Episode 61: Melissa Logan on Marketing Open Source Effectively and Sustainably

Panelists Justin Dorfman | Richard Littauer Guest Melissa Logan
Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! Our special guest today is
Melissa Logan, Founder of Constantia.io, a marketing consultancy
that focuses on open source and enterprise tech companies. She
pioneered the role of open source marketer that helped fuel the
rise of open source software development. She also launched the
Sexism Field Guide to help people identify and confront all forms
of sexism. We will learn why Melissa created Constantia, her work
at The Linux Foundation, Apache Cassandra, and Isilon. Also,
Melissa talks about having the right personality to do marketing in
a community and why she thinks about the community like a prism.
Download this episode now to find out more! [00:00:48] Melissa
tells us all about Constantia and why she created it. [00:02:30]
Since Melissa has worked mainly with large OSPO’s, Richard wonders
if she has had any experience working with smaller organizations or
smaller repositories on GitHub type stuff. She also talks about
what she did at the Linux Foundation and the projects they started,
one specifically called OpenDaylight. [00:06:38] When Melissa talks
about open source there are two key ways that she describes it.
[00:07:43] We learn about Melissa working with the Apache Cassandra
Community. Justin wonders if there was a company that did support
contracts for Cassandra funding this or if this was a grassroots
type of deal. [00:11:03] We learn what Melissa did at Isilon.
[00:13:00] Richard wonders how Melissa gets marketing copy in front
of people because mailing lists are important to getting into
people’s inboxes. [00:16:23] Richard asks Melissa if she has any
insight on how to market somebody who runs a small react library
and she gives some great advice. [00:18:47] Melissa tells us how to
pitch marketing to open source foundations as something they need
to do because the return is so small. Richard wonders if she’s ever
had to deal with people who are closed sourced and try to convince
them to go open. [00:26:55] Since the pandemic has changed a lot of
things around marketing, Richard wonders what Melissa’s had to
change with how she markets stuff to get in front of people’s eyes
over the past six months. [00:29:35] Melissa brings up the topic of
disaggregated marketing and when you think about doing marketing in
a community one of the most important things you need is the right
personality. She also explains how she thinks of the community as a
kind of prism. [00:34:43] If you’re interested in seeing the
awesome content that Melissa has put out, she tells us where we can
find it online. Spotlight [00:35:22] Justin’s spotlight is
FingerprintJS. [00:36:00] Richard’s spotlight is a website
(https://alex.github.io/nyt-2020-election-scraper/battleground-state-changes.html#)
with election data that allows you to see what’s happening every
minute in all of the battleground states. [00:36:41] Melissa’s
spotlight is Scribus.net. Quotes [00:08:01] “At Linux Foundation it
was different because it was part of kind of the governance of the
project.” [00:11:03] “You were at Isilon. I remember reading about
it way back in the day and it was acquired by EMC. What did you do
there because that just really interests me?” [00:17:15] “When you
think about doing marketing in a community, there are a lot of
people who work at different companies, they have different
cultures, they have different reasons for participating. Maybe
they’re not aware that you actually want to have a marketing
effort.” [00:17:32] “So I think what’s really important is to build
some kind of architecture of participation for people in your
community.” [00:19:18] “What are those quote unquote KPI’s in an
open source project? What do we look at? I think things like lines
of code, stars, those are all, I think you should just set those
aside. That really doesn’t tell you about the health of an open
source project.” [00:20:01] “So we really look at share of voice as
one of the key metrics in an open source project and how we
evaluate how things are doing.” [00:21:35] “One of the key ways
that we knew we were gaining traction was when we found out that
AT&T had adopted OpenDaylight, and we found out because they
had said something on a user list because of course they found some
bug or issue with it, so of course that’s when they reach out and
talk to us.” [00:27:00] “So during the pandemic we’ve all been
trying to figure out how not to overload people who are overloaded
by so much content and information because everyone is doing
everything digital all the time.” [00:30:38] Then how do you level
the playing field for projects that maybe don’t have a charismatic
leader? And the way you can do that is to find someone who plays in
this marketing role who does go and seek out all these other types
of contributions and tries to shine a light on things that are
happening, not just with individuals, but in all parts of your
community.” [00:31:40] “I remember in the early 2000’s, you had
people in the embedded Linux community who were looking at ways to
improve power consumption in satellites that were going into space
so that was really important. You had needed a small footprint for
everything. When they figured that out, they put it back upstream
and that was then adopted by people in the supercomputing
community.” [00:34:26] “I think of marketing kind of like you’re a
backstage manager for a play and you’re trying to make everything
run really smoothly for all the other people on the stage and
really shine a light on them literally and figuratively.” Links
Melissa Logan Twitter (https://twitter.com/melissa_b2b?lang=en)
Melissa Logan Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mklogan)
Constantia (https://constantia.io/) All Things Open 2020 Online
Event (https://2020.allthingsopen.org/) Open Daylight Project (ODL)
(https://www.opendaylight.org/) The Linux Foundation
(https://www.linuxfoundation.org/) Dell EMC Isilon
(https://www.delltechnologies.com/en-us/storage/isilon/isilon-a2000-archive-nas-storage.htm?gacd=9650523-1033-5761040-266691960-0&dgc=st&&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI59rQu7327AIVg-iGCh0mAASuEAAYASABEgKNdvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds)
Apache Cassandra (https://cassandra.apache.org/) Apache Cassandra
Twitter (https://twitter.com/cassandra) The Sexism Field Guide by
Melissa Logan (https://sexismfieldguide.com/) FingerprintJS
(https://fingerprintjs.com/) Election data results website
(https://alex.github.io/nyt-2020-election-scraper/battleground-state-changes.html)
Scribus (https://www.scribus.net/) Credits Produced by Richard
Littauer (https://www.burntfen.com/) Edited by Paul M. Bahr at
Peachtree Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/) Show notes by
DeAnn Bahr at Peachtree Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/)
Special Guest: Melissa Logan.