I have had some discussion with Alex about developing a PR Plan to help promote the conference.
Any PR Plan starts with defining the target audiences.
Related to the target audiences are the topics to be presented.
So I made a summary to help myself get a handle on the discussions.

Please add your ideas to the list for discussion.

====


Audiences brainstorm summary list:

- current Joomla website developers - consultants
- current Joomla website developers - end-users/owners
- current Joomla extension developers
- current Joomla website administrators - end-users/owners

- potential Joomla website developers - consultants
- potential Joomla website developers - end-users/owners
- potential Joomla extension developers
- potential Joomla website administrators - end-users/owners

- current Joomla template designers
- potential Joomla template designers
- interface designers

- small/medium business - in-house website developers or managers
- large business - in-house website developers or managers
- government or NGO - in-house website developers or managers
- non-profit organization - in-house website developers or managers

- corporate/business
- ecommerce publishers
- online communities
- media publishers

- beginner level users
- intermediate level users
- advanced level users


Session ideas to meet the needs of these audiences:

- ecommerce
- community building
- media publishing
- intranet
- extranet
- document management

- beginner level presentations
- intermediate level presentations
- advanced level presentations


-----

What are the challenges faced by each audience?
How is this conference going to help them with solutions to meet these challenges?


Some ideas for Challenges/Solutions type presentations:

- Ecommerce SEO for Joomla - Tools and Techniques
- Ecommerce Case Study - XYZ Online
- Building Your Intranet with Joomla
- Intranet Case Study - BigoleCompany, Inc.
- Extranet Case Study - AnotherCompany, Inc.
- Document Management Case Study - Mega Corp.
- Building Your Online Community - A Roadmap for Success
- Managing Your Online Community - Challenges and Solutions
- Understanding the Joomla Framework
- Extension Development Best Practices
- Building Your First Component
- Using Eclipse for Joomla Development
- Training Your Clients to Use Their Joomla Website
- Managing Your Corporate Joomla Website - Best Practices, Checklists, Security, and more...
- Blogging With Joomla - Tools and Techniques
- Building a Joomla Website in 24 Hours
- Scaling Joomla for High Traffic - Servers, Performance Tuning, Other Tools
- Converting Your Corporate Website to the Joomla CMS

- Building Your First Joomla Template
- Advanced Joomla Template Design
- Advanced Interface Design for Joomla - Pattern Design Libraries

- Semantic Web and Mashups
- GPL Friendly Business Plans
- Creating an API
- Development Design Patterns
- MooTools Getting Started Guide
- MooTools Advanced Techniques
- jQuery for Joomla
- SEO for Joomla - Tools and Techniques
- Mobile Solutions for Joomla

- Joomla for Entrepreneurs
- I Feel the Need for Speed - Joomla at 900 RPS

- Optimizing Extension Performance - Caching, Queries, and More

- Kickapps present - How to use our stuff with joomla
- Kickapps learm - How to use our stuff with joomla


Joomla 101 Series: (15-30 minute presentation, 10-15 minutes of questions)
- How to Secure Your Joomla Website
- How to Backup Your Joomla Website
- How to Install and Modify a Template
- How to Move Your Joomla Website
- How to Install Extensions - and Remove
- How to Update Joomla
- Kunena Forum - How to Install and Configure
- Community Builder - How to Install and Configure
- JoomlaPack Backup - How to Install, Configure, and Run
- FLEXIcontent CCK - How to Install, Configure, and Run

- JoomlaPack Advanced Features and Techniques
- Sourcerer - Ideas and Solutions Guide
- Content Templater - Help Your Client Create Great Pages
- JUMI Tips and Solutions
- JCE Advanced Features
- Joom!Fish - Overview and Usage Guide
- VirtueMart - Getting Started Fast


The Challenges/Solutions approach helps focus on audience needs and interests.

Using real examples or case studies (if possible) helps establish immediate credibility.

Select some topics you know are important to your audience,
and then seek a presenter with the knowledge, experience, and skills.
Then you know the topic is one the audience wants to attend.

It is often easier to ask a potential presenter to pick a topic from a list.
Some of the sessions will invariably come from this process.

Views: 44

Replies to This Discussion

Great :-)

Beside the developers I would also like to differentiate to template designers and marketing agencies. I think it is important that we also focus on these topics and reach out to an audience that is more in the graphical/design area than in the development or site integration.

What is crucial in this area is the separation between beginner and advanced levels for these groups.

~~~
As said already in the other threads - especially the session should be left as some ideas, but not fixed yet. It is our wish that the PR reaches out and invite new people to suggest topics they like to listen to. I'm sure we will get some wide attention in the media and we will be able to reach out beyond the current community. Europe is extremely active in these things and the talks even in economic publications about open source is big. With an open approach we might get their interest and with this some additional media attention.

This doesn't that that we can use the list above as suggestions - I just want to make sure we all understand that the sessions are not fixed yet.

Alex
-

@Brian
KickApps looks like a service provider.
What do you envision as a topic or session?

Sometimes a vendor can speak on a general topic related to their service.
Such as: Harnessing Social Media to Power Your Website Marketing

Or do you mean a sponsored session to introduce themselves to potential users?
Please elaborate.


@Alex

Grinned at myself for completely forgetting template designers, interface designers, etc.
I will add those audiences.

Not sure what you mean by "marketing agencies" - please explain.


Yes, I know the sessions/topics are not fixed.
The above list of ideas is just there as ideas and examples.


Re: "Open Source" - we can certainly keep that angle in mind when creating the PR Plan.
A large conference for an open source CMS is certainly news in that arena.

Ken

-
Ken - love this! My Favorite Topic -> Advanced Interface Design for Joomla - Pattern Design Libraries.

If we use an organic approach, there will be a mis-match of topics that come from community experience. But, I see that fitting into what you are doing, nicely, and helping to put form to the organic process so that participants understand.

By pulling together the Joomla! 101 set, you built synergy into the collective work. It would be very cool if a goal was that attendees can follow along and build their site with the presenters. I would love to present one of those topics. It would be fun!

I would like to see Workshop that brought third party developers together to begin working on Extensions, like Tags, or Spam fighting, or Pinging/Trackback, etc., that we all need in our work. It would be good to identify the list, talk about requirements, split up the work, form teams, and get after it.

Other topic ideas Semantic Web and Mashups, GPL Friendly Business Plans, Creating an API, Development Design Patterns, Mootools, jQuery, SEO, Mobile.

Once community begins submitting session ideas, we will learn more about how Joomla! is used and useful. I've always been fascinated with what people do with J!.

My opinion -> In terms of audience, one difference between this event and a typical Joomla! Day is that this event will be much more geared towards the hard-core Joomla! professional. Those of us who use it to earn a living, or are very familiar with it. There will, of course, be newer people, but getting community together to collaborate, to drink a beer together, to find ways to improve Joomla! is a big goal and reason I will attend.

Thanks for your work here, Ken. Good to have professional help with this.
One session I almost canceled turned out to be the most popular - Joomla for Entrepreneurs, and the room was packed. Covers all technical levels, all areas of expertise, and focuses on different business models, and how you can more effectively leverage Joomla to promote your brand online.

Slideshare is here, definitely was an impromptu session but easily could get some polish and more detail:

http://www.slideshare.net/spacemonkeylabs/joomla-for-entrepreneurs

@Ken: KickApps is a hosted social media platform that integrates with Joomla. Imagine if you had a band and you wanted to allow your fans to upload their bootleg videos as part of a contest. You most certainly do not want all that media going to your bluehost server... KickApps takes care of that with Akamai integration and provides a rich API for social features.

Oh, another topic that might be of interest is Joomla Performance, I'd happily volunteer to do a session on how I got 900 requests per second out of Joomla 1.5, for instance.
Regarding Joomla performance - beside optimizing servers this should include optimizing extensions - especially implementing caching and optimizing queries topics. Still a lot to learn, but i do have some knowledge on that, if it's needed.
-

@Amy
Lots of good ideas.

Not sure I understand the Developer Workshop idea "to start working on ..."
Do you mean build some extensions? Tags, spam fighting, etc.
Or teach developers how to add support for these features to their extensions?
Or ??

Will your add your topic ideas to the ideas list above:
- Semantic Web and Mashups
- GPL Friendly Business Plans
- Creating an API
- Development Design Patterns
- MooTools Getting Started Guide
- MooTools Advanced Techniques
- jQuery for Joomla
- SEO for Joomla - Tools and Techniques
- Mobile Solutions for Joomla

Target Audiences - your take is the primary target audiences are:
- Joomla Website Developers - current and potential
- Joomla Extension Developers - current and potential
- Joomla Template Developers - current and potential (including interface design)


@Mitch
That is another topic area I completely missed - the business of Joomla.

I will add that topic to the ideas list above:
- Joomla for Entrepreneurs
and
- I Feel the Need for Speed - Joomla at 900 RPS
:-)

KickApps might be a good idea for a case study presentation.
Perhaps if you had a good Joomla/KickApps success story to share.


@Klas
How about this name for your topic idea
- Optimizing Extension Performance - Caching, Queries, and More


@All

Roundtables
This discussion reminded me of something that I have seen at other conferences.
Roundtables or Roundtable Discussions
Big room, lots of round tables.
Each table has a discussion leader and a particular assigned subject.
Participants can pick which table where they want to participate.
All the discussions happen at the same time.
Optionally - When a time periond is up, people switch tables, discusssions are repeated.
Very successful and very popular when I saw this done.
Nice way to let people connect and share knowledge, experiences, ideas, etc.



Let's give this brainstorm a couple more 24-hour cycles for ideas and comments
and then I'll see if I can organize it by audiences, levels, tracks, topics ...
So we can get a big picture view of the options.

Then nail down (agree on) the specific target audiences.
Then I can start working on the PR Plan on how to reach these audiences.
And everyone can work on the topics, speakers, discussions/roundtables, etc.
which will make those audiences want to come to the conference.


Off for some zzzzzs.

Ken

-
@Brian
I added these to the topics ideas list above.

Brian Teeman said:
@Ken I would envisage that we could have two scenarios (and kickapps might not have been the best example)
1) Kickapps present - How to use our stuff with joomla
2) Kickapps learm - How to use our stuff with joomla
Great topics.

BTW, I have a lot of things to say for extension developers who use "The worst practises in Extension Development" :-)
Hi Oleg,
I would expect that any discussion of Extensions Best Practices would also discuss what Not to do, perhaps even with concrete examples, and how the example would be improved. ;-)
Regards,
Ken
Oleg Nesterov said:
Great topics.

BTW, I have a lot of things to say for extension developers who use "The worst practises in Extension Development" :-)
I see a tendency in the suggestions towards reaching out to new "customers" for Joomla!. In that case it would be good to have some presentations about what the unique selling points of Joomla! are in comparison with other solutions (open and closed source).

Personally I would like to also see an opposite direction: inward. Joomla! community reflection. What do we want with Joomla!, where are we heading for, what direction do we want this ship to sail? Also room for constructive critic on how things could be improved (we had some discussions about that lately...;-). Maybe this kind of talk could also be done in the proposed round table discussions (I like that model). But I am well aware that "selling" Joomla! to new markets, winning souls in stead of just preaching for ourselves, could give a bit of tension with this reflective discussion as eventually weak points of Joomla! will be exposed then. In Dutch we have the expression "don't hang your dirty laundry outside", dunno if it has an english equivalent; but I see it as a plus for Joomla! if we can show how openess and transparancy can lead to a better product.
@Ken Sounds good
Dear Herman,

Herman Peeren said:
I see a tendency in the suggestions towards reaching out to new "customers" for Joomla!. In that case it would be good to have some presentations about what the unique selling points of Joomla! are in comparison with other solutions (open and closed source).
I think this tendency is related to the requests and the feedback we got from our last event. We had many absolutely new people on the event which just wanted to learn something about Joomla and CMS solutions in general. From my personal feeling it is less related to sale but to meet their wishes.

Personally I would like to also see an opposite direction: inward. Joomla! community reflection. What do we want with Joomla!, where are we heading for, what direction do we want this ship to sail? Also room for constructive critic on how things could be improved (we had some discussions about that lately...;-). Maybe this kind of talk could also be done in the proposed round table discussions (I like that model). But I am well aware that "selling" Joomla! to new markets, winning souls in stead of just preaching for ourselves, could give a bit of tension with this reflective discussion as eventually weak points of Joomla! will be exposed then. In Dutch we have the expression "don't hang your dirty laundry outside", dunno if it has an english equivalent; but I see it as a plus for Joomla! if we can show how openess and transparancy can lead to a better product.

I like this suggestion and would love to see it happening during the event. One idea we have is to bring in various Joomla associations and their representatives, giving them a room to discuss with Joomla/OSM members about their issues, suggestions aso. might be a good solutions for future talks.

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