 Good morning, my name is Charles Jones and it's for presently the launching track in your tentative about promoting your office and your language. Welcome, everyone, thank you for being here. So very quickly I thought about doing an introduction, many of you know me already, my name is Charles Jones and I know the things these days. Mostly working on promoting your office on social media but also contributing to the general marketing. So this session has one specific topic which is the motion of your office in native languages and I've been so to speak working on promoting your office and earlier openoffice.org in precisely worldwide native language communities. And today I would like perhaps to help and share my experiences about precisely this aspect of promoting and marketing a new office and engaging people in a new office project when you do not or you do not speak English or when your English is not good enough. So let's start right away. We're first going to discuss a little bit, you know, what is striking when you are not speaking English or English is that you want to tell me first which is that language is not an abstract reality. In fact language is most of the time a geographical, cultural, maybe even economical context. And while I would say that it is always the case, basically there is a set of realities that frame where your language and how your language lives, flows, kinds maybe. And this in turn makes for different realities based on language and the area you are in. So here I've got a very, very summary, perhaps some schematic set of examples of types of language matching two days of reality. And of course I'm not suggesting that all of these actions or all of these approaches are the most absolutely adopt but basically these are maybe approaches that have been seen sometimes to be more of a priority in comparison to others. So the important thing while you're considering the promotion of new office in languages other than English is that you need to tailor an instinctive, vital approach. So as I said examples, for instance, we're going to have intake languages so if you're visiting India, what we can see is that what really interests or volunteers on the field is going to be education and raising the brand words is one example. If you're going to Western Europe and to a large extent Eastern Europe too, what you're going to have is forms of promotion that involve much more social beliefs and social media and marketing, for instance. Then you have Portuguese and Brazilian, which is perhaps one of the same that Portuguese in general. Well you have a reality, which is a reality of Brazil and free and open for software in Brazil. So the approach will be a bit different. There will be business supports about growing skills and of course the relations with the national and local companies. Then Asian, Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Of course these three countries and these three cultures and these three languages encompass wide cultural differences. We're not putting them in the same basket because I don't know better. It's just that they share a common reality from what I can see. Which is indeed a sophisticated form of social media, that's one thing. But at least that's my experience with China and PRC distribution. That is how you insert liberal office somehow in the distribution. How people can get liberal office. Because most of the time, for instance, in PRC you're going to have people who are very happy to use pirated software from Microsoft. And that's just about it. So if you manage to get distribution deals involving money or not, then you're striking something really big in PRC automatically. African languages, of course, you're again encompassing a wide variety of languages, cultures, spaces. Then you're going to have a different kind of approach which is going to focus mostly on education, but also distribution, you're again, distribution. It's something quite different from the distribution pattern you have in PRC, for instance. So this being said, here is, I wouldn't say a standard list, but it's basically a list of actions that is always going to happen. There's not a one-minute recipe, but there are things that may not be obvious, but it's just being useful, and that they want to consider what a promoting liberal office is in their language. So of course it starts with online presence, websites, and a few years ago they stopped there, but it's not just a website. The website at home, this is not where you can human spread the news around the world. So you can do a website with active social media accounts. Active social media accounts means active social media accounts, not let's say Twitter accounts sleeping, otherwise it's not really good news. But it also means being available and having a strong presence on social media. It may seem obvious, but it is not. I'm very happy, I must say, when I'm looking at a liberal class like this, when I look at all these liberal office groups that basically exist for a wide number of languages, and very little for that reason, that shows there is action. But there are cultures and languages and groups and sociologies that essentially do not encourage the presence of social media. Some people will just be like, hey, you know I'm not on Twitter, it's okay not to be on Twitter. But there are people who will say, you know I'm not on Twitter, so why should I be on Twitter? Well, the point is not what you do, the point is that if you actually want to spread the word, you need channels and networks that are available to you. That also means another thing, which has, let's say, a little bit more of a trolling potential than what I said at the time so far. We will meet and show there are people here or in other groups who will tell me, or who will tell you, you know, it's very important not, or to privilege social networks that do not, let's say, have a mining on your profile and what have you done. It's very important not to give Facebook because Facebook is involved. I think Facebook is involved. Many people think that Facebook is equal. This being said, Facebook is where everybody is. So I do not care whether you feel that Facebook is equal. I do not care whether you think that that's more, that's the best thing since widespread. I think that is an excellent, beautiful idea. But Facebook is where everybody is. And if you're on Facebook, then you're a group of plus. Very goodness. Because there's a whole lot of people who are a group of plus too, so it's fine. But again, you need to be where you're existing and potentially users are. Then, dots. An interactive presentation of your office. I must plead guilty because I'm probably the bad example here. But essentially, if you can have anything from, you know, standard brochures, they don't have to be six pages long. It's not like that. Just small presentation brochures like one leaflet, maybe one, you know, one sheet of paper, at least something you can print for just simply share by email. It's just fine. That gives you a very simple kind of collateral that you can make more. And of course, interactive video presentation. We started to see, thanks to the 4-day team, some very nice presentation videos about their office this year. I hope they will be translated for the presentation that can be spread. Then, of course, meetings and participation. I think this one is quite obvious. We usually don't have much of a problem with explaining this one. Then, this is a bit more complicated. The one because it's more difficult and second because it's just not so obvious to understand. Growing a user base and attracting new countries. We've said this before, but marketing recipes for LibreOffice as a community tend to be kind of no go. Because if you're trying to apply traditional marketing techniques during the swap teams, you know, pricing mix of what I have here, it's not going to work. The product is both catering to such a broad range of users. And the product itself is not a product. It is a community producing software. So it's a bit complicated at first. But one of the logical consequences of that is that in fact when you are promoting LibreOffice, you're not just promoting the fact that LibreOffice is a great software, you're actually promoting the fact that there is a community and that anyone can join. And in fact, any user, anyone who made the conscious decision or made the unconscious in front to nominate LibreOffice uses at that very moment he or she is the potential candidate to join your community. And I know that it's very hard for our contributors who are localizing LibreOffice to even have time to set up some sort of welcoming community with a user support activity on one side and maybe localize quality insurance or localize bills from the other localization team next to it, maybe a little bit of translating documentation activities. That is actually quite hard because it simply requires time and it simply requires manpower, which most of us don't know how. Then, and you've noticed that from this last one, although this is all from being an exhaustive list, of course, I've listed the traditional promotions such as ads. I think that might work. We have one good example of how it can work and one bad example. The good example is, well, what Firefox did a few years ago with their ads in the New York Times. So they had ads in the New York Times and their download really showed progress, I mean big progress. We have another one, which is that it was the ad in the site's journal for LibreOffice and one of the downloads would seem to have decreased, obviously, they could not seem to have increased by any sensible factor after this ad, which truly is very impressive, but you know, rotary orders. I don't know, at least what we saw was an interest in essentially anything that had to do with about us pages and document the foundation of one. I think the download page was lovely, which is a bit crazy. Well, the journal, the site journal. Yeah, the site journal. I know, I know. I know. It was lovely. I think the site journal is known for very intellectual political or technical stuff. I do not have to not see it. They are open. Yeah, but I have not seen the ad myself. But it was in paper. That was in paper. That was the funny thing. It was in paper edition, but inside of it. So then suddenly you said, you know what? It's just as stupid as that. You had no conversion rate because of course you could not get it. So you also get it as a download program which is very depressing and useful for the ad marketing paper. Anyway, I'm going to come back to this topic of the role in your community. Because again, while it may seem very different from marketing, in fact, marketing opens or is free and open from software. It's precisely about growing your community. So the community, as we say, is made of your users and the contributors of any kind that you have. Whether they are developers, localizers, documentation writers, people providing user support, people providing, you know, working with the quality assurance of localize builds, showing up at events to help you lose these of art. This is what you need. And you need to grow that. You need to grow at least some part of it because in fact that is how you grow your market share. That is how you grow your user base. Do not think, please do not think that you are in some sort of company where there is a team on the one hand and then there is your customers aka your market. No, that's not going to work. First of all because you have the money that's facing and you are not an entity or business. Therefore do not have this money based relationship that you are going to have with customers. So you are going to have users and these users are going to be sometimes noisy and sometimes they are going to thank you and sometimes a small chunk of them might actually be interested in helping. And helping of course they can do in various capacities. Even if they are not technical, that's okay. You also need people. Yet, attending groups, ensuring that people asking questions online are being answered, helping out with documentation, producing maybe collateral, maybe you need something like a cluster or whatever you need. So only people can help. And of course you have the localizers and people who are communicating should invest more time in providing quality insurance and contributing to quality insurance. So it's very important to nurture your local community the community in your language. Now, it sounds a little bit different but it's actually pretty much the same continuation. When you have a community and the bigger your community is the more it shows inside the wider e-books in the team. In fact it's just a simple thing. I called this in-down marketing and the term had the tickets to me but basically you have in-down marketing and out-down marketing. Out-down marketing is what you should think that marketing is. But in fact marketing, and I don't have a graph there to show you, marketing starts with tradition, product definition and you should include this industrial marketing. And whether you're an industrial player or not, I can care for this in-down marketing. It starts when out of your corporate strategy you can derive product definition based not just on market research but actually based on your resources your state-of-the-art technology how you can service your customers you know, all this. And you have a phase where you have in-down marketing and this in-down marketing goes from that very moment to the moment when you have shipped your product out of the door and then everybody still that's a very important thing. That very moment the in-down marketing stops and in theory you have the up-down marketing work and it's going to be promotion, promotion, promotion. So in the office just like for the subject project in-down marketing is actually extraordinary important. There are reasons for that. Again, we're not in a framework where you can have customers and those customers pay in exchange for something whether they're in a consumer's market or a corporate market it doesn't make any difference. When you are inside of your office thinking of hope rating as contributing well, you're not handling customers by any means. But you only work with the community and this community can grow or this community can diminish but if the community grows you will find out that in fact you are growing your user base and therefore you're doing the right job and promoting your office. So it's important that not just that you grow your user base you grow your community and your contributors it's actually extremely important that you ensure that your community is integrated, really integrated inside of your office project. Is it easy? Well processes structures even when they're not really effective or detailed or not even handy all one thing they can help by being effective by proving that they're effective this is one thing but I don't think in my experience this is the difficulty the real difficulty is cultural differences and language barriers you first have to deal with the fact that every individual is unique and you're going to have shy people shy people may not want or dare to express themselves even in their language but after that if you send them you need to tell I don't know who in English because he is maybe German or she is Italian and you need to tell them about something then you will have to see people who are just very embarrassed but complicated in the language and the fact is that at the end of the day many people think that they cannot communicate in English but actually in written form they can and they will just find so please don't think you need a states diploma in English master to use in English I can assure you this is not how it works but so the most important part is really the side of human interaction yet it is the most important because this is how you show first of all it exists it shows who you are it shows what you do and then it shows you can even have opinions and your opinions just matter as much as anybody else's and you're just simply adding to the country views so you enrich the broader parts of that side so that would be my main idea for this session it is really that if you want to think about promoting the English language in your language it is good to be older but yes there are a few obvious things which we discussed small collaborations websites being in the social media ensuring that you take the right approach and you understand what you need and what is possible in your own geography cultural context that might help but aside that the earlier community is the most important thing well thank you this presentation was meant to be relatively short because we are here to share so if you have questions I'm sure you do have questions so please go ahead two questions I was just thinking for example in Canada we don't have any group or association so as far as the name of our site we were going to organize and create one does it really matter what name is there an association with the Indians well I think it's going to be very easy I think you're still going to page seven pages on our website I don't know what is the best approach where you might have something called CAA CAA.meagorale CAA.meagorale slash Canada CAA we can't name CAA we can't name CAA CAA is what CAA is the 10th one oh yeah CAA is the 10th one U.S. U.S. there is two things the language and the country. Yes. I want to clarify. So we want to avoid the... Yeah, thank you. ...we already discussed that. So Michel finds another way to expose the countries without political... Well, we can have what we call racial groups. I mean, you know, so there's the... I mean, I know what really became the North American group, but instead it was translated into some sort of U.S. group. So... So I'm sure you can have like Canada or something. We should discuss countries in particular. Yeah. And in Italy, for very well, the Libre Italia concert. Yeah. And... Yeah. Yeah, because that recalls the Libre office that it's the... basically it's the only... it's the only real product of the Libre. So if you call the Libre Italia, there isn't an immediate association and that's working very well. So we can check if we can buy... buy some domain names and songs and... We already have the Libre Italia and it's going to be a property of the association soon. You're very organized and you're... No, of course. You should think also to... Just to... Yeah. Yeah. We had a... I think that... We have... But the way... The way structure teams can... know it all from... The way that's created is also a conversation. Yeah. So if you have an existing organization... It's running in the same way, by the way. It's the marketing guy. It's running in the same way. Sure. But... Then that becomes a question about... Is Libre Italia T... We can say that's the... Which they've read in... Digraphs, but it's not like... Maybe it's controlled by T.F. Yes, we... For instance, you know, if we start inside T.F. and then Libre Canada wants to do something then that's a conversation between them. T.F. Do we still need something? So... Yeah. It's just slightly different. Yeah. Although I think that... So we start Libre Italia through Google+. And... The... What I've done at first was to invite all the people that I knew and all the people that were commenting about open source in the other community. So I... I was... I was looking at the... I think community always on Google+. The Fedora community on Google+. And the... The general links community here on Google+. And I was just... connecting people and sending every now and then a message that Libre Italia and we want to visit it. And actually because of the peculiar situation of Italy in T.F. you have to be admitted in Google+. So it's not free. It's moderated. And it's going to be moderated forever because I don't know some people there. It's very... You know, in Italy is the only place where there is an association supporting a budget of an office and clearly hostile to Libre office. But I mean really hostile means you are a son of a bitch which is myself. So this is hostile. So... And I understand it's a peculiar situation. We are Italians. You should live in Italy for a couple of years to understand how we are done with our mindset works. But this is... I accept your position. But the fact that we created something that was close where people was invited to share experiences worked extremely well you think that in just over one year we have 2,400 people that asked to be an associate and are now associated with Libre Italia In five days we have 110 members of the association which is just crazy. If you think that TDF in four years, 200 members we have 110 in five days. I think it's just incredible. And I think it is because we have been able to create a lot of kind of group in the group inside the Google Class community. So, repeating or copying or cloning the Italian experience I think it makes sense. Yes. Project list and... Yeah. In two days. In two days. There is a marketing workshop later on today. Yes. And there is also... Yeah. There is also a community. Maybe you can discuss there and then post on the project list in Seattle and around and get them on this TDF help on website. And thank you everyone again. You're not going to hear at all from who's very eager to tell you about features. So, thank you everyone. Thank you everyone.