Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: Marketing and Advocacy

Collapse
Posted by Torben Brosten on

Regarding aD2: A US defined nonprofit would really be too constricted to serve a diverse commercial community well; And the name aD2 was a means to succinctly describe attributes as an example of a company that was envisioned to operate as an umbrella company for independently operated project-oriented companies --similar to our independent operations.

"How many people showed up to Linux World Expo in the US or Europe?"

Certainly few, if any, based on the activity on this site about it. Maybe we should ask why that was so?

"Do we have some information paper that allow a user to quickly see the functionality OpenACS has to offer?"

Aha! Maybe that is why there are few participants?

"Is there an introduction into .LRN with the focus on how a university can make use of an LMS? Do we have a description how well OpenACS works as an enabler for Communities of Practise? Are there documents why OpenACS is the best solution a NGO can go for?"

Great questions!

"OpenACS does not provide [info that helps me *quickly* decide if it is worth reading more or not] at the moment."

So what is it going to take to make these?

  1. collect user (and marketing) needs.
  2. identify sources of information needed to fill the above requirements.
  3. organize the information in a way that it can be easily kept current
  4. publish the information according to readers' requirements.

Step 1 is 90% done. See https://openacs.org/doc/openacs-5-1/docbook-primer.html#docs-end-user-reqs . Read where it starts with "From a marketing perspective" a little further down the page. Do not let the antiquated url page-name misrepresent the contents. There are many hours of work there --from qualified users commenting, to collecting, sorting and combining the thoughtful comments that people took time to post. Certainly enough comments are there that we can proceed to step 2. Step 3 and step 4 are also already addressed by the same url.

At this point, we would be well underway if we focus on #2, identifying sources of information needed to fill the requirements. A significant amount of work is already done!