How to Launch an Open-Source PR-Campaign

How to Launch an Open-Source PR-Campaign?

In the last week I have written about how to launch a new open-source project, based on an example project called TinyTM. In the last three days I've been working on getting the word out about that project. Here are some reflections.

Content

Obviously you won't be able to launch a very successful PR campaign if you don't have something newsworthy to get the media's attention. So first and foremost, make sure you're promoting a deliverable with some kind of impact on your target audience (see below).

Timing: Content vs. Lost Time

In the case of TinyTM we had three options:

1. Simply announce that we'd created the project,
2. wait until the first prototype for developers was available, or
3. wait until we'd finished the first first version that could be used by end users.

Basically, the longer you wait, the more content you can present. And content is what makes the press release "newsworthy."

On the other hand, the longer you wait, the higher the probability that you'll never publish anything. Also, possible collaborators will take more time to find your project.

Expectation Management

So it's tricky to find the optimum timing, and timing varies with the nature of your project. Traditional companies also need to consider the bad impression that an incomplete product might leave with customers -- no "banana software" that ripens with the customer. Open-source projects, by contrast, are known to release early and release often, so in our case it's OK to be on the earlier side. That said, it's critical to clearly state the maturity of your project, lest your readers feel deceived and lose interest in the next release.

At the end, we decided to release an early developer version plus a demo server. So even though user management and other functionality isn't yet available, non-technical end users can preview the GUI and get a better idea of the software's capabilities.

The Press Release Text

Writing a press release is a horror for non-native English speakers. In particular, we open-source guys are usually techies, and not so much into the humanities. So what can you do?

The bottom line is: Copy, paste and modify. Press releases are very similar to each other for some reasons. Don't try to understand or change that; just accept that it's how the world works. Then search for press releases about similar products and mix and match.

Further Information

It is essential to have a web site up with with detailed information about your project before launching the press release. If somebody is interested in your project, and he or she only finds the techy stuff on SourceForge, you won't exactly end up promoting your message. So make sure you have at least 2-5 pages to introduce non-hard-core-OSS people to your project, and include these pages in your press release.

Determine Targets

Let's assume you've got everything: The content, a web site with background information, and a a press release. Now: Where do you post your press release so that people actually read it?

There are several open-source publications that are obvious targets for your press release, such as SourceForge (project news might get on the first page and will be published as RSS) and Freshmeat.

Another channel to consider is related mailing lists and discussion forums. You may actually have to subscribe to these channels before you can post; that may fill up your inbox for some time, but it also gives you the opportunity to get feedback and to answer that feedback.

Similarly, you might have a list of "multipliers" who you could ask to spread the word for you. Don't think too poorly about your project and your press release (if you do have interesting content, that is). Multipliers maintain their reputation by providing others with information, so your press release might be a way to enhance their standing.

Extending the scope a bit more toward the mainstream is www.openpr.com and some similar PR distribution lists. We haven't seen many hits coming from these postings, but Google tends to index them and they might provide your web site with an increased Google ranking.

Finally, there are the big magazines and newspapers. Check their web sites -- most of them have a special email address for press releases. One hour of surfing your preferred magazines will provide you with 10 to 20 email addresses. Only 10% of them might publish your press release, but that could get you more visitors then all of the measures above combined. And you never know what's going on in the heads of the editors ...

Maximizing Impact

After publishing the press releases, try to gauge your success. How many links did you get? How many additional visitors? Then check where they came from and try to evaluate which of your PR measures were the most successful. You might also try asking people why they didn't publish your press release and what you could do to improve.

Beware of Negative PR

Just a word of warning about media people: They may not always publish what you would like them to publish. That's no problem in most cases -- as the saying goes, bad PR is better then no PR. However, keep in mind that negative news sells better in the media business than positive news, and that the friendly reporter may actually only write about the stuff that's missing from your release.

Cheers!

Frank

How to Start an Open-Source Project? And Why?

Why?

The last 10 days or so I've been working on TinyTM (http://tinytm.sourceforge.net/). We've decided to launch this new open-source project in order to cover an important shortcoming of ]project-open[ in the Translation sector. Most "competing" applications in this sector provide an integration with a "translation memory" -- the most important translation tool. We don't.

What?

Translation memories are a kind of "light" natural language processing tools. They record the sentences that a translator translates and are able to remember them later if a similar sentence appears. That is not as bad as, say, real machine translation, but it's sufficiently tricky to take a long time to work out.

The "Competition"

There is already one OSS translation memory, but it's written in Java; this makes it relatively difficult for linguists, many of whom are not technologically proficient, to install. It also doesn't support Microsoft Word, which is clearly a vital tool for working linguists. In short, it doesn't meet its current users' needs.

The "Plan"

So the idea is to offload most of the work to the OSS community. Will that work? There seems to be a big "market" for it (if that's the appropriate word in the OSS world); many users have requested a better translation tool, so it's certainly possible.

Allies

I've been in contact with FOLT, an industry association trying to set up an open-source TM system themselves. I was really keen to join their team until I heard that they've been discussing a TM system for about the last three years. Also, they didn't seem to grasp the open-source "publish early and frequently" approach. So that one didn't work out ...

I've already heard about other companies asking Common Sense Advisory about a TM system. They apparently even asked CSA to take the leadership. But I wasn't able to find out who that was. Maybe it's just easier to publish some code in oder to get their attention? Maybe that's the open-source answer to business development: Just publish your code.

Another group of potential allies are small TM vendors. These small companies currently have no chance to fight the market leader (SDL Trados), which has an 80%/90% market share. But if TinyTM gets successful, these small vendors might be able to "ride the open-source tiger." Since we OSS guys are usually not very good at creating user interfaces for non-techies, these guys might be able to sell their polished front ends as a kind of "enterprise version" for TinyTM if they can connect to the TinyTM back end. That's not 100% the open-source idea, but a nice commercial front end might convince the "early majority" to adopt TinyTM once it starts taking off. For this reason I've used the LGPL for the TinyTM protocol and the interface code.

The "Market"

So what are the "success criteria" for TinyTM to fly? There are some 900,000 people in the world spending their days translating texts, according to a post from Common Sense Advisory. But most of them are linguists, and linguists tend to be IT-averse, meaning they don't make very productive open-source community members.

Success Criteria

So we'd need to get the 1%-2% of linguists who are "open" to open-source and try to provide them with a fun environment where they try and extend the TM:

• "Recruit" enough skilled developers to extend/finish TinyTM
• Spread the word to reach as many of them as possible
• Try to lower the barrier to involvement.
  
• Think of ways to make involvement a fun experience
  
  
• Get some donations to push the project
  
  
• Reach to innovators and early adopters in translation companies who could start using TinyTM while it's still in its early phases.
  
  

Some Online Community Theory

Philip Greenspun, an impressive entrepreneur, once said: "Communities need killer content to attract users." So is a TM killer content? I believe that is actually true for a large number of people, because TMs still cost several hundred dollars per license.

Code!

So I've pulled my basic knowledge about natural language processing and written a first version of the software, trying to simplify the architecture as much as possible while keeping everything modular. Web services sounded nice, but I actually took the decision to start with a plain old relational database and Pl/SQL as the language to implement remote procedure calls.

This approach is very simple to start, it doesn't require all the web-application XML stuff, and it's easy to wrap the Pl/SQL calls in XML later. So: Quick wins without sacrificing anything about the future -- that seems to fit.

On the client side I decided to go with something very unconventional for an open-source project: VBA. Yes, Visual Basic for Applications. The advantage: MS Word, the #1 translation environment (reach the 900k users!), contains an ODBC driver, and already comes with the "editor."

Spread the Word

So I set up http://tinytm.sourceforge.net/ with the purpose:

• Attract the maximum number of developers
  
• Attract some companies as sponsors
• Convince the "suits" that the project is about something business
  

For Thursday (17th of April, 2008) I've prepared a press release and a list of magazines and other potential multipliers. I've send the press release to a few contacts for feedback, and it seems more or less to work out.

So let's see if it works out.
Please let me know!

Frank