Discussion

Marketing Tips for ProjectLibre

September 24, 2012 - 21:01 pm
9 comment(s)

Hello all,

I would like to contribute two tips which might increase the spread of ProjectLibre:

1. OpenProj ceased development and it's founders have forked the old code base to become ProjectLibre which is now developed very actively again. Although OpenProj's development ceased and the project is literally dead, absolutely outdated and full of known bugs ans limitations, problems which ProjectLibre fixes all of them, last week there still had been 16,388 downloads of OpenProj and only 2,058 of ProjectLibre on Sourceforge. The brand awareness of OpenProj still seems to be extremely strong and people continue to download the dead horse, instead of being aware of the new and fully alife alternative called ProjectLibre. So my tip is: Mark OpenProj clearely as "DEAD" on Sourceforge and urge all site visitors to swtich to ProjectLibre instead, including a link, etc.

2. Voting for project of the month: This is a great thing and winning this contest would boost ProjectLibre. Unfortunately as I figured, to participate at the poll, someone needs to have an Twitter account. This is a total showstopper for some people out there, who don't want to use such a service, but would loved to vote for ProjectLibre. Introducing a more open way of participating at votings, might increase votes..

Just my 5 cents,

thinkerix

 

9 Comments

September 24, 2012 - 23:52 pm

Thanks for the comments.... we totally agree with you that OpenProj development is dead and has been for over 4 years. Unfortunately, we do not have access to publicize ProjectLibre on their Sourceforge site.  We have spoken with Sourceforge to get access but Serena is blocking any changes.  The best we can do is put a note on the forums but it is not very effective.  We really do need to get more publicity!  

Good news, we did win Project of the Month!  We were very pleased as we are a new project and the support was terrific! 

September 25, 2012 - 19:14 pm

Well, I guess someone of OpenProj heard us and decided to support the effort of ProjectLibre, check out the "superseded"-note: http://sourceforge.net/projects/openproj!!

Thank you very much for the support!!

 

 

September 25, 2012 - 23:01 pm

I did notice the change and wanted to let you know they made the change due to your comments.  I am being interviewed later today by Sourceforge and in the process of setting up the interview mentioned your comments. It did spur them to do the right thing, we need to keep improving ProjectLibre but this is helpful.... Thank you again! 

September 26, 2012 - 02:58 am

Regarding the POTM vote and the use of Twitter ...

The first POTM vote I did, there were about 15,000 votes cast by one individual, and I ended up having to throw out the results and start over. I settled on Twitter as the auth mechanism because it's more universal than other things. Ideally, we'd use SourceForge accounts, but we don't yet have a voting mechanism on the SF site. So I had to pick something.

So, yeah, I agree, Twitter isn't ideal, but it's better than ballot stuffing.

On the other hand, if you have alternative suggestions, please speak up. I'm not at all tied to using the current mechanism. Unfortunately, any solution that I've looked at so far either eliminates a large part of the voter pool or opens the vote up to fraudulent voting.

 

September 26, 2012 - 07:10 am

Hello rbowen,

I understand the problem of ballot stuffing,  but IMHO replacing a flaw with another flaw is not a solution.

Using the proprietory and commercial webservice "Twitter" for the poll requires people to be registered at Twitter Inc., which many people aren't or even explicitly refuse to be. The userbase of Twitter is not equaly distributed arround the globe or concerning user groups, demographics, etc.

So what you produce by using Twitter is a totally distorted result- it is not a poll about "Sourceforge Project of the month", but "Twitter user's favorite project of the month that is hosted on another service called Sourceforge".  As a matter of fact, they did not even need to be Sourceforge users or of any of the software projects that they where voting fore. Oposite to that, users such as me, who use the software that was included in the poll and who are Sourceforge users since many years where excluded from the poll.

IMHO the only valid and proper place for such as poll to occur is the userbase of Sourceforge itself. The "Sourceforge Project of the Month" naturally should be elected only by Sourceforge users and nobody else. If Sourceforge has no means to perform such a poll I would recommend waiting until this has been added.

As for alternative solutions, I would like to suggest "LimeSurvey" (http://sourceforge.net/projects/limesurvey), which is a free (GPL v2.0) and fully-fledged surveying tool that works great. Since a poll is nothing else than a simple one-page survey, LimeSurvey would be more than enough for the job. But being a sophisticated surveying tool, LimeSurvey includes advanced features, too, such as "tokens". Tokens are code-keys sent to users, that allow them to participate at the survey/poll, so to avoid unauthorized people participate and/or hamper ballot stuffing.

A quick-and-dirty solution would be to set up a LimeSurvey Server, create a poll with it and sent a invitation-message/newsletter-topic to all Sourceforge users inviting them to participate at the Sourceforge Project of the month-Poll, including such a individual token in each message. A more sophisticated solution would be to integrate the whole LimeSurvey survey into the Sourceforge Website, etc. I guess that in any case the very nice guys from the LimeSurvey project would be delighted to assist Sourceforge in doing so.

HTH

Cheers

thinkerix

September 26, 2012 - 09:01 am

Briefly, yes we intend to implement a survey tool as part of the sf.net website, and, no, I am not content to merely wait and do nothing until that time. I'm sorry the poll excluded you. The alternative was to exclude everyone. I, for one, am glad projectlibre won. It's what I voted for. 

October 1, 2012 - 23:05 pm

Have you considered joining the LibreOffice group and making ProjectLibre part of their office suite?   Not having a project managment module is one of their missing pieces and being part of their suite would be a major boost to this project's rebranding. 

 

Thanks for getting OpenProject moving again.  I applaud your efforts, am using your software, and will contribute to the documentation as much as my "day job" permits.  Keep up the good work!

 

 

 

October 2, 2012 - 01:16 am

Thank you for the note... I have been in touch with Florian and we intend on working together.  I completely agree, we have different open source licenses but will find a way to work together.  It turns out over 7% of all desktops have Microsoft Project.  This makes it impossible for even smaller organizations to migrate to LibreOffice or OpenOffice.  We can really make a difference!