On Wed, Jun 07, 2017 at 11:55:49PM -0600, Ryan Gorley wrote:
Thanks for providing some additional perspective for me, Bryce.
Thus far the overwhelming consensus selection is graphic designers and illustrators/artists. That's not surprising, but your comments have me wondering what subsets of these groups are capable enough to give back through development-related activities and which these subsets are large enough to move the project in a meaningful way. It also has me wondering how we could better facilitate giving back from non-developers, who will constitute the large majority of these groups.
Excellent questions, and well worth pursuing, particularly if we could get some solid data.
One observation I'd add is that development of software requires a wide variety of skillsets, beyond just coding. Moviemaking requires more than just actors, and similarly software development involves much more than coding. Think about an average software development company's staff - actual coders may well comprise a minority.
So too is true for open source projects, at least those of significant size like Inkscape. There is a lot to do to make the software: Translating, bug triaging, event planning, fundraising, technical writing, usability analyzing, graphics asset designing, and on and on. All these skills are involved in development of software, and so I would consider anyone who contributes to Inkscape in one or more of these roles to be a "software developer".
Certainly Inkscape is desperate for people in all these roles. There is a manual writing effort going on presently, which just this week pointed out how desperate they are for writers. This month's board meeting identified a bunch of events, fundraisers, and activities that we should do but can't due to lack of belly buttons to organize the dang things. I tried organizing a marketing team a few months back but had to cancel due to lack of people. We are perennially short staffed for bug triaging, and there's no such thing as too much testing. Not to say more programmers wouldn't hurt either, but we need people in tons of different roles to create the product. :-)
Bryce
If anyone has any thoughts in these two regards, please chime in.
Ryan Gorley @ Dijt https://dijt.co/
On Wed, Jun 7, 2017 at 5:21 PM, Bryce Harrington <bryce@...961...> wrote:
On Sat, Apr 29, 2017 at 01:52:32PM -0600, Ryan Gorley wrote:
Hello all, I have been in communication with Martin and Maren about assisting with some marketing on the project. I am a designer and marketer by
profession.
You can read the conversation http://forum.inkscapecommunity.com/index.php?topic=497.0 that got this all started if you're interested, but in short, I feel passionately about helping Inkscape succeed.
I am emailing to get your feedback on a survey I would like to begin collecting responses for. As I see it, growing users and growing contributors are two sides of the same coin for any successful FOSS project. This particular survey is focusing on the user side of that
coin.
My intent is to help develop criteria for, and consensus around, who our primary markets for Inkscape should be. A free and open application is of course for anyone to use for any reason. However, because our resources
in
marketing this application are finite, we really need to clarify and prioritize to have any hope for success.
So here is the survey: https://goo.gl/forms/ReZkSjOMokkaoSln2
*Don't spend your time responding (yet)*. I would like to make sure I'm covering the right user segments here, so do email me with your thoughts. I'm glad to meet you all and thanks for the help!
Ryan Gorley @ Dijt https://dijt.co/
Hi Ryan, and congrats on getting your survey out, I hope it gains you lots of useful feedback.
I wanted to chime in a bit food for thought on how to use the data effectively to benefit Inkscape. In particular, you commented:
That being said most open source project leaders and developers I've interacted with genuinely want to create something people will use and appreciate.
I like your phrasing here, and notably that you did not say, "...something that as many people as possible will use..."
For an open source project like Inkscape that makes its product available for free, a larger audience doesn't translate into increased income (well, not directly anyway).
Inkscape's value proposition involves time contribution to the project much moreso than dollars. So a marketing strategy that drives value to us -- in the form of larger audiences that can contribute to pushing development forward -- will have a bigger impact than increasing our penetration into audiences that would be less likely to participate.
Indeed, as we've recognized in the past that when entering a new use category it can create a surge of demand for improvements needed to close gaps in the featureset for that category. This can lead to a virtuous cycle of development, but only if we already have project participants interested and prepared to work hard on closing those gaps. If we lack participants able to work on those features, the new audiences' expectations will be dashed and people will (reasonably) conclude that Inkscape should not perceived as a serious tool for that area.
Given this line of thinking, I might suggest that the audience to market to should not be the broad userbase of a given market segment, but to the subset of audience in that area who are likely to be doing development-related activities (which can be not just pure software coding but also stuff like tutorial writing, toolsmithing, community hosting, testing/bug reporting, etc.)
Bryce