Pause and networking

Morning session: Customer Focus

Why should you bother to 'understand' FOSS? Free and Open Source Software is not just about the money. When it comes to organizations, FOSS for involves change and understanding of specifics. These specifics matter for two important reasons: as a customer, you should know what your actual benefits are; as a customer organization, you can take advantage of working with other people. FOSS is not just  another software stack, but a community. But what kind of community? Does community matter for customers of FOSS solutions? What about 'Open Core' solutions?

Workshop co-leads:

- Charles H.Schultz, Founder, Ars Aperta, FOSS Alliance (France)

- Simon Phipps, Chief Strategy Officer, ForgeRock, Director, Open Source Initiative (UK)

- Carlo Piana, Lawyer, General Counsel to the Free Software Foundation Europe (Italy) 

Cocktail-Lunch and networking

Afternoon session - part 1 : Vendor/Project Focus – Does Open Source Need Marketing.

From the vendors' perspective, their relationship with the customer has typically been developed and refined through marketing. But the traditional tools of IT marketing where developed for a very different marketplace from that of modern Open Source software. This presentation will deal with the following questions: Is there a need for marketing at all within Open Source? How does traditional marketing fit with the very different Open Source business models? What new disciplines need to be added to the marketing mix and which old tools have lost their edge and are no longer needed?

Workshop co-leads:

- Sandro Groganz, Funder and principal, Initmarketing (Germany)

- Rory MacDonald, Consultant, InitMarketing (Germany)

Afternoon session - part two: Workshop – How can OSS vendors help their customers to handle the changes in OSS?

This workshop will be run jointly by the FOSS Alliance and Init Marketing, and will explore the intersection of the two earlier presentations: looking at how marketing and other customer-focused disciplines can be improved to help OSS customers to handle change.

Workshop co-leads:

- Sandro Groganz, Funder and principal, Initmarketing (Germany)

- Rory MacDonald, Consultant, InitMarketing (Germany)

Pause and networking