On Sat, Apr 22, 2006 at 12:51:36AM +0200, cedric GEMY wrote:

I kow this is not the most important stuff, but browsing the helpWanted section of the wiki i've seen that there was a project or a wish of project about Inkscape communication.

Where are you with that ?

Heya Cedric,

I didn't see an "Inkscape communication" project on the HelpWanted page - did you mean Inkscape Promotion perhaps?

If that's the case, here's where we are with that. We've made great progress since that project was listed. Inkscape has been covered by many magazines, and has been included in many computer magazine CD's; in fact, in many cases we have not needed to contact them, they've contacted us. :-)

We've also started to have a decent presence at conferences and summits, although many of us still have never met! Hopefully this coming year's worth of conferences will give us opportunities to fix that. :-) Inkscape is one of those pieces of software that is easy to present; audiences love watching the drawings. This is also an area where users can make a BIG contribution; watching a skilled Inkscape artist is a LOT of fun for an audience.

I think the Inkscape Project's strongest, most effective promotional tool has been the good, friendly community built up around it. Coupled with a good product, I think simple word of mouth has caused awareness of Inkscape to spread very, very broadly. I still run into people at conferences who haven't heard of inkscape, but they're getting rarer and rarer.

Our PR efforts so far have tended to focus on promoting to the larger Open Source community. But I suspect those OSS folks that have need of drawing software by now must already be well aware of us. If we want to spread awareness of Inkscape further, I have the sense that we need to start looking beyond our traditional audiences and target new groups -- perhaps even groups that have never heard of Open Source before.

For instance, while it's great that Inkscape is being presented in computer magazines, how about getting into non-computer magazines? For instance, an article about using Inkscape for creating holiday cutout patterns might be suitable for an arts and crafts magazine. An article about using Inkscape for creating a company's logos and icons might be suitable for a graphics design magazine.

At the same time that we grow the userbase, however, we also need to take care that we grow the contributor base as well. Having more users is of course nice, but having more contributors means the project can handle the increased number of questions, bug reports, and feature requests. Thus in all of our PR activities we must make sure to encourage interested users to get involved, and help out where they can.

Right now, I think the most important thing we can do is to keep an eye out for folks who want to help out, and take time to welcome them and assist them in getting started coding, documenting, translating, testing, user support, PR, or any of the many other ways to help the project. Growing this pool of people now, and instilling in them the same friendly, helpful manners that has helped us so much until now, will enable us to bring Inkscape (and in some cases, to introduce the ideals of libre software) to much larger audiences than before.

Bryce