Transcript

Sandro Groganz: Hello Stormy, welcome to this interview. Thank you for joining me.

Stormy Peters: Thanks Sandro, I'm glad to be here.

Sandro Groganz: Great! You are the executive director, at GNOME, since a few months, right?

Stormy Peters: Right.

Sandro Groganz: So tell us a little more about your role at GNOME?

Stormy Peters: I started at the GNOME Foundation in July. I am the executive director. The GNOME Foundation exists to support the GNOME project. We have funding, and we use that money to help the project out, primarily by sponsoring things like events, flying developers to those events, sponsoring projects like usability studies or accessibility work that might not be getting done right now by the volunteers but is important to them. In my new role, I am working with the sponsors to make sure they are working effectively with the GNOME Foundation and the GNOME project, I am working on GNOME marketing, I am working on different projects like GNOME Mobile or making sure that we launch different business initiatives as they come up.

Sandro Groganz: What is the most important aspect when it comes to marketing GNOME?

Stormy Peters: The most important aspect is probably figuring out what the community wants to say about GNOME. Figuring out what the consensus is, if there is a consensus and what we want to say about it.

Sandro Groganz: You mean, positioning the product?

Stormy Peters: Positioning the product in the community. I think there is very much a feel in the GNOME community of "community" and many of them are working on it for the same reasons. They want a product on the desktop that’s free, that’s accessible, and that’s usable. So it’s very much a common theme to the community. But, figuring out why you want to market it or who you want to market it to, that’s more difficult.

Sandro Groganz: What was the most recent marketing work that you did for GNOME?

Stormy Peters: What I’m working on right now is our "Friends of GNOME" project, which is our project for accepting donations from individuals and I want to relaunch those pages in a way that appeals to more people. For example, right now, it doesn’t explain what GNOME is. It’s very much targeted at GNOME developers themselves, and I want to launch it with a product focus to the general public. So that’s what I am working on right now.

Sandro Groganz: What is your goal? Why do you want to do that?

Stormy Peters: My goal is outreach. To teach more people about GNOME, so that they know that it’s there for them to use and that it’s a free desktop, that it has lots of features, that it’s an alternative to the proprietary desktop they are using and also to raise money for the GNOME project so that we can fly more developers to conferences, support more things that developers need to develop a better GNOME for the public.

Sandro Groganz: You have experience working with very large companies and mid-size companies. What's the difference when marketing a community-driven project like GNOME compared to a company?

Stormy Peters: Yes, I worked at HP for 10 years and then I worked at OpenLogic, though at OpenLogic I actually worked in the marketing team. So, I joke that the biggest differences when I came to the GNOME Foundation was that there was nobody that made a business card. So I got to design my own templates, and print them...it’s that small! But that’s just the kind of difference between a small company and a large company.

The other difference is that at companies, there is a team that's the marketing team that directly reports to the CEO at some level and they have the agenda for marketing and they get to make all the decisions. In the GNOME Foundation, the marketing team is volunteers that signed up on the marketing mailing list. They may or may not have a marketing background, they may or may not be available this week to work on something, and they don’t directly report to anybody that can say "Yes, that’s okay".

It’s very much finding people that want to work on it with you, coming up with good ideas, putting them out there to the community, getting feedback and at some point feeling like you have enough feedback that you can say, "Okay, this is good, the community bought into it, we can move forward".

Sandro Groganz: So basically, you are building a community-driven marketing effort within GNOME. How do you think you can best achieve that goal?

Stormy Peters: I should give credit to the people before me. There was a GNOME marketing community before I got there and a marketing mailing list of people working on it. So, the group is already there, and I am helping drive some new goals and some new ideas that we wanted to do.

For example, there is is the GNOME annual report. All of the content was done by volunteers before I got to GNOME, and it’s been really useful and a really valuable tool to show companies and people what GNOME is doing, who the people are that are working on it, some of the things that excite and motivate the community.

I just wanted to share it as something that I think the GNOME project has done a
really good job in making this annual report available to our sponsors and others and it really highlights the great things that GNOME did in 2007.

Sandro Groganz: Within that group, do you have specialists who are good in event management, who are good in public relations work?

Stormy Peters: We have a little bit of everything. GNOME actually has an annual event, GUADEC, that is always run by volunteers, and it’s phenomenal! I’m very impressed with open source conferences like GUADEC, that are completely run by volunteers. And it’s not necessarily the same volunteers every year. Some conferences like SCALAR have the same volunteers, but for Linux-CONF Australia and GNOME, it’s a new set every year and it runs phenomenally. That expertise for event running is already there and working, I don’t want to say perfectly but, stupendously.

Some of the things that we need to work on next are the Web pages - and we have graphic designers and people that know HTML and CSS and things like that. So it’s really just about energizing people around a topic, and the experts have been awesome about volunteering.

Sandro Groganz: Concerning the Web site and the positioning of GNOME, what are the changes you want to apply to the Web site?

Stormy Peters: Again, I have to give credit to the people before me, that the whole revamp has been happening before I got there. I think that what I would like to introduce is more language that addresses people who don’t have a background in open-source software and GNOME. One of the things that the community needs help with is reaching out to the very end-users, the ones that don’t already know about open-source software, because we get a lot of feedback from people that are in the community.

Sandro Groganz: Concerning the marketing budget, of course there are a lot of people who work on marketing at GNOME for free, so to say. But if you compare it to companies where you worked, what would it be in terms of money? What kind of budget does GNOME have at hand virtually to do marketing?

Stormy Peters: So, if I added up all the volunteer efforts, how much would it be? You know, I don’t know enough to know yet. On the mailing list, you can see the list of email addresses of the people that have signed up, and I know the people that have been vocal over the last couple months, but I don’t really yet know the level of effort that everyone’s spending on it. So, ask me again next year.

Sandro Groganz: Okay. How do you reach consensus within the GNOME community when it comes to marketing activities or focusing, marketing and positioning the GNOME product?

Stormy Peters: Yes, I’m still working on that, personally. We have a couple of formal, official tools - for example, the GNOME Foundation has members which are all the contributors to GNOME that have applied for membership. We have 400 voting members. So, for something really big, you could do a vote, and you could get everybody to actually say what they thought, one way or the other. We also have an elected board of directors who has the authority to make day-to-day decisions.

But, imagine it was a marketing effort that was pretty substantial, like a tag line or, you know, something that was very representative of GNOME, I’m not exactly 100% sure how you reach consensus. I mean, you could do a vote. In the past they’ve done polling, so they’ve actually put out...they did some kind of brainstorming and they came up with ten tag lines and put it in a poll, and everybody got an opportunity to go vote on the poll.

But it’s a dilemma, because you’re never gonna actually reach 100% agreement, and so at what point do you decide from a mailing list that you have enough agreement to move forward?

Sandro Groganz: So, I guess the problem with positioning a company or open-source project is about making a decision on the one option that you want to continue working on. And the same problem in a company: if you have a vote mechanism in the company about the positioning of the product, there would be many different opinions about it and that might be one of the major problems within the open-source community. Do you have an idea how to tackle that? How to get consensus?

Stormy Peters: Well, I wouldn’t actually say it’s one of the problems. It’s one of the difficulties. But I think, for companies, that’s one of the things that they’re missing.

I’ve seen this conflict: if you watch an open-source software developer who works at a traditional company, if he thinks a feature that you're adding or what you’re marketing is wrong, he’ll argue it, which is great and then you’ll see the manager who is not used to the open-source community say, "No, this is the way we are doing it". And the developer who comes from the open-source background says, "But no, you don’t understand blah blah..." And the manager goes, "No, this is the way we’re doing it". And the developer says, "No, I can’t do it that way, you know, this is not right". And the next thing you know, the developer’s fired because the manager gave him a direct order and he didn’t listen, or they go into passive-aggressive.

Companies need to learn that you have to get buy-in from all the developers on your team. And if they’re really protesting and saying "I won’t do this because I don’t believe it’s right", there is something missing in your communications effort. At the same time, in the open-source community, when you do that for several hundred people, it's very difficult, right? And often, you
see flame wars that happen on mailing lists and so you don't always get everybody to say, "Yeah, I’ll buy in". Often you have quite a few people that say "Well, alright, I don’t really agree but go ahead".

It forces the communication to go to the next level, and it doesn’t shut people up to have that opinion.

Sandro Groganz: I wonder if maybe part of the difficulty is because GNOME is an early-phase project that has been started by developers simply because there was a need for a Linux desktop. Maybe, in the future, we will see more open source projects or products that have been started with a business background. So there, marketing comes first or is part of the first decisions, while at GNOME, marketing maybe comes at the end now that it has already reached a certain visibility. What do you think, is that a proper way of looking at it?

Stormy Peters: I think the GNOME community would come back and say, "Why do you need marketing?" And they need marketing for different reasons and some of them feel differently. In general, they made a project they believe in that does the job. It’s been picked up by many Linux distributions because it did what it needed to do and it did it well.

Currently, GNOME gets rebranded often by the Linux distribution so end users don’t know they are using GNOME. So one question that you could ask is, "Is that an issue? Does GNOME need marketing, or does it just need relationships with the distributions?"

Sandro Groganz: Did you analyze the brand identity of GNOME and did you think about how to change it and how to make it more visible?

Stormy Peters: One of the things that I joked about doing was making GNOME like the "Intel Inside", so like the "GNOME Inside" and I think there’s ways we could do that. I think GNOME has very strong tools when it comes to logos and brands. They’ve got that infrastructure. We could put together rebranding guidelines for the Linux distributions saying, "you must leave the GNOME foot or icon in these following three places and here’s where you can put your icon". We could do something like that, if we decided that we wanted to market GNOME to that end-user.

Sandro Groganz: What is the most important goal for you concerning marketing at GNOME?

Stormy Peters: The most important goal to me is making sure that we're reaching the right people with the right message and that the community atmosphere, the community environment, comes across in that message because I think, to the average person or to the average company person, understanding the feeling of the GNOME community and how dedicated they are to having a free desktop that’s accessible, that’s usable. I think that’s very appealing to people, and very valuable.

Sandro Groganz: When is the year of the Linux Desktop?

Stormy Peters: Every year from five years ago till ten years from now [smiles], I’ve said "It’s this year!".

I really think that the netbooks, the small, very cheap laptops, are definitely bringing Linux to a huge number of people. I mean, half a million people this year that probably didn’t use Linux now have a little netbook that runs Linux, boots extremely fast, and you only have to boot it in front of someone who has a Windows machine and they go "What's that?!". So, I don’t know if this is the year of the desktop, but this is definitely the year where it’s starting to grow fast.

Sandro Groganz: OK, thank you very much for the interview.

Stormy Peters: Thanks.