Open Source Summit North America 2022

The word ‘marketing’ has a bad reputation in the open source world, but if you want to gain traction and build a community of engaged users and contributors, people need to know your project exists — in other words, marketing. Regardless of your project’s goals or your project’s current size, marketing is critical for continued growth and adoption, both to get people to discover your project, understand what your project does, onboard new users and increase engagement among existing users. Authentic marketing should never feel sleazy, and there’s no reason open source maintainers can’t borrow marketing ideas from the for-profit world when spreading the word about their projects. In this panel, Emily Omier, Jana Iris, Nithya Ruff, and Matt Yonkovit will discuss marketing and community building strategies and how they can be applied to open source software. Attendees will learn how to apply these strategies to their own projects, taking into account their goals for the project, skill sets and resources at their disposal.