Are you managing an open source project? How much does this matter to your reputation, business, or bottom line? This session will provide practical takeaways to help you reach the right audience and open up productive lines of communication with your project’s users and community members. This session is suitable for beginners to marketing.

From predictable release schedules and release notes; to the differences between tutorials, guides, and documentation; and yes, to your promotional schedule–marketing touches on all aspects of communication between your users and your product. This is Marketing through the lens of technical communication. We’ll look at marketing from an open source perspective and consider how you can apply well established techniques to help your project and community thrive.

Users don’t want to see their feature requests or bug reports sink into a black hole; they expect transparent communications; and they expect to be able to contribute improvements directly. What are popular open source projects doing right (and wrong) now and why? No matter the size, whether you have a new module, a theme, an integration, or a full distribution; you can probably find ways to improve your technical and marketing communications.

We often think of marketing as hyperbole or BS, but if you are authentic and accurate in your promotional communications, you can even market to developers :-) You’ll leave this session with a practical checklist of how you can improve the marketing and communication of your open source project to increase adoption and grow your user community.