Global Melt/Communication Outreach

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Scopes:

• global
• community
• individual

What's in it for the different scopes?

At different events I noticed seeing the same people, and it was hard to pull new people in. Decided to go further, experimenting with unusual names for events. Not using organisation names. Let's come and talk about HTML 5. Related to the mission, but not necessarily connected to the company. People were interested, and new faces showed up. This event has one of the best attendences of events organised in Barcelona.

Motivator for non-community members: learn about something new.

Drumbeat is a Mozilla initiative, movement. Connect people with idaes and creating open tools and improve participation and make the web better.

How do you decide what is interesting and relevant to your mission? How to select the crowd you want to attract and then attract them?

KDE: has big forum website. Many users and discussions between users. Challenge: involve more users, or get more contributors or promotors?

Goal: attract new users.

Goal: attract new developers.

Goal: involve existing users. Same event as below.

Goal: attract new contributors. Combine mini-exhibition with existing contributors. Attracted new contributors through non-technical communities. Promotion: flyers distributed by volunteers in public place. Media attention generated through networks of exiting volunteers.

Prototyping. Used wp10 as an opportunity for outreach.

Building your partners: Identified possible needs -> available strategies -> available networks -> potential partners

What's in it for me? -> stories. Identify people in your organisation that have the skills to tell/find stories, and use them setting up and framing your events. How do you maintain relationships if your travelling circus goes to another town next year? Follow-up, follow through, Contacts with sponsors Doing a few things really well is better than doing a lot of things half. Think about derivative works. Which people need to be talking to each other before the event in order to make it (more) succesful Evaluate after event, document the results/stories, update your best practices Agile conference planning

How do you keep track of how far it spread and how to identify blind spots? By analysing feedback forms and updating best practices and checklists. How do you increase the percentage of attendees that provide feedback? Not discussed. Takeaways. How do they contribute to outreach after the event? Have you thought about what you want to achieve with swag? Consider how it could provoke action! Think about who you are going to create the swag for. Examples: Google handing out Android phone. Not being done in cheap swag as far as we know!!!

Summary

• global, community, individual
• Travelling circus vs garden growing
• Building your partners: Identified possible needs -> available strategies -> available networks -> potential partners. Travelling circus vs. growing garden.
• Get story tellers in contact with your event planners. This will create more attractive events.
• Let documentation not be an afterthought. Create it and update it!
• Takeaways: purpose an audience
• Collect feedback in every stage and act on it.
• Swag should provoke action!