# A Proposal for Open Technologies role in supporting OpenAPI, AsyncAPI and JSON Schema Marketing, Communications and Social Media.

The reports this week comparing attention results between Twitter and LinkedIn generated a variety of thought paths for me. I had questions. Does the nature of the attention matter? Who is responding? I know some are encouragement likes from fellow team members, but shouldn't evaluate the quality of attention to know if it's what we want. That path caused me to move up a level and ponder the goals and intentions for generating this attention. In one case, projects want to attract contributors. In another case, awareness might be the goal.

## Project Goals

Next, I landed on what if we shaped the message to meet the goal. Certainly posts that achieve attracting new contributors would be different from posts intended to go viral and raise general awareness.

After noodling how Open Technologies could be helpful to the individual projects I recalled a model used by The Linux Foundation. They maintain teams of certain skillsets that can be loaned out their member projects. This is a proven model and could work for creating connective tissue between our 3 autonomous projects through the assistance of OT.

## Coaches

What I envision is a coaching approach. There are already motivated, knowledgable and capable people in the spec teams. Yet, from observations of some of the struggles they face especially in marketing, communications and social media some support would improve outcomes they want to achieve. OT would maintain either FTEs or consultants (I have no visibility into the budget or staffing plan) to act as coaches for spec teams. Coaches could assist teams in developing plans, campaigns and messages based on the audiences they need to speak to. I believe this would be especially helpful in tamping down some of the anti corporate messages coming from some team members. OSS benefits from corps that can deliver dev teams and funding that fuel the growth of a project. It's difficult to attract those you simultaneously alienate.

There is always much discussion and hand ringing about maintainer burnout and the requirement for maintainers to do things beyond code for the success of the project. This model proven by The Linux Foundation addresses those exact risks.

## Creating the virtuous circle at OT level

As coaches work across OpenAPI, AsyncAPI and JSON Schema they bring a deeper level of understanding to OT. They can contribute first hand experience with the needs of the projects including what and how sharing best practices, content, strategies and so on would strengthen projects in their individual goals.

Sharing these kind staff with expertise in marketing, communications and social media makes sense as the tasks are bursty. There is heavy lifting in the planning phase, evaluation during the execution phase and ad hoc support for special events or possibly new adoption by a large enterprise.

## Official Ted Talk training

https://masterclass.ted.com