Life at Eclipse

The past two days have been both busy and exciting. Today was the Eclipse Members meeting. Yesterday I was in the Board meeting while Ian Skerrett and Skip McGaughey were leading the new members meeting and the Eclipse marketing symposium.

The marketing symposium was definitely a big hit with the members. We had Carl Zetie from Forrester and Steve O’Grady from RedMonk speaking. (I would have liked to have given a link to Carl, but apparently you have to be a Forrester customer to read Carl’s blog. How lame is that? I hope that Carl can drag that company out of the ’90’s soon.)

Steve’s talk on marketing to developers was a big hit. His message? Developers matter, and you cannot market to them using conventional marketing blah blah blah. Top down will never work (if it ever did), so you have to learn how to create a market bottom up. Steve’s presentation materials are available here (OpenOffice) and here (PowerPoint). They are available under a Creative Commons license and I highly recommend them.

Along the same lines, I also really enjoyed reading You ARE a Marketer. Deal With It.

If you’re interested in creating passionate users, or keeping your job, or breathing life into a startup, or getting others to contribute to your open source project, or getting your significant other to agree to the vacation you want to go on… congratulations. You’re in marketing.

The message here is that we are all becoming marketers. Every one of us in Eclipse — developers and committers definitely included — have the opportunity to get the message out. To have conversations with our community. Both Kim and Steve get it.

For those who read the entire “You ARE a Marketer…” and are wondering….Yes, I sent the link to Ian……and no, he refuses to kill himself 😉