[yocto-ab] YP Advocacy: Minutes, 5 March 2014

[Osier-mixon, Jeffrey]

My personal thanks to those who were able to join the two meetings
scheduled today.

YP Advocacy 3/5/2014

Attendees:

morning PST:
Denys Dmitryenko, TI
Lieu Ta, Wind River
Andreea V, Wind River
Steve Sakoman, Sakoman Inc.
Tracey Erway (Intel), Yocto Project
Jon Aldama, Enea
Jefro

afternoon PST:
Henry Wiechman, TI
Jefro

Agenda:
- Budget
- RTC supplement
- Events & giveaways
- Website
- Webinar series
- Messaging

_______________________________________________________
Budget

The major item we discussed was the advocacy budget for 2014, which
was started by Tracey back in September and redrafted in February by
Andreea and Jefro. The budget is for the approved US$94k, with the
following major items:

Q1: RTC supplement ($36k)
Q2: ELC sponsorship & booth ($12k) and giveaways ($2k)
Q3: no expenses planned
Q4: ELCE sponsorship & booth ($12k), giveaways ($2k), and
    Developer Day ($30k)

Other than the RTC supplement, discussed below, the major expenses on
this draft are related to conferences.

There are several items on the waiting list that can happen if we
decide to forego anything on the existing draft, or if we find
sponsors or other methods for accomplishing them. These are in order
by apparent priority:

Badge revision ($1k)
     a simple update of the Compliance program badges, potentially
     to include new badges for member orgs in gold & silver
Website revisions ($25k)
     requires further refinement and identification of resources
     also needs resources for ongoing, regular maintenance
Webinar series over the summer ($10k est)
     an idea from Andreea, true costs and resources TBD
ARM TechCon sponsorship in Q4 ($20k)
     this has some challenges for the project and is quite expensive

Action items:
- [Lieu] keep team up to date on budget refinements

_______________________________________________________
RTC supplement

This supplement to RTC Magazine has been discussed several times in
both the Advocacy team and the overall Advisory Board. The proposal is
for a 28-30 page full-color document, with content provided by the YP
member organizations. Design, layout, production, and distribution
would be handled by RTC. The first use would be as a supplement to the
monthly magazine in an upcoming edition, which has an immediate reach
to over 18,000 readers. Second use is as a printed material displayed
at RTECC events and other conferences where RTC has agreements, like
EE Live. RTC also proposed costs for translation services, which get
expensive quickly but are optional.

Pros: The availability of a high-quality printed document would be a
huge asset. In addition to the visibility at RTECC conferences and in
the magazine, they could be made available at YP member organization
booths at any conference, which would give us a coherent YP message at
many conferences that the project itself can not afford to attend or
sponsor. An electronic version of the supplement in PDF can be made
available on member sites and on yoctoproject.org. We can also revise
the document as needed, so we could have a new edition annually to
showcase newly joined members and new features in the project.

Cons: While there are a lot of benefits to this proposal, the main
detraction is the cost: $36k for the initial work and distribution.
Reprints cost close to $4 each (e.g. 500 for $2k). Tracey noted that
this one project would comprise 1/3 of the Advocacy budget, which
seems like a lot - we may be able to come up with other options that
would suit us better.

Note: An informal survey of a similar publication showed that a
supplement of this caliber is actually pretty inexpensive. EE Times
would charge more for a smaller document, although their reach is
greater.

Other options: It was also discussed that we may have other options
for providing some of the benefits, such as doing a smaller document
ourselves at much reduced cost, though we would not then have the
automated distribution. Tracey also suggested that we could place ads,
which we have not done in the past. Jefro noted that a campaign of
articles could also serve to get the word out as long as the messaging
were consistent.

It was noteworthy that industry veteran Steve Sakoman had not heard of
RTC before reading this proposal, which yields some concern about how
visible and influential they actually are. That does not really affect
the document for our own purposes, but it could affect our decision
about whether to do it ourselves. The overall consensus in discussion
was that the reach was still pretty substantial.

In a nonbinding straw poll:
- Steve suggested that the idea was not worth the cost
- Tracey said "yesshure"
- Lieu suggested that it was expensive but we didn't really have
viable alternatives, and
    that it would be a valuable experience with a valuable outcome no
matter what
- Andreea said it was still worth doing, as the advantages surpass the
disadvantages
- Jon noted that it gave us a powerful reach to people who don't
already know about us
- Henry said it was an interesting opportunity to which they could
contribute already-written
    material, and he would follow up with Amy (TI's advocacy representative)

Tracey suggested that all the orgs come up with 5 advertising targets
they would like to affect this year so we could compare them and reach
the greatest number if we decide on an advertising campaign.

Action items:
- [Henry] follow up with Amy S.
- [team] put forth list of up to 5 ad targets
- [Jefro] call a vote among Advocacy team members as to whether to continue

_______________________________________________________
Events & giveaways

The major events YP plans to attend and sponsor this year are ELC and
ELCE, which is normal for us. In the future we would like to create a
longer reach into the embedded world, as in a sense we have saturated
the Linux world at this point, but that will have to wait for more
funds and more people willing to be involved.

DevDay events are very popular for obvious reasons - we provide free
high-quality training, access to project maintainers, and giveaways.
The ROI extends deep into the organizations who attend as well as
those they talk to. We can only afford one DevDay this year, and the
response seems a bit higher in Europe, so we are planning to do one at
ELCE in Dusseldorf in October. It was suggested that we might want to
do a themed DevDay, possibly on the theme of automotive or Internet of
Things, possibly as a second event or as a track in the standard
DevDay. The Advocacy team will need to discuss all of these options
between now and this summer.

One cost that was notably missing was another 1-2k to ship the booth
to ELC in April. This was an oversight by Jefro, but it was not
expected to be a problem, as we anticipate more funds to be available
this year. In dire circumstances we will seek a sponsor to ship the
booth.

Also discussed was the possibility of a t-shirt giveaway at ELC and/or
ELCE, as well as other giveaway ideas. Shirts are quite expensive,
normally costing $9-11 each, so providing them for an event like ELCE
could cost $8k. In the past, we have had sponsors for shirts but have
not placed any corporate logos on them, making them YP only, and we
would like to continue that. Andreea proposed that we could set up a
landing page with logos and recognition on the website with the URL on
the shirt. Another option is to focus on a high quality giveaway in
the $3-4 range instead, as we did at DevDay in Edinburgh. In addition,
we have a "grab bag" of leftover items from past events that we could
turn into a game at an upcoming DevDay or in the booth at an event.
The Advocacy team will need to make decisions on these issues soon if
we are to give anything away at ELC.

Action items:

- [team] discuss giveaways (now, for ELC)
- [team] discuss DevDay event (summer)

_______________________________________________________
Website

In short, the website needs some work, both in terms of design changes
- probably not significant - and usability in terms of content, which
will likely be significant. In addition, we need to locate a resource
for ongoing maintenance and data entry on the site. This is currently
in the community manager's lap but help is needed.

Action items:

- [Jefro] locate resources for website work
- [team] discuss website changes, anticipated rollout before ELCE in October

_______________________________________________________
Webinar series

We only touched on this briefly in the meeting, but Andreea suggested
that we might be able to put together an informational webinar, or
webinar series, this summer. Costs are undetermined - if we were to do
this through a webcast organization it could cost up to $10k or more.
If we do it more informally through Google Hangouts, we could get away
with it for free or for very little, but we'd be on our own for
infrastructure, promotion, monitoring, etc. This is all TBD but is
good stuff to discuss.

Action items:

- [team] discuss webinar ideas (summer)

_______________________________________________________
Messaging

Finally, the team discussed messaging at length. Until now, our
messaging effort has really been confined to the website, conference
materials, and some YP assets like the animations and other videos
listed on the website. As many of our member organizations are now
gearing up to promote messages about certain vertical markets that YP
fits with, it is a good idea for the members to have a uniform set of
messaging directly from the project. We discussed messaging around the
following markets and hot current topics:

- automotive
- Internet of Things
- medical devices
- aerospace
- non-"mobile" consumer electronics and appliances
- industrial automation

Andreea mentioned that Wind River hasn't had much in the way of
automotive-specific messaging before now, but she is starting to see
questions from project managers about the Yocto Project that are
coming directly from customers, and the link between YP and automotive
has not been sufficiently clear. Andreea also mentioned that we could
better encapsulate our core messages, like hardware agnosticism, and
adding clarity into messages that all of the member organizations
could pass down into their own efforts in marketing as well as
documentation. Jon added that communications are of primary importance
and that the Internet of Things is a topic many organizations are
talking about now.

In addition, the team discussed briefly the possibility of upgrading
the YP version number 2.0, originally discussed - though not yet
proposed - by Richard Purdie, and what that might entail in terms of
messaging and communicating direction. Henry suggested that a move to
2.0 should probably have some solid feature changes behind it, so if,
for example, the fall release focused on bug fixes rather than new
features, we may want to delay moving to YP 2.0 until the next release
where we have some compelling new features to discuss.

Finally, Steve recommended that our original message still appeals to
quite a lot of people, and while it is good to craft messages around
popular issues like the Internet of Things, we should remember the
Hippocratic oath in our messaging and first do no harm.

Action items:
- [team] continue discussing messaging around hot topics - this needs
an owner and priority

_______________________________________________________
Note for future Advocacy meetings

I'm not sure the two-meeting approach really works, but I am
interested in feedback from those who attended as well as those who
couldn't make it. What would be the best way to help you participate
in the advocacy team?

I'd like to set the next meeting up 2 weeks from now, just before
Collaboration Summit.

thanks


-- 
Jeff Osier-Mixon @Intel
Yocto Project Community Manager http://yoctoproject.org