Marketing KDE: The First Year

Speaker: Sebastian Kügler

At last year's Akademy, the Marketing Working Group was formed and introduced a new, concerted way of dealing with marketing-related issues such as promotion, development of strategy, relationship management and general messaging. This structured approach is fairly new in the Free Software world, and it proves that KDE's innovativeness goes beyond technology. After roughly one year of work, it's a good time to evaluate last year's efforts. KDE's world summit provides an excellent opportunity to do so.

Akademy in Dublin also offers the opportunity to communicate KDE's marketing strategies and areas of interest to the KDE community. The presentation will give an overview over the work of the Marketing Team of KDE. Results of the scientific research that has been done will be presented, among which a set of analyses that are used to streamline KDE's messaging and strategy. Other current efforts include writing non-technical documentation, such as the events guide, the local group guide and the release promotion documentation.

The first results of this concerted effort will be laid out and things that have been learnt. An outlook into the future of Marketing the Free Desktop in general and KDE in specific will conclude the presentation.

Sebastian Kügler

Originally from Germany, Sebastian Kügler studied Business Administration at the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands. He is currently employed be the Department of Computer Science at the same university where he works on two Open Source related projects. He is researching quality metrics to form a European standard for Open Source software services and in another project, CodeYard, he is guiding secondary education students into the world of Open Source software development by participating in an Open Source digital schoolyard.

Sebastian set up the KDE Marketing Working Group during last summer's KDE world summit in Malaga, Spain and has since then become one of the thought leaders in marketing the free desktop. Areas of interest of this work range from coordination of existing activities over relationship management to scientific marketing research.

He is dedicated to push the Free Desktop into the mainstream market over the next years by professionalising organisational activities conducted in the KDE projects, but he also wants his work to serve as an example route for other projects to take.