Re: AOO Downloads, false-positive and Beyond

2012-05-18 Thread Roberto Galoppini
On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 4:25 AM, Louis Suárez-Potts lui...@gmail.comwrote:


 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?



In this case 'we' was simply SourceForge.


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.


Apparently ooo-dev is still the best place to coordinate marketing-related
efforts.

I'm working on how we can pass the request of help to our developers'
audience, and possibly find some translators and/or devs.




 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?


Yea, any specific idea in mind?

Roberto



 Ciao
 Louis

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This e- mail message is intended only for the named 

Re: AOO Downloads, false-positive and Beyond

2012-05-18 Thread Louis Suárez-Potts

On 2012-05-18, at 12:15 , Roberto Galoppini wrote:

 
 
 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?
 
 
 Yea, any specific idea in mind?

Yes. Many. 

What I'd suggest is not to target a particular regional market but a logical 
one. In this case, let's look at, oh, say, the Portuguese deployment of the 
Magellan education netbooks. As you recall, earlier instances had Win/MS Office 
in one partition, Lin/OOo in the other. That implicitly and immediately 
deprecated free software, as there was little reason to use it.

As Paulo has told me, though, things have changed. But the basic elements are 
the same: gov't. promoted software (now more free) and devices that are 
inexpensive enough (esp. aftter support) so that they can be widely deployed. 
Portugal is small—about the size of a Beijing suburb, at least in terms of 
population (10M) and Brazil is big, nearly 20 times that size. There is also 
Angola and other former Lusophone polities around the world. 

My argument is to promote a solution that is, at first, software focused. 

* AOO in Portuguese (Br/Pt) with local, when possible, support. (If it is not 
there, we start it or use global options until it is—and it comes into being 
because the market is or ought to be obvious enough.)

* Devices: Intel sided publicly with LibreOffice but earlier had wanted to work 
with OOo. Frankly, I doubt Intel cares one way or another which flavour is the 
best but simply wants a suite that has humongous global usage and also crucial 
community and industrial momentum. 

We have both.

 So, we contact Intel. I know the people at the Tizen (formerly Meego) 
 project, and I'm sure others here do, too. Tizen is essentially a mobilized 
 Linux, I believe, and if Intel has worked to get LO on it—I don't know—then 
 whatever it has done would probably work with AOO.

The point is to have a package: software on hardware. It need not be mobile per 
se. The education laptops, too, may not—I don't think they do—use Tizen. 

The most important point, as I see it, is to have a product that is ready for 
education—students and teachers—and only secondarily, the hardware. I put it 
this way, even though I obviously believe in the integrated ensemble, just 
because the hardware element is so susceptible to change. As well, hardware 
decisions are usually made more than a year in advance; I don't know when 
software decisions are made in general but I guess is that the cycle is a 
little shorter.

I think developing this general idea is needed, of course, and to focus on PT 
is not essential. However, my reason for doing so rests upon what had already 
been done by Portugal's prior gov't., by the PT users/OOo group, by the wide 
scale and exciting deployments in Brazil, by Angola's earlier interest in OOo 
and by Intel's live interest in producing a product that can have global 
popularity.

But all the players here could be replaced by others, of course. And the 
language could be, I don't know, Italian :-) or even the English they speak up 
here in Canada, eh?

Cheers,

Louis
 
 Roberto
 



AOO Downloads, false-positive and Beyond

2012-05-15 Thread Roberto Galoppini
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

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

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Re: AOO Downloads, false-positive and Beyond

2012-05-15 Thread Louis Suárez-Potts

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