After much research (going back over the mailing list for the past few months, reading the proposed budget, pacing back and forth in my office, taking another look at our website and some blog posts, thinking about the OpenGeo folks), I have come to two preliminary conclusions:
* The "selling geo to open source people" / "selling open source to geo people" dichotomy cuts both ways. OSGeo has compelling stories for both the development community *and* the existing "geo-focused IT" community and I do not think we can afford to focus on just one or the other. The network effects and the current state of the GIS ecosystem are simply too large to ignore.
* We should not spend undue effort explaining what Open Source means. Those with purchasing authority already know what it is and are willing to believe it can be a good option for them. (For those who don't understand Open Source, there are plenty of organizations out there already propagating the meme.)
If valid, those propositions then lead me to these spending goals for 2009:
* Continue to attend classical geo conferences, targeting the user and purchaser communities. Focus almost exclusively on case studies showing how the whole stack works together and interoperates with existing pieces of the tool chain (read: ESRI). Case studies should demonstrate ROI, so the CTO types can see that our stuff is real, not just a bunch of random beta-level code. Beef up our website and collaterals to directly address this market. Case studies, Live DVDs, demo portals.
* For the developer folks, target the existing GIS developer community rather than the non-geo open source crowd. Provide sufficient project descriptions, road-mapping, and examples to show them that they can use our stuff today, on the projects they are already undertaking. And do it almost exclusively via the website, blogs, magazine articles, etc; you won't reach the developer types as well at conferences. Don't stress about trying to reach the existing non-geo open source crowd: they are the most likely ones to find out about us on their own, via blogs and word-of-mouth and such, so we need not specifically go after them; the developer-oriented content on the website we build for the traditional geo developers will be sufficient for them.
I have not yet decided what those two goals mean to me in terms of exactly how much money to spend on what things, but I thought I'd send this now in case anyone wants to discuss at tonight's mtg.
-mpg
PS: I note also that we are likely underserving the education and open data parts of our organization. These are among the less active communities, perhaps, but we're not spending much effort on promoting their agendas. Not sure how to address this yet.
