Marketing goals, revisited: the 4 Foundations

[Robyn Bergeron]

On Mon, Jan 4, 2010 at 9:26 AM, Neville A. Cross <nacross at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 4, 2010 at 9:57 AM, Mel Chua <mel at redhat.com> wrote:
>> (I'm pulling out one section of the thread for a moment, but hope discussion
>> continues on the other ideas brought up as well.)
>>
>>>> I'd love to get a marketing class working on this - actually, I
>>>> would love to see a case study (see
>>>> http://www.hbs.edu/mba/academics/casemethod.html) on Fedora.
>>>
>>> What would be really interesting is feeding back the process for
>>> meeting this goal into a discovery of what worked to captivate and
>>> motivate college students to follow through with a contribution.
>>> Maybe that's what you mean by the case method?  It's hard to tell from
>>> the page in question, it's a bit vague but I'm guessing you have some
>>> experience with or knowledge about the method yourself.
>>
>> What I think you're talking about is a case study - documenting what we do
>> as a way to make it easier for others to follow. I think we should be a case
>> study of how open source projects can interact with the case method of
>> teaching, which is a particular thing.
>>
>> The case method is a particular way of teaching that I believe is mostly
>> associated with MBA programs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_method. Most
>> of the cases I've seen come from Harvard, which has an extensive collection
>> of them (http://www.hbs.edu/mba/academics/howthecasemethodworks.html,
>> http://www.hbs.edu/learning/case.html - for an example, see
>> http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5466.html for an explanation and
>> http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5466.html for the abstract to an actual case.)
>>
>> Think of a case as... an .rpm for curricular content for MBAs. It's a format
>> and delivery mechanism schools are used to. (Someone who actually has an MBA
>> may want to step in and correct me at this point.)
>>
>> There's one on Red Hat, though it's 10 years old by now:
>> http://cb.hbsp.harvard.edu/cb/web/product_detail.seam?R=600009-PDF-ENG&conversationId=630649&E=35930
>>
>> There's also one called "Linux in 2004":
>> http://cb.hbsp.harvard.edu/cb/web/product_detail.seam?R=705407-PDF-ENG&conversationId=630649&E=45690
>>
>> Here's the interesting opportunity: these cases are written about companies
>> - there are no cases (yet!) about communities doing many of the same things
>> The Open Source Way.
>>
>
> I have been teaching in business and had to take a seminar on case
> study writing. Case studies are usually wrote to demonstrate and
> exercise some concepts that were discuses on class. That's why case
> studies are usually business focused.
>
> A new trend have emerge where companies think that if some one wrote
> about them can be a way of marketing. This has led to some documents
> that are half case-study half white-papers. White papers in the sense
> of a success story.
>
> There are new needs for academics papers as there are a lot of new
> programs for NGO management were classical business case study does
> not fit. For instance, MBAs does not deal on how to recruit and
> motivate volunteers, which can be very important for NGO and for us.
>
> A good case-study, white-paper or mixture, should be a nice to read
> composition. It that sense, this case studies can have broader use.
>

I think either way - the first step is to actually work on some ways
to get college students contributing in a bigger way, before we can
start case-studying/whitepapering our successes :)  And I'd -really-
like to see something where we're not just tapping engineering
departments for braaaaaaaaaains, but also marketing students, English
/ technical writing students, art / design, journalism,
foreign-language, and I'm sure we could probably find something for
the students in the physics department to do, perhaps bending time and
space to increase time to be a 28-hour day... :)

There are a few routes we could take, not including all the ways I
haven't thought of:

- A basic in-school ambassador program (of sorts) where students are
going out and getting other students to use Fedora, and possibly
contribute to whatever they want

- Mini-projects: Find university departments who have students who
want to free-intern on something.  Foreign language students can work
on translation type things; IT departments with students who are
interested in learning about infrastructure support.  Groups of
students can work on either on-going, continuous things, or taking on
project launches.

- Larger projects: Get a student "leader" at a school (we'll call her
a mini-stickster!) who may be on an official "internship", paid with
small stipend or unpaid, maybe with bonus goodies (we'll send you to a
conference!).   A project where there might be marketing students
working on a marketing plan for some new feature that the engineering
students are working on, foreign-language students doing translation
of what the english / technical writing students are pumping out for
documentation.  In other words, a real, honest-to-goodness, cross-team
project.

I'm just braindumping, of course - Mel also sent an email a while back
that was a beginning-of-the-thought-train on getting students
involved, which I would reference here but my search skillz seem to be
rusty this morning. :\

And you KNOW we have to call it F(ed)ora or something like that.
Although that kind of looks like the Project Red branding (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_Red)... maybe F.Edora :)

-robyn

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