in New York City’s free daily paper Metro is now entering its second
full week. We’ve collected over 10% of our goal already and continue to
find new pledge donors at a healthy pace.
Please take a moment to add your pledge to our effort at the
Fundable.org project page, which you can find here:
https://www.fundable.org/groupactions/openofficead s
Our project’s purpose is to help “cross the chasm” and bring awareness
of OpenOffice.org 2.0 to the large number of computer users who stand to
benefit from its broad feature set and range of useful capabilities. New
York City is home to many savvy and influential computer users, 450,000
of whom read the Metro newspaper on their commute into work each day.
Many of these people are mavens in their particular fields (in Malcolm
Gladwell’s “Tipping Point” sense), and therefore, reaching them will
spread our message much farther and faster than almost any other means
we could develop.
This is not the first time an open source project has sought a
high-profile newspaper ad buy. In fact, our effort was directly inspired
by the Firefox New York Times ad. Firefox’s famous effort announcing its
arrival on the world stage helped push it from about 10 million
downloads to its current tally of over 185 million!
Meanwhile, OpenOffice.org has already been downloaded over 63 million
times from its main site, and has received further distribution through
peer-to-peer networks, CDs and packaging with Linux systems. It is
second in worldwide usage and is rapidly becoming the top choice in many
markets, including developing countries and advanced economies alike.
Unfortunately, though, the USA lags behind most other countries in its
adoption rate, so it is our self-assigned task to help turn this
situation around!
This morning, to start the work week right, we are releasing our first
sample design for the ad that will appear on the backpage in the Metro
newspaper. You can see the preview on our project’s homepage:
http://homepage.mac.com/bhorst/
We are looking for community members and interested parties to get
involved with design suggestions. Please drop by our Google Group
(http://groups.google.com/group/ooads) and get involved in the planning
and design process!
Last week we launched our Metro ads campaign with an interview on Mad
Penguin, that was picked up and spread around the web thanks to Digg:
http://digg.com/linux_unix/New_effort_to_spread_Op enOffice.org_launched_in_New_York_City
This week we are looking to spread our meme even further and accelerate
our efforts in time for the collection deadline. Thanks for reading!”
Link: fundable.org
