Awareness Working Group
OSI Awareness Expansion Working Group
The OSI Awareness Expansion Working Group was chartered by the board on March 5, 2014 and created as a short-term activity to call on volunteers to help refresh OSI's communications approach and thereby improve its ability to meet its non-profit mission.
Activities
During the period of March through June 4, 2014, working group members will work together through discussion forum, wiki, and teleconference.
Detailed Timeline for the Working Group will be posted here by April 5, 2014.
Apereo 2014 Conference Survey
While attending the Apereo Conference an impromptu survey was undertaken to assess if the attendees were aware of the OSI. The show only 14.5% of people attending the conference could explain to a colleague what the OSI is and does.
Volunteer
If you are interested in joining the effort, please email debbryant-at-opensource-dot-org and we'll set you up to access the working group space.
Overview
OSI’s presence and ability to communicate its mission, goals, activities and in the marketplace of ideas is need of improvement, as it is with many evolving non-profits. We propose creation of a working group focused on expanding global awareness of OSI and strengthening its ability to fulfill its mission.
The work group will be comprised of experienced communications professionals and enthusiasts, marketing/research and brand experts, and community development and management leaders. Their task will be to review OSI’s communications strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and challenges, and to recommend steps that OSI can follow to increase global awareness of OSI, while keeping within OSI's community culture, volunteer goodwill and financial resources.*
Details
Project Sponsors are Board members and OSI Outreach and Learning Committee co-chairs Deb Bryant and Tony Wasserman.
What we want to produce:
It is our goal provide OSI with concrete recommendations to assist in improving its communications; strengthen its ability to use and protect its registered mark. This will be fundamental to advancing OSI’s initiatives to educate and advocate for open source software.
A written recommendation will come from the work group which will include
- General path for revitalizing/expanding OSI’s communications
- Specific recommendations for action
- Suggested approach including a mix of volunteer vs. paid professional services
The Awareness Working Group is spinning back up after a hiatus while we determine an initial messaging platform. This messaging platform will be developed on this wiki page with input from all working group members.
* Key Concepts likely to be included in discussions of the work group include
- A messaging platform that reflects OSI’s member-driven mission, ideally based on segmenting OSI’s audience subsets (various member classifications; kindred organizations (including current Affiliate Members); industry and community groups etc.)
- Improvements on existing public-facing assets such as the OSI web site and Google community groups
- Resources for content creation and management
- Strategies for more effective use of social media
- An approach to managing the OSI logo as a communications asset
- Search Engine Optimization and other contemporary inbound marketing tools
- Identifying high leverage events in which OSI should participate
- Facelifts for look and feel for all outbound OSI communications (“branding”)
- SWAG and other tangibles
- Membership drives and other ways to attract people to join OSI
- Designation of evangelists who can help build awareness and support for OSI and its mission
- Budget needs to implement awareness programs
Messaging Index - Initial Draft
The first action item to complete as part of the Awareness Working Group's deliverables is a set of key messages for the OSI, as well as an understanding of audiences for each message. As our mission with the OSI is both broad and deep, our key messages will be of value to almost all audiences listed in the audience segmentation section. However, the key messages will need to be nuanced for each audience. There will also be overlap amongst our audience segments; for example, it is easy to imagine that we would see audience members who are both individual members and open source software developers working on FLOSS as part of their employment and on their own time or that a corporation consuming FLOSS would also be a funder for the OSI.
The OSI wishes to express their deep thanks to the team at Agile Public Relations for volunteering their time to assist us with spinning up this initial messaging index.
Audience Segmentation
The following groups are our audience for OSI's outreach objectives:
- Open source software developers
- Independent developers working on FLOSS projects
- Developers working on open source software within corporations
- Developers who work create FLOSS software both as part of their employment and on their own time
- Individual members of the OSI
- Affiliate members of the OSI
- Members of the press
- Goal: make OSI the go-to source for expertise on matters related to open source software & open standards
- Government agencies / bodies
- Looking to adopt open source software
- Need convincing that open source software is a viable option for them
- Those who have adopted FLOSS and wish to share their stories
- Education organizations / universities
- Looking to add FLOSS options to their curriculum
- Wishing to use FLOSS for their institution, e.g. Kuali or other university targeted FLOSS applications
- Corporations consuming and/or contributing to FLOSS projects
- Licensing questions and stewardship
- In need of best practices information / knowledge sharing
- Funding organizations who wish to financially support the OSI's mission
- Affinity organizations whom with wish to collaborate with around matters of FLOSS software production, plus open & participatory culture
- e.g. joint work with the FSF and SFC on the FLOSS entities working group
- e.g. joint amicus briefs prepared in concert with other organizations related to net neutrality, etc.
Key Messages
OSI Messaging - Context
Open source is one of the world's key drivers of innovation, generating previously unimagined levels of efficiency and collaboration while spawning entirely new products and industries such as .... (examples to be segmented depending on audience, e.g. cloud for corporations consuming FLOSS project work)
Supporting Context
- Open source touches peoples' lives at multiple points throughout their day - smart phones, banking applications, search engines, security software the average user doesn't realize exists, etc.
- The success of open source adoption and its recognized value by developers, distributors and users make it an irreversible trend
- Due to confusion and competitive forces, there are organizations that are incorrectly portraying their software as being open source
Key Messages
- The OSI protects and promotes open source by providing a foundation for community success.
- The OSI champions open source in society through education, infrastructure and collaboration.
- The OSI protects and promotes open source by stewarding the open source definition & preventing abuse of the open source concept by bad actors.
Key Messages Expanded - Community Success
The OSI protects and promotes open source by providing a foundation for community success by
- Stewarding the open source definition and thereby providing a set of guidelines so that the community can understand the "rules of engagement"
- Acting as a fiscal agent for open source organizations who require such services but cannot be housed by existing groups, e.g. OpenHatch
- Providing infrastructure and expertise for community driven projects that improve the overall FLOSS ecosystem, e.g. the FLOW Syllabus