A new year brings new projects and new plans for marketing at Eclipse. I thought it would be useful to let the community know some of our plans for 2009. Of course this isn’t all we will be doing but it will represent a significant portion of our time and resources.
First some context: late last year, the Eclipse Board of Directors set the following strategic goals for the Foundation in 2009:
- Establish Eclipse as a leading provider of open source runtime technologies
- Maintain global leadership in open source tools platforms
- Create value for all its membership classes
- Foster growth of the ecosystem, particularly in verticals
Therefore, we have set the marketing priorities to support these goals. So in no particular order here are some of the projects we plan on doing in 2009.
- Eclipse Plugin Central (EPIC) provides great value for our community. Over 1100 products and solutions are listed and it drives considerable traffic to those products. However, EPIC is built on an old content management system and it is showing the age. Therefore, we are going to undertake a complete rewrite of EPIC. My hope is to significantly improve the look and feel of the site, integrate some of the p2 technology and host it on a modern CMS. In the next couple of weeks we will kick-off a community call for requirements, so if you have some ideas to improve EPIC please let me know.
- The Eclipse Days and Eclipse Demo Camps have been a great success. Having local Foundation member companies organize local regional community events is great for building the global Eclipse community. Not everyone can attend EclipseCon or Eclipse Summit Europe and in the current economic climate, we want to make it easier for people to participate. Therefore, in 2009 we are going to organize two series of Eclipse DemoCamps in May/June and November. We also want to encourage more Eclipse Days, either regionally focused, like EclipseIST, or industry focused like the Eclipse Banking Days. Feel free to contact me if you have a suggestion for an Eclipse Day.
- Last year the Eclipse RT top-level project was created to be the home for the Eclipse runtime technologies. At EclipseCon we rolled out Eclipse RT and our strategy to be an open source provider of runtime technologies. In the last year, Equinox and in general OSGi has gained reasonable awareness in the industry. This year we will continue to focus on educating the community about Eclipse runtime technology. We will do this by highlighting the different projects with the press, create content, such as white papers and webinars that make it easier for developers to understand the technology and case studies that highlight how people are using the technology to solve real problems.
- In general, most developers know and understand Eclipse. However, we need to do more work on explaining Eclipse to the business and technology executives in large enterprises. This is especially true as Eclipse expands into runtime technologies and if we want these executives to deepen their organization’s participation in Eclipse. As I have mentioned before, I believe enterprise collaboration and participation in open source projects is the future, so we need to help these decision makers to understand the opportunity.
- Our annual release train is always a great opportunity to reinforce the leadership Eclipse has in the developer community. Again this year we will focus on promoting the Galileo release and the cool new features of the different projects.
- Later this year we want to create a user portal for eclipse.org. Right now, we provide a ‘one size fits all’ approach to our home page but what if we allow our users to create their own home page. Kind of like iGoogle but focused on the different aspects of Eclipse. We need to do the EPIC modernization project first but a user portal is something that I hope will make it easier for our user community to interact and participate at eclipse.org.
These are some of the major initiatives for us in 2009. Comments, feedback and good ideas are always welcome. The real power of the Eclipse ‘marketing machine’ is the community participation and support. If you want to help work on a good idea to promote Eclipse, let me know how I can help.
