Charter of the Marketing Working Group

"Coherent and strategic messaging around KDE"

A roadmap for the Marketing working Group

Introduction

During the Working Group BoF session at aKademy 2005 the KDE community decided to form three Working Groups, one of them aimed at improving KDE's marketing and promotion efforts, the Marketing Working Group. Subsequently a Marketing BoF session took place, with the goal to kickstart this working group and get the first ideas going. This document describes the ideas that were gathered back then, and that have been polished and extended over the past couple of weeks on the kde-ev-marketing mailing list.

The Marketing Working Group is an extension of the various existing community processes that we have in place, like the Dot Editors, the kde-promo mailing list and several other public fora and outlets. The Working Group is not a replacement for any of the existing systems and fills the missing gap that we still have on the coordination side of things by providing a single entry point for anyone who has marketing and promotion questions and ideas.

Goal and strategy

The long-term goal of the Marketing Working Group has been identified as "Coherent and strategic messaging around KDE".

The approach that will be taken is basically a participative approach, which presents the marketing people as supportive staff that help where help is needed. The Marketing Group might be proactive though if it identifies areas that need help. The target being that people all over KDE know that they need marketing and ask for help themselves.

The Marketing Working Groups sees itself as the people putting lubricant into the KDE gears, so they run smoother. "Coordination" might sound a lot like "dictating what other people have got to do", but it's more like reducing overhead and giving advice so people can do what they're good at. What the Marketing Working Group will be doing is asking people what could it do for them, and improving coordination between the respective groups, bringing people together.

Tasks:

The tasks of the Marketing Working Group (no, we still won't abbrev. this :P) have been identified as:

Short term activities will consist of the following:

• Publishing KDE's "new structure" in a digestable way for the outside world
• Creating a structured release promotion process
• Getting the relation management in shape
• Trying to help the webteam to improve and streamline www.kde.org
• Coordinate creation of business cards

Mid- to long-term activities add:

• Backup the Marketing Working Group's work with scientific research done on KDE, such as strategic approach, target groups, amongst others
• Iterate over current processes to improve them

Community Groups, the Marketing Working Group will offer assistance and try to help coordinating their work can be characterized as:

• The web team
• Events staff
• News editors
• People writing press releases
• Internal communication
• Local groups
• Business contacts
• Merchandising dudes

Forum & Staffing

The inner-circle of the marketing working group is the mailinglist where all issues are being discussed. We'll invite people who are important there, and we won't reject an e.V. member who just wants to be watching us. Note that the list is not only for e.V. members, but for people who might be of value for the Marketing Working Group's targets as stated above (and can keep their
mouth shut, if necessary). This list will is in no way supposed to take over what other lists, such as kde-promo already handle, but will deal with strategic issues, and is broader than only promotion. Furthermore, the Marketing List is in no way supposed to be a private club, but it is natural to the issues that have to be dealt with that some of them be not public in an early state.

It has been decided on the kde-ev-marketing mailing list that the Marketing Working Group will consist of the following people:

• Wade Olson (olson@kde.org)
• Troy Unrau (troy@kde.org)
• Franz Keferböck (keferboeck@kde.org)

The Marketing Working Group has been formed of people who have been working on the identified issues, and are supposed to have qualities relevant for marketing. Of these three people Wade will be the official representative to the KDE eV board and membership. Marketing issues are discussed on the kde-ev-marketing list, which consists of a changing group of people, most of whom are interested in marketing issues within KDE, related to marketing work or a digest of board members. The list is non-public because it will contain discussions which can not be disclosed at an early stage, a good example is coordination of sponsoring, and in more general contact management.

Finally...

The Marketing Working Group has already started working on some of the issues identified above. It will continue to do so for about six months. After that period we'd like to evaluate whether or not our work has been successful and have someone decide upon the future of the Marketing Working Group.