XSF Marketing Ideas

October 14, 2008

The first XSF board meeting just concluded. Instead of the usual formalities of electing positions, we skipped right into the board’s new hot topic - marketing. With the rising interesting in XMPP, most of the board is keen to invest some effort into promoting our standards, our organization, and our members. I’m pleased to see so much interest in this, and I believe the timing is perfect for the XSF to promote XMPP to a larger audience. How exactly will we accomplish this?

:EXTENDED:

Empower The Membership

The Ubuntu LoCo Teams are great at promoting Ubuntu. The Ubuntu projects empowers them by giving them some simple tools - a wiki, buttons, stickers, and CDs. Another example of such empowerment is the American presidential campaign of Obama. The Obama campaign lets anyone get lists of people to call, helps provide ways for local groups to organize, and distributes basic literature to everyone. The XSF can learn a lot from these efforts.

We already have over 50 XSF members, and they all care about XMPP enough to have nominated themselves for election as a member. I think we should give the members some basic tools to help and encourage them to promote, advocate, and improve XMPP and related standards.

A Few Ideas For Tools

I have a number of ideas floating around in my head, and more were mentioned in today’s meeting. Here’s a short list of them, and why I think they might help.

Perhaps these kinds of tools will help us grow our membership and leverage it to bring XMPP to more people. If you have any ideas for how we can better market our standards and ourselves please let me know; I’ll take these ideas to next week’s board meeting.

XSF Marketing Ideas - October 14, 2008 - Jack Moffitt