On 2012-05-15, at 14:49 , Roberto Galoppini wrote: > Hi all, > > as you might now SourceForge is serving the vast majority of AOO binaries > downloads, and we provide download stats by country, Operating System, > Browser, and traffic source. Some of you are familiar with our stats pages, > while others use our APIs. > > We do have spam detection enabled to identify false-positive traffic like > bots, and I wish to share some insights of what happened recently on this > front. > > We noticed that Russia was the highest download country, something that was > hard to explain. The popularity was limited to /localized/ru/3.4.0/ > Apache_OpenOffice_incubating_3.4.0_Win_x86_install_ru.exe > > We looked at the raw download logs for that file, and saw a lot of > downloads from user-agent "Download Master". Apparently it is popular in > Russia, and apparently it starts hundreds of simultaneous downloads at > once. Our download stats system does have some logic to prevent double > counting this type of traffic, but it didn't exclude all of the duplicate > downloads, so the result was still high. We've updated our download stats > logic to correct this, and then reprocessed the raw logs from 2012-05-08 to > present, to update the stats. > > Beyond bringing our ability to provide reliable stats, I wish to throw some > new ideas about how we can help Apache OpenOffice to grow: > > a. We could provide intelligence on which projects were downloaded with > Open Office within a week. > b. We could cross-merch Apache OpenOffice project with other projects > c. We have community management and Internet Marketing to support the > community
I'm in favour, as you probably can guess--I strongly promoted OOo both as a binary for users and as a source project for developers (considerable overlap)--but do have simple procedural questions, starting with "we"? You mean, I'd hope, those who simply want to do it? As we encountered with the OOo Marketing Project, good ideas and intentions can quickly get lost in community cacophony: more noise than signal. What we discovered was that focusing on particular drives and engaging those who would be able to carry them out, long term and without undue stress to their regular lives (this is all volunteer), helped. What I further discovered and tried as much as possible to arrange was the support & coordination of small, medium and even large businesses and public sector entities. For instance, a company may have an extension that adds value to AOO and which, by its use, adds huge marketing value to their company and product. I received *a lot* of such requests from companies, and I would like to reacquaint myself with them and they with us, but it takes time. A preliminary list of organizations that were using OOo and probably are interested in AOO can be found at http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Major_OpenOffice.org_Deployments The thing that I noted repeatedly was that many organizations, esp. public sector (and also not a small number of individuals coming from a Windows or Mac background) refused or were reluctant to download the product without professional support. The user forums worked great but in the case of public sectors and also companies, they wanted professional support, as they were used to getting (and paying for). This does not mean we must wait for the horse to be hitched to this wagon, not by any means. And I'm working on rekindling those who *were* providing that support. (Besides Sun/Oracle, there were actually quite a few. Some can still be found from http://support.openoffice.org/) > > We've already run a 250k impressions campaign through our media channels, > and we plan to run more. > Our community growth hacker and Apache member Rich Bowen has covered Apache > OpenOffice both on feathercast and SourceForge blog, and also here we plan > to do more videos and interviews. > > Roberto All in all, thanks, Roberto! I would suggest an IRC meeting with an agenda to start coordinating activities. I also see some implicit milestones. These include drawing attention to what is here, what is coming and how people can use it and contribute to it--without thinking about the Cloud, or cost. And if they must, that there are options there, too. As well, wouldn't it be great that over summer we do enough so that when school starts again here in the Northern Hemisphere, students and faculty can actually use something that is all about working together for a better place? Ciao Louis
