Someone (forgive me, I forget who... sorry!) linked this to me on IRC
the other day and I thought it was very cool and interesting - and
thought I'd share some of the bits with others.
openSUSE has their strategy, SWOT, and industry assessments posted
online, openly and transparently (kudos to them!). I think they have
done an awesome job thus far.
http://en.opensuse.org/Documents
They also have a link to the survey they did in February 2010 (8700
participants!) - generally surveying who their users are, what they
are using linux for, what types of development they do, etc.
http://en.opensuse.org/UX/openSUSE_Survey_2010
There is also a link to this page:
http://www.90-9-1.com/ - which I
thought was very interesting, particularly in light of the user base
discussions and diagrams that we've all seen. Essentially 90-9-1 dives
into (no, no, PLOWS into) these three points:
* 90% of users are the “audience”, or lurkers. The people tend to
read or observe, but don’t actively contribute.
* 9% of users are “editors”, sometimes modifying content or adding
to an existing thread, but rarely create content from scratch.
* 1% of users are “creators”, driving large amounts of the social
group’s activity. More often than not, these people are driving a vast
percentage of the site’s new content, threads, and activity.
(Incidentally, if you haven't seen the User Base information, I
encourage you to do so:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User_base . I
was also looking for the page that has the user base triangle diagram
- does anyone know where that is?)
Additionally - Wikimedia has some REALLY awesome documentation and
information available about their current strategy process.
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
What I love about what they're doing is that they're hitting three key points:
* Where we are now
* Where we should go
* How we should get there
And not just in a short term view - they're looking at the development
of the 5 year plan, and figuring out what the waypoints are to get
them from the place they are currently at. And similar to openSUSE -
they're also doing this in a community fashion.
I'd like to add that Wikimedia strategy was part of the
opensource.com
"Open Your World" Forum that was done online a few days ago. I really
encourage everyone to read this blog post -
http://opensource.com/life/10/5/spreading-dandelions-open-your-world-recap
- and watch the linked session recordings. The Wikimedia one in
particular was presented by Eugene Eric Kim of Blue Oxen associates -
and you can also download the slide set if you don't want to listen to
the whole thing (at the bottom of the page where the video
presentation loads up - click on "presentation PDF.")
I think it's great to see other communities tackling the same kinds of
things we are - does anyone know of any other communities doing
similar things in terms of strategic thinking?
-robyn
PS. I think i will make this a blog post. Too interesting to not spread around!