I’m popping out again with marketing stuff (I know I know, but it’s my job after all)
After the b1 release, I saw several attempts to revamp communication efforts on Haiku. The teaser is nice, and a FB post about a pet is popping ou and it has good potential (well…not yet actually…i still prefer the crane eheh)
Haiku needs probably a bit more marketing at this stage and this is going to feed a thread on his own (and I will)
Here, I’m going to put under spotlight the idea of crowdfunding instead. Not a huge campaign which needs lot of love and care, but one or two smaller entrée campaigns to feed some developer months to add more critical issues (and fixing the existing under the hood)
KS campaigns needs a lot of attention (I did some for my side activity 9th Circle Games) and effort. This is not money falling from the sky. They are difficult and first attempts often fails (personal experience).
But I think Haiku and expecially its community (including ofc non-devs) have everything it needs to perform one. And this would be a great step in fundrising (btw: Haiku Inc. must upgrade the financial reports. Transparency is everything IMHO)
Maybe a Patreon would be better. After all, it is the long-term security of cash flow that is more important to people in most cases. Perhaps some of the devs can even setup their own as a way to compensate them for Haiku work?
1- Patreon needs a lot more branding to be succesfull. It’s a much more difficult to climb at this stage AND it insists on the same target audience that was already cartched by the community (and have donated already, probably). I, for example, would never patreon a dev just, let’s say, to discover than I’m going to be the only one.
2- Crowdfunding on the other hands insist on a different audience, those one that - albeit still in the target (geek, open-minded, OSS enthusiasts, idealistic, linux and mac users, ex amiga users, we can refine later) - have not been catched already. Those one needs eye candy: teaser, trailers, tutorials, showoffs, a vision, ideas; they must feel that you love the project and you won’t escape with the chest.
In other words: you make them dreaming. You’re not going to achieve it with monthly blog post. This is a lot of work. But it’s the best strategy for a successfull campaigns.
I don’t want to understimate the dev works that made this possible ofc, but marketing and communication deserves more love here (just coming from the FB page…well…ok…nevermind…)
Maybe @humdinger could help here handling in the best way. I had not luck in introducing these subjects in the past to core. Marketing and DEV are likes dogs and cats u know
Well, I’m a developer and sales engineer, so maybe I can help bridge the divide? Having been involved in marketing campaigns and social selling, I know the challenges.
Your ill-fated suggestion to use Google Analytics to gain data on the website usage is a different issue. There you had to convice the very small (opinionated ) admin team to actually install something on the Haiku server. (I always wanted to bump that thread and keep forgetting. I may still do that… )
The Kickstarter idea can be realized completely independent from the dev side of the Haiku project. In fact, I doubt many devs would like to get involved, if only because of time constraints.
Don’t count or depend on someone else (or the devs) to start this. The Haiku project has pretty much no marketing department. We could definitely need one or ten people there. And not just with an idea, but actually doing all the work.
this is good to know. So the point is where to start/how to get the commit. A marketing team cannot start acting on their behalf without authorization or without bootstrapping a strategy all together (with the devs, in the sense they should help defining a tentative roadmap for the releases)
And that will always be the problem if you have a Kickstarter in mind of “Finance x developers to finish Haiku R1”. As a volunteer project, there just isn’t a way to get a trustable timeline for that. And even paying people to work on that, things tend to crop up that were unexpected…
I’d suggest to create a list of, say, ten major tickets from the bug tracker that will bring Haiku a nice big step nearer to R1, and make the Betas better. Then see what that will cost and look for a dev for that.
Of course, it’ll be very hard to find a large audience at Kickstarter to finance that… It’s all been said before, try a forum search. At least I feel that I’ve wrote tis all before…
I already worked full time for Haiku, and I can say that I’m now quite happy with my current full time job and not willing to risk working on Haiku again unless I’m really sure there will be long term support for it.
So, I don’t get the “let’s do a kickstarter” thing. For me, it should start with “what do we need money for?” and only then we can think about the best way to gather such money
I have created a Liberapay account as a way to accept direct donations from other people. Currently I don’t plan on making a living out of it, I will probably donate back most of the money to other people and organizations.
This is not the way to fund a KS campaign to ppl not having idea on what’s Haiku is at first place Im afraid. “Bake on this and if we reach XXX we are going to fix the ten oldest bug plaguing our source code!”
Fund raising targeted to the community will work this way, this for sure. But on KS you’re going to target high education, wealthies, instinctive buyer that doesn’t know what Haiku is yet.
KS bakers know there’s a bit feasibility during a campaign. They expect it. Ofc this doesn’t mean that the promoter can bail it out irresponsibly. It’s more a matter of reciprocal trust.
yes…and no…
Today? This would be impossible.
A KS campaign is the last step in a well planned, long-term journey. Starting working today on a digital strategy we could hope to try a KS campaign in Q3 2019 IMHO. Many digital assets must be crafted before that attempt (social, web, SEO…)
That’s why the dev/core team should be involved in the planning phase and this is exactly what I mean with a tentative roadmap. DEv must tell what is feasible in which times and with which resources with the actual asset in place.
For ex. sayin “3d acceleration” could have a great impact on a KS trailer…but is this possible to realistically achieve it?
On the other end, put (just an example) EFI compliancy as a KS goal is probably not a good idea
I agree the first question to arise where to invest money supposing we have them? (how to convince bakers to invest and where is a secondary matter at this stage)
We have trouble hiring students for GSoC already. There is no point for hiring more students. As a result the focus switched from hcd to funding already contributing developers, when they are available for hire.
Last year the inc also funded a coding sprint, where Haiku developers could work together in the same room, distraction free, for a week. This had a nice impact both in terms of produced code during that week, and morale and productivity boost for everyone attending. I think this was a wise use of the money.
Having kickstarted quite a few things, I think a KickStarter is a great way to generate a ton of bad PR. Expectations not met, missing deadlines, bad blood this are all terrible for a project.
I personally would much rather one of the developers just steped up and said “I want to work X days on Y and it will cost this much” and then I’ll throw money at it to the tune I see fit. For instance if Pulkomandy finds himself between jobs at some point… I won’t be the least bit supprised if he does some contract work for Haiku.
In Pulkomandy’s case probably improving Web+, maybe specifically adblocking (something similar to what Otter-browser does would be awesome) and stablility would be worth a bit to me. That probably means further improvements to the Network kit also. Maybe ipv6 improvements if he’s feeling it. I think it deserves being mentinoned first as well as it a key component of Haiku these days. Oh and BTextbox isses… its really annoying so maybe that too
For waddlesplash there is the obvious 3d acceleration most all of us want for this reason or that. And USB improvements he’s working on as well. Wifi driver improvements. Random app porting and such…
Kallisti5 I wouldn’t mind sponsoring him a few pizzas to get Vega graphics working… and maybe some fixes for Ryzen while he’s at it maybe sent him an Athlon 200GE to play with.
Sponsoring developers that way for me I think would feel way more like saying thank you kind of premptively rather than paying for something and expecting to get it…
Repeating the coding sprint sounds like a good idea too where all of the above and more could happen, if Haiku is to take on a yearly release schedule perhaps doing a sprint soonish, and then improving and stabilizing the results for a year makes sense?
That’s exactly how it works now. Only that there have been 0 developers interested in it for some time.
I just doubt that a Kickstarter campaign like “Let’s have 3D acceleration for Haiku” will gather signficantly more than a "Who or what is a “Haiku”?
The general public doesn’t seem to be interested in a Desktop OS.
But I don’t want to bring anyone down…
Maybe @waddlesplash can give a time estimate once he looked into what’s what wrt 3D. I doubt he’d want to wait for a successful Kickstarter a year away though…
Just calculate with 12 months á $10,000 and now try to come up with PR material that could generate that amount of money from people that aren’t already interested in Haiku.
Maybe that’s because the intiative like this is not described anywhere on the website homepage where it could be clearly seen by the first time Haiku devs?
) admin team to actually install something on the Haiku server. (I always wanted to bump that thread and keep forgetting. I may still do that… )