in a boot. There's a reason for that, it's really shown to have had some value for the project, but the positioning was really key to that and it was a total change in mindset from the corporate view, frankly. It's not easy to build this strategic plan and be honest with yourself what you're trying to accomplish. I am part of a project that's represented by a number of different companies. It's not just Intel, it's not just Win River or TI or whomever is in the project, it's all of us and so I had to learn how to represent everybody. I don't just work for one company anymore. Even a very small project that's beginning to start out and starting to create a solution can benefit from this outline. It's these fundamental questions that you need to know in order to move the project forward, who do I work with, what's my product and so these things scale down to small projects as well as very, very large projects. The alliances is really key. We realized right off the bat that there was no way that the Yachto project was going to go anywhere without a lot of very important alliances and so you look at where you can get alliances for any kind of project that you're working on. You can look at corporations and see if you have alignment with another corporation. You can look at other open source projects and all of you band together to make it a bigger project or have greater reach because each one of you attracts a different kind of developer or user or whatever to the greater whole of the project. Segment focused alliances, if your project is really good for one particular industry segment then you should be spending all your time right there just making the most of who's in that segment and who might really want to align with you and do something special with you because they like the project that you're working with and then the industry as a whole. Are you in communications? Is it just embedded? Are there other places that you can be? Those are the different areas that you can form alliances and then once you do, you're trying to create momentum. You're trying to strategically get aligned, you're trying to join together, maybe do something jointly, have sponsorship from someone. There's a whole lot of different ways that you can show an alignment and get results from an alignment and so that's what you're trying to create to actually develop some momentum at the end. This is a good one and I think I'll ask this question and many of you may know this. So how do you tell a Linux developer that really likes you? They look at your sheet or your sheet is embedded. Yes, exactly. So, Hint, that's not really your spokesperson and we'll talk a lot about the spokesperson because a spokesperson is such an important aspect of a project's success. A spokesperson is really representative for the project and the job is like how you know how you go about finding a job where you have to schmooze and do a lot of promotion of yourself. It's a bit like that except that there are a lot of very interesting opportunities to do it. In real estate they say it's all about location, location, location and in schmoozing and in promoting a project and moving it forward it's really about networking, networking, networking. And the Linux community and the open source community provides a lot of very, very good venues to connect with other like-minded people from an Alliance perspective as Tracy was indicated. Your dinner events and what I love about some of the embedded Linux conference events as well as LinuxCon there's a lot of social element built into the conference agenda there are evening events and then there are lunch and so on and so forth always try to find someone you can go to dinner with or sit with or talk to and find local lugs where you can go talk to people and promote the project. And at the end of the day you need to give to get so it's share, share what you're doing why you're passionate about it what problem you're trying to solve and ask for help. One of the things a lot of us tend not to do we talk to be very self-sufficient but it's amazing when you open and ask for help people are more than happy to give you an opinion or a suggestion or an introduction to somebody and that's where you can also say I really admire what you're doing I'd like you to get involved in this project and people do. One of the things we also felt that worked very well was because you are the one who's caring about the future of that project you really need to be persistent and you need to follow up you care about it more than the person that you're trying to get to be involved in the project and you have to convince them to be involved. But there is no need to be annoying but persistence is as you can see a common thread throughout this and it's all about relationships in this business it's about knowing people it's liking people it's creating a common vision that they can buy into and the point in asking also about the developer who likes you and doesn't like you is if it's not you you've got to find someone on your team who likes doing this and likes going out and evangelizing the solution and finding like-minded people who are enjoying the project in a user capacity or an alliance capacity or a developer capacity and the other thing we found was you'll find in this event and in other Linux events also the people who are really memorable the people who have a point of view they're either blogging about it they're tweeting about it they have a website, they write articles because they really believe in it and they are passionate about it so we love goofy handouts we love t-shirts and stickers and things that are memorable and then volunteer to be a speaker at a show or to be a volunteer at these events in whatever capacity all of those allow you to get the word out get connections and community I think we have one of the biggest schmoozers in the audience which is Tim Bird who is a big marketing and a big marketing effort on your part to build it from nothing into something and that's pretty much exactly the kind of person you would want to have that people respect as well as interesting things to say oh, maybe I stretched it too far for you okay, I don't really mean that maybe you're not such a great example but seriously, look at it now it's huge and what happened you ended up with a big alliance with the Linux Foundation and it grew even bigger, right? so now it keeps going and going anyway, now you end up with a team and so I don't know how you look at this little thing and then you talk, I can't do that I have to look at the big thing I don't know about all projects because I'm not the goddess of everything open source, bless you and I certainly only worked with projects with my particular company and now with some other companies on the Yachto project but the governance model to me is really important and if you don't have a governance model that can support marketing for instance you don't get any so from a Yachto project point of view we actually have a governance model where people contribute money and they allocate a budget to marketing just like a company would and I think that's really set us apart from a lot of other projects out there anyway, and it gives you a way that people can really contribute to the project whoever's involved in it, they're part of this governance model and it makes a big difference creating channels for you know I think this is your slide actually isn't it, well you should just go on under the slide okay, yeah go ahead both of us can speak to each other's slides and I think you know one of the things that I really liked about the Yachto project and I worked on it and projects in general good projects that I've worked on is you've got to be transparent and you've got to be honest people don't like it the whole notion of open source is that you're deciding it in an open and an honest forum whether you're gathering requirements or making decisions on what goes into the next release and you'll find that successful projects do that, they provide forums for requirements gathering in fact a lot of these conferences are used for birds of a feather type of discussion for example where the project lead gives an update on the project would also solicit feedback on the list of requirements for the next project there is no smoky room behind the scenes discussions of what goes into the project which I really like I'm a product manager in another life and so I really like the fact that I can honestly sit down in an open source project with users with developers and say what do we do next guys and what's the right direction for this project and creating a marketing plan and I think Tracy and I experience this constantly it's again not about slickness it's not about these brochures and slick value propositions and things like that so we had to, exactly we had to put a different hat on when we did open source marketing because at the end of the day it has to be useful, it has to have technical merit the white paper or the application note that you write or the case study has to have practical value it has to say how do I do it and what does it have and does it have the facts and figures that I need, is there sample code that I can download, is there training and is there a code fest or is there a collaboration opportunity where I can ask others in a very open and honest way for help in doing this so we found that it's not the same as corporate marketing and you just really need to understand that and provide the value that the audience is looking for the other one we figured out is how valuable a community manager is because in the beginning we were all kind of saying what's each of our role what's the marketing person's role what's the community manager's role what's the development lead's role and so on and so forth and the community manager is like the COO he is the operations guy or she is the operations person who really works very hard to attract developers create the infrastructure for downloads, for chats for IRC, for code reviews for everything so what happens is as you get bigger as a project you have the maintainer who really is the technical vision and the lead and then you have the community manager who helps get the skids the greases or greases the skids and it just works well and then you have the marketing person who brings awareness and gets the users and things like that the other thing the community manager is really good at doing is noticing nuances and changes and users and developers and what they need and what they're looking for and what he or she is hearing and so like Jeff Rowe is our community manager for the OCTO project and he'll often call me up and say I've had like three people talking about this what can we do to solve this problem or how can we write something up to push people in the right direction so that they get the right information or meet the right people or whatever so we work together and I think he uses me as a megaphone and almost a process to get information out and he's collecting information and working with individuals and their personalities so it's a very interesting sort of balance so this is where you'll actually get to see the behind the scenes of the OCTO project and I'll hand it off to Trace and she'll walk you through how the project was started and how it functions what are the different structures of the organization because I think when you look at a case study you really learn in practice how things worked and how things evolved so the picture that was just up there when we started off the project we didn't have any money, we didn't have anything the first thing that marketing people like to do is they like to go brand stuff we're going to brand everything we just brand everything I have to admit if you go out to the booth and look at it but we started off, we had a little animation that we did because it would tell people what the project was and we could point anybody we wanted to product managers, developers anybody, our own managers look what we did to that animation it told the whole story in about two minutes and this was a character from the animation and then we thought okay well we have an asset we have one artistic asset we're going to put it on a we're just to create not really a logo but a representation of the project and we had a logo and that's where we started and that's all we had for the longest time I talked a little bit about the advocacy team and how it came about through the governance model we came up with a way to actually have sub teams we defined that in the advisory board and then when we collected money they actually gave a budget to the marketing team and it was really pretty fabulous mind you we argued a lot about it, what good is marketing you know it's not going to make it chachky what good is that but I'll tell you what internally at Intel there are a lot of open source projects that are being worked on in a number of ways and I actually heard through the great vine last week that somebody said an engineer who had pushed out an open source project of some kind and he basically said you know I wouldn't say if I known today or if I known last year what I was going to say today it's that I wish I had had marketing to help me out with this project a year ago because basically it hadn't gotten where he thought it should go and I don't know you know I think that we feel like the Yachta project moved along a lot quicker than we thought it would because of some of the marketing efforts not to mention the kick-ass technology just to add to what you said an important decision I think we made early on was not calling it marketing but instead calling it advocacy because essentially we were advocating on behalf of the users and also on behalf of the project so we didn't want to use the word marketing we didn't think it fit into the project that's not true we were trying to fool all the engineers who were on the advisory board into giving us money without it it seemed like it was going to marketing okay the secrets out we figured out really right off the bat the most important conference we would ever go to was ELC we earmarked that as we thought that's where the movers and shakers in the industry were going to be and who would use our project and this is where we're going to put all of our money so you will see us at ELC forever because it's very important to us even if we're the project will always continue to grow and this particular conference is our conference as far as we're concerned I mean this is where we want to be you people who will make or break the Octo project we're also very unified you know the favorite my favorite thing about working on the advocacy team is that I don't have to talk about Intel I don't have to talk about Intel anymore I get to talk about the Octo project and I get to talk about TI and I get to talk about and I get to talk about you know, manner graphics and all the other people who are part of the advisory board and it's a fabulous good feeling because all those people are really important to the project and so and they do the same and it's really all about working really hard even though it's not always possible to have the diverse members of the advisory board present at trainings or have demos in the booth or whatever and we try you'll see that even though we make t-shirts and it may be that a company pays for t-shirts or whatever but nobody puts their logo on it and we keep talking about it you know I'd be more willing to make some stuff for you Tracy if I could put my company logo on it and you know the feeling is always to resist it because once you start individually identifying the members then the whole becomes a little bit less in my perspective so the Octo project is exactly that it's the Octo project I'll also tell you the one thing that we did that I thought I would get fired over from the start the first thing we did was we went to ELC in Cambridge and I wanted a sponsorship and we were late because we had just started really working on the project and figuring out how to get people involved and whatever and so we bought a sponsorship under the name the Octo project and I went and begged for money for it and no one would, no one wanted to give me money because I wouldn't put the Intel logo out there and so I said I'm sorry if you don't want to give me money fine we'll go you know we didn't, we were still building the advisory board we were still getting people on board so it wasn't you know a huge number of people yet and so we finally did it we went out with the Octo project and it set the stage for the project being a project and not a corporate project and I can't tell you how important that is to fight those battles internally and they're subtle, it was a very subtle thing we could have easily put anybody's logo up there and had a little Octo project booth there and done very well so but it set the stage for the Octo project moving forward and how we all feel about it branding yeah so now we have the Octo project branding I don't know if we like it, we have it everything looks the same it's got some yellow stripes we have some very special t-shirts in here that no one else has because they're limited quantity and I only handed them out to the Octo project soul mates but you guys can be included okay some more interesting elements so messaging, we do this just like a company would we look at our key segments and we target our messages to them so we have messages for developers we have messages for users we have messages for other marketing people we have a lot of them and the coolest thing is, this line if we hear customers reiterate our messaging we know we're on track oh my gosh we use the Octo project and they say blah blah blah we did in two days instead of two months and there it is on our little messaging list so this stuff is really crucial it's not that you say it and they believe it it's that you say it and they actually experience it and then other people believe it so you can never forget to do the messaging correctly and it took us months months and months, reiteration and after you weren't working on the project we were still reiterating these messages launch requirements we didn't just shove this thing out the door we really had some code but we didn't have finish code we didn't launch until we had enough people that it really made a difference to really support the project two companies wasn't enough if you're going to have a project that supports multiple architectures you better have someone from all those architectures there to really say that they believe in it so we had those kinds of requirements before we would launch we just weren't going to go forward with it we didn't think it would succeed and then Nithya talked about this before we really, we just talked about facts you know we're not all about aren't we great, aren't we wonderful we really try to look at what's the value of this stuff and that's what we market because nobody nobody involved in open source really listens to bullshit frankly so we really try to concentrate on what's real where it's going to help people where it's going to be useful where people are actually going to be able to contribute and we try to open all those doors the whole time absolutely so you know just to conclude and we have about 10 minutes so we can throw it open for questions at the end of the day reason marketing the reason advocacy and awareness is so important is because you're building a community around a very important piece of technology or code and without that it's like a tree falling in the forest you just don't hear it if there's no one there and so it's important to get the word out and you're building a community around the technology you're building a community of developers users, collaborators alliances around the community around the technology rather and don't let the project fizzle make sure that you have enough marketing enough structure and thought process behind your technology before it goes out so just with that in mind I just wanted to acknowledge some of the contributions we got to this story we found a lot of these fantastic graffiti pictures that I talked about we found it online and there's a fellow who goes around the world taking pictures of Linux graffiti that's where we found it Tracy and I when we presented at Barcelona Spain at the ELC we also went around Barcelona and took pictures of graffiti that we found and that's part of the culture of Barcelona they actually let people come in and put graffiti on shop windows and we only had to walk exactly and there are a number of open source sites that you can see from corporations, Qualcomm has a very good site, Intel has a very good site so you'll get a sense of how companies are messaging if you are a new company to open source and you want to see how others are doing it and if you want to see how a project is doing it's certainly check out yachterproject.org I think they're doing a really fantastic job of marketing we have two sets of t-shirts there you're more than welcome to partake but wanted to throw it open for questions in case you guys had any questions