 a problem that is connected to the fact that Microsoft was so smart to handle their communication that their communication was not just communicating about Microsoft's problem, but was about, I would say, uneducating people about digital companies. So if you are used to Microsoft messages, Microsoft messages are so nicely, also smartly designed that they not only explain you some stuff, but they uneducate you about the general right, digital rights and so on. I mean, Microsoft is really a smart company. It's really a smart company, which doesn't mean that I appreciate what Microsoft is doing, but they, in terms of marketing, they employ some of the smartest marketing guys around. Their PR agency, which is not very well known, it's called Wagon and Edstrom, is based in Seattle. It's a very, it's a big PR agency and the lady that owns the agency is an incredibly smart lady that has the luck to be, she has been a schoolmate of Bill Gates. So she was I because she was a schoolmate of Bill Gates. She's a very smart PR lady and she has only one customer, Microsoft. But you can imagine what it means to be the PR agency of Microsoft corporate. One customer is enough to maintain the agency, of course. And she's really smart, smart lady. They have, in addition to the internal staff of Microsoft as porters, they have 50 people working at Wagon and Edstrom on the ground, messages, and to do PR for Microsoft. So it's, if you are and they are smart people, at the end, you are smart in what you're doing. Our big advantage, I think, is that we can be as smart as Microsoft because, luckily, neurons have no frontiers. So neurons are not just based in Seattle and Brentwood. And we have the opportunity of a house-marking Microsoft because we do not have the corporate culture that limits our creativity. The corporate culture is a limitation in many, many instances, in many cases, to creativity. So we have an opportunity and let's see how we can have the opportunity of house-marking Microsoft in creating messages about the PR office. It's not easy, you can do that. So the message is a complicated story. If there is anyone that thinks that when I say something, you all understand the same thing, forget about it. So I think there are 20 people here. I say one word and there are 20 different understanding of the same word. This is what happens because we all understand my message according to a number of staff which is your experience, your background, your location and so on. So of course, when we craft messages, we cannot think that we craft messages according to our experience. We have to be very careful in understanding who we are talking to, who we are speaking to because that is the message that we have to craft. I cannot craft a message because I'm Italian and I have a kind of humanities background but I have to craft a message according to the target audience I'm trying to reach because that is the only way I can be affected. Because that is what happens to your... I understand that this is not a nice way of summarizing your brain but this is how it works. So you have a sensor that filters the information. You have a short-term memory that sees if the message is pertinent which means I'm interested or not, if I'm interested in getting it and I filter it down if I'm not interested, I throw it away and then you score the message. You score the message but the message to be picked up again needs to be, let's say, nurtured in a way. So you have to go on that message more times. Repetition is key because one message is lost into your long-term memory. Actually, there is a huge amount of discussions about how much memory has an individual in IT terms because that is the only... I mean, we are used about talking about gigabytes of RAM, terabytes of storage and so on. So there are two different schools. One says that our memory is more or less in the terabyte. I mean, our brain, in the terabyte environment. Of course, there's no way of measuring it so it's just a scale. And then there's another one that says that our memory is kind of flutueling. So the memory that we really use is kind of 2 megabytes but just use it as a reference. But our brain is so smart that cannot move these 2 megabytes around in a way that they pick up from a kind of garden which is a lot bigger. It's like you pick one flower at a time and use that flower and you have a huge garden of flowers and your brain is so smart. So I don't know. I mean, they're both fascinating in terms of theories. I think that the human memory is just huge. And of course the problem is that how good you are in managing your own memory. There are people that remember more things. There are people that remember things in a different way. But anyway, repetition is key just because if we have... Let's assume that we have 2 megabytes of memory in our brain. One information against 2 megabytes of memory will just drone into a sea of nothing. So we have to repeat the message. And there are a few rooms that we have to think about messages. This of course was done for journalists but if we replace the word journalist for your public we have to be fast in our messages just because today we are used to information that are really fast in the way that they are managed. Today when I started a message had a life of probably weeks because the way of transferring the message from the originating part to the... from one part to the other was slow. There was no internet so it was not immediate. Either you were able to go through the phone or it took at least one week to get a printed message from the source to the reader. Today it takes one second and you have a message spread around the world. So of course this means that we have to be fast with messages. Otherwise if we are not fast in creating messages the message will be already old enough not to be a message anymore. We have to be factual. We must use facts. We have to be frank so we don't have to tell lies. Mark Tulane used to say, never tell a lie. You don't have to remember which lie you are told. Which is true if you think because if you start to tell lies then you have that group of people I told that it was a scientist and that other one I told that it was a developer and then what happens when I talk to one group I have to build a story and the other one I have to build another one. So just tell what you are and what you do. Respect people we are talking to and be friendly. We have five founding principles. These are key and important. We have chosen copy left license. Why? Because the project was born from the community and the copy left license is a license that was born from the community. I'm not discussing about the virtues of one license against the other one. The reality is that the copy left license forces you to be a member of the community because you have to give back what you are developing and only if you are a good member of the community you can accept this concept. Because of course there are people that resist this concept because they say why should I share what I am writing what should I share what I am developing. Why? If I smarter than the others then if I share I use something. This is a no community attitude. It is not by chance that copy left license are not loved by enterprises or at least by certain enterprises. Red Hat is releasing software with a copy left license but Red Hat is a company that was born with a kind of open source DNA. Trying to ask to an IBM employee which license that you should use and they would say permissive. Because that is their license. The companies, and again I don't want to discuss the merit between permissive and copy left license, I am for copy left but I know that there are smart people that are for permissive. But the reality is that the permissive allows you one day to close the tab, pick up the code and do not release anything to the community. This is the unfortunate reality so copy left license is the community the copy left license in fact protects the weakest member because the guy that commits just one patch in his life at the end has the same rights of the one that commits one patch per day. But the copy left license guarantees you that you can attract people because everyone will feel protected by the copy left license. There is no chance that you have committed one small bit of code one day and the other day the large corporation comes in, picks up your contribution makes it part of a progressive software and buy buy. So that is the reality of permissive license. We do not have a particular agreement. Again, this is something that companies like and I think that I've been just a little bit a little bit of background about myself. So I have been doing humanities. I have started my life by being a teacher of geography at the university then after two years of not being paid I realized that I had to change my job because you cannot really live a long time without being paid. So I switched to the, as I was a journalist I started to handle PR for companies and I was hired by Hannibal in 1970-1980 to manage the communication for their printer division. Hannibal at the time was the second largest IT company worldwide. And so I've been a manager at Hannibal and so I know how corporations think about that. Basically the relationship between corporation and employee is a relation where the company does not trust the employees and therefore they ask a particular agreement because they want the employee to take all the responsibility and they do not want to have responsibility. Then we have meritocracy. Meritocracy means that if you do stuff you are recognized, if you don't do stuff you are not recognized. So it's a kind of democracy that is based on how much you contribute to the project. Community governance, this is very important. We, maybe you don't know, but apart from having members and having our management, if we can call the management elected by the members, in addition to that we have a rule that says that in our governing bodies not more than one-third of the members of that governing body can be affiliated to the same company organization or anything. This means that in our board of directors there cannot be more than two people who are employees of the same company. And this is just because we don't want to recreate the situation where San was dominating the OpenOffice.org project just because at the end of the situation was, yes, but I'm paying all the developers so I should take the decision. We don't buy this kind of project. And then is vendor independent. And again this one-third rule is to guarantee vendor independence. And these are the assets that we have to use when we create messages of government foundation and bigger office. And again, the reason why TDF was born are the following, to promote free software. If you read the articles when we fought, most of the articles or most many articles were writing that we fought against our vote. That is completely false. We didn't fought against anyone. The discussion about the fork started way before Oracle even thought about acquiring San. So they started actually, and some people were there, we started talking about forking in 2006 at the Lyon conference. So way before, of course then, I mean forking a project like open office is not an easy task. And I always say that the 16 founders have been so, you know, forking open office to create a project that is competitive with Microsoft, competitive with IBM. It's like diving into, I don't know, I mean, this is because I'm a geographer. So in Venezuela, there is the highest fall worldwide called Salto Angel. It's 900 meters, and at the end of Salto Angel, there is a small lake. And I said forking open office to create different office, it is like diving from the top of Salto Angel into the small lake at the end without any parachute. Hoping that something happening in between. And we did it, and we demonstrated that it was possible. But the reality is that we were really, I would say, we were brave and crazy at the same time. Because you don't know, I mean, it's difficult, I know the process, but it's difficult to believe that we were able to recreate an infrastructure, to recreate a discipline between developers, to recreate a discipline inside the community, to recreate the community in some areas. All done now, betting on your personal capabilities. You don't have a company behind, you don't have a structure, you don't have rules. So that's, it was a positive for, it was not a negative for, that is a guess. So we always have to think that we must give positive messages about LibreOffice and the Document Foundation. We want freedom of the users. We want open standards. We want document freedom. We want a software that is accessible to everyone. When we present LibreOffice, don't focus on feature. Feature are just used, they're useful for the user, but they're useless as a message. Because if you start discussing feature, there will always be a feature that someone doesn't like. We have to tell people that we give them professional software that allows them to be as productive as they were using proprietary software. But in addition, it's using standard formats, it's not trying to lock in him into a software. I always tell, when I discuss LibreOffice, one of the things that I say, is that if you start in one LibreOffice tomorrow, in a year you can probably abandon, but if you don't like LibreOffice anymore, you can abandon LibreOffice and employ another software that supports on the earth, and nothing happens. People look at me and say, you're telling me that I should use LibreOffice, but at the same time, if I'm not happy I can change it. I say, you are for freedom. You cannot be supporting freedom or 50% freedom, but the other 50% sorry, you are not free. Either you're free or you're not. And being free, you're free for time on what I'm telling you today. And it's like, you know, the guy was saying during the Illuminism, I might not agree with your ideas, but I will defend your ideas because I want the freedom of ideas. So it's, I don't know, Illuminism was probably a little bit more important than LibreOffice, but I don't want to get us into the same area, but we must tell people that it is a positive way to employ LibreOffice. And this is, I know that people that see my presentation are probably fed up with this slide, but this I really suggest, this guy is a friend, so of course you cannot take his way, his copyright, but this I think is depicts in one image what happened before. So this is the Sun umbrella culture. Sun is the umbrella, this is the community. Of course, if you are under the umbrella of a company, even if you are a member of the community, then the company tends to protect you like an umbrella protects you when it's raining. We just reverse the umbrella and make that it says a mixing bowl, but people say this is a candle and everyone has to row in the same direction, whatever you prefer. But this is important to say that, you know, this is the community on its own. There is no one protecting the community from the water if the water is flowing from the sky. So if the community on its own has to take its own decision, has to be brave enough not to rely on what is happening under the umbrella, because if it's raining, we all get wet. So that's the... And this is important because people have to understand that we are a different project We are independent and independence from us is really a key asset. We don't want any company to come in and say, you know, it would be better to do this this way. If they are very smart, they can convince us that that should be the way, but it's not because they have more shares or more power or more money, it's because they're smarter. If they're smarter, that's a fair contribution to the project. If they're not smarter and just more powerful, sorry, there are other projects that are blind to be driven by a company. You can go there. And this is something that I use when I show... In some cases, this is a graffiti, it's a real one. You can... I don't want you to rewrite this in his line, but when people say, but why should I change? Because change... You always change for the better. In your life, when you had to grow to make a positive decision, it was usually a change. Status quo never brings you further. A career is not based on just doing the same thing, the same stuff for 50 years. It's usually based on changing what you're doing, taking a tough decision, changing your mindset, changing the way you see things. Why should I change? Because the only way you can improve your situation is by changing it. If you go on with the situation that you have today, then we know what happens, but there's no chance that you will be able to improve that. There's no chance that you will be able to improve that. Of course, change your resistance. When you have changed, you have resistance to change. Unfortunately, it comes for free to change. But resistance to change is a challenge that we can solve together. And again, you reintroduced the concept that together we do better things than alone. And I think that no one... you know, I have a tweet, an old slide, and my user was showing it, their presentation. And in their presentation, they said, we hire all the best developers in the world that have worked with one product. So the best definition is all the best developers that work on this product work for us. Today, this is not possible. And I would say, I definitely prefer to say, all the best developers that work on this product do not work for us, work with us, which is a subtle change, but they work with us because they're motivating and they see a future in what they're doing. So that is, of course, the guys are smart. We have to be smarter than the guys. And when I say about the guys, I always refer about Microsoft. I've done several stuff when the Reborn, the Microsoft guys published the Reborn in 2007. At the time, I created the prayer for the office because the Reborn was refused by many people. So I printed it out and I even did it in public. So I had an entire audience standing the other side because the prayer was to stand up. So you stand up, you take a printout of the screenshot of the Reborn, put that in front of you. Then you look in the direction of Redmond that now also Redmond should be more or less in that direction. And then you have kind of 500 people doing that, thank you, Microsoft in the direction of Redmond. Of course, yeah, that creates, of course it's totally idiot, I understand, but this creates people who remember this kind of stuff because of course if they look you, you know, why should I stand? And then they open that stand and say thank you, Microsoft, by looking at Redmond then they will never forget that specific moment. So we have to be smart in this way, we have to be creative. We have to outsmart marketing people Microsoft, because it's possible. This was our first tagline. You know that that was left on our week by an anonymous guy that was fantastic. Freedom never takes it too sweet. This is the first teachers that we printed for Boston, 2011. And it's I think it's fantastic. And again, we can use that. You know, it's distracting because sweet and it's sweet and sweet and it's nice and community, of course in community, with unity people is not used to community and I can tell one, I would tell a story about a common Sonya I discovered that one year after we met for the first time we met in June 2010 2011 2012 so actually what happened is that was that gentleman called me one day on my mobile and told me I would like to migrate to Petrofis. What are you doing? Tomorrow I'm in Perugia and I don't actually, I was born in India and this is the reason why Liberia is based in India but I've been living in Milan for 40 years so I think one week after we met in Perugia and I never met Sonya before I was already in touch with Marina I knew Osvaldo for a couple of years yet and I remember that we met and I was discussing the importance of the community and so on and Sonya was listening so one year after in a presentation Sonya said the first time I met Italo I thought that he was coming here to sell Liberia office and I probably never knew and I'm not a salesman although I'm a salesman we all sell our cartels anyway but I was selling the community I was not selling the product so I probably during the first meeting how important was to become part of the community to interact with the community and this is something that makes us different it's a message that makes us different because if you get a guy from Microsoft he will tell you that you have to buy the license and then you have the license, you have to support and the license there is a kind of license that is a yearly one so we can be different by working on this kind of concepts and I think it's important this is a way I always say that this is a picture of the Liberia office in September 2010 because there were not many more than that just trying to use messages or clues that are distracting in the mind of the other people of course if you create a slide where you put the name of the 20 developers it's not as effective as this one because the next will be forgotten after 5 years but this slide actually the original one that was not developed just counting the people said this is developed so I substitute the letters I don't remember what was written it happened 3 years ago 4 years ago and the idols when I use Liberia office I always use the idols I don't use the logo because that gives you the complexity or the completeness of the program so in half an hour you cannot tell everything but I think I wanted to give you a little bit of clues about how to use and to create messages about Liberia office in different situations because there will be different situations use a lot of visuals use visuals because that is something that is remembered if you have questions otherwise I kept the storytelling just immediately after so that's some people start thinking that I have thought the conference is done by myself but it's just because I want to share stuff that I think is important because otherwise I'm the only one that goes around and does the jolly for Liberia office which is part of my of my role of course but I think it's important that other people do the same in other markets and in other geographies otherwise it's only myself I'm willing and I don't have any problem in the face of the project in a sense but it's wrong that just one person is the face of the project so if you have questions about messaging ok otherwise if you want to listen about storytelling stay here if not go away