Community driven PR
 

since several users approached the team about pathetic PR and how to help to improve this, I start this thread for them to gather and discuss ideas and share thought here.

/j

Re: Community driven PR
 

Was chatting with some folks on irc and thought it may be time to help out with the PR/Marketing of the Neo900 project (actually I think we should have started this earlier, But I've been swamped and still am).

So I'm thinking of offering some design help and marketing strategies for this project.

I think if we band together we can pool our talents together and plan, document and deploy a PR/marketing that can get this project into more eyes outside of just the hardcore folks.

x

Re: Community driven PR
 

what i feel here
....

Re: Community driven PR
 

In order to reach more potential supporters, especially outside the Maemo and N900 community, running a "traditional" crowdfunding campaign has been suggested for a long time.

I have prepared a brief document that discusses some of the aspects of such a campaign. The focus is mainly on technical issues, but also touches on marketing considerations.

The paper:
http://neo900.org/stuff/marketing/cf.pdf

This specific version (there will probably be updates):
http://neo900.org/stuff/marketing/cf-20160106.pdf

I didn't get to do this because I would know anything about marketing or such, but because someone had to do it, and I didn't hide fast enough.

So for now we'd appreciate feedback especially on the following items:
- are there any major misconceptions ?
- is there anything important I've overlooked ?
- do you know anyone who would be willing to help us with this ?

Thanks !
- Werner

Re: Community driven PR
 

Want attention? Why not post your endeavors and intent on https://www.producthunt.com/ and get us, as a community to upvote it to gather peripheral and extended attention perhaps?

But have your tonality, progress and perhaps graphics all sorted before doing so. The geeks will get it. The non-geeks will look at the incompleteness and consider it not worth their time.

Re: Community driven PR
 

That's one of these sites that make me feel very old :-) Looking at, say,
https://www.producthunt.com/tech/politwoops
all I see is a brief example (which I probably wouldn't get if I didn't already have an idea - from "traditional" IT news - what this is about), about 40 bytes of meta-data, and a bunch of comments.

So is this how it works ? Put a link to neo900.org and some picture, and let the swarm intelligence figure out the rest ?

That would be a good thing in general. Neo900 is definitely not your average "next droid", and attracting the wrong crowd is likely to result only in unhappiness for all involved.

But all things considered, we are rather invisible. E.g., there have been many Jolla news lately, unfortunately not happy ones. But while many comments there bemoan the end of the Nokia way of things, Maemo, etc., nobody seems to ever mention Neo900.

So anything that helps to get out of that extreme niche would be good. We should at least aim for people insulting and mocking us when a suitable context comes up :-)

- Werner

Re: Community driven PR
 

Two brief ideas since I'm better to give ideas than doing PR by myself ;)
Since neo900 is a expensive niche device, and not "yet another android device", we must target the right audiance :
- people concerned by privacy/security
- open source enthusiasts

So the ideas :
- Already proposed and don't want seem to be insistent but getting a contact with security OS developpers.
It may be OpenBSD (I proposed it because I use it daily and it already has a limited arm support) or BitRig (OpenBSD fork oriented toward armv7 support - don't know how active they are) or any other security-focused operating system. Sending prototypes to enthusiast teams would help them to make their OS work on neo900 and could raise interest from their users.
Aahh, Wish I had put more than 750€ in this project... I would proudly have offered my prototype to any serious OS developper. :x

- Contacting FSF and try to get the RYF certification.
Obtaining this certification could make us benefit from FSF promotion because it would be the first "RYF phone". Since getting this certification requires to meet some criteria (see "100% Free Software", "Other Misleading Endorsements", "Cooperation with FSF and GNU Public Relations") it may not be so simple to achieve.

Re: Community driven PR
 

Hi. Just want to say I applaud your efforts! Is this really going to happen? I have one suggestion. You might consider changing the name of the phone to something that better describes what it is in terms of capabilities not history. Anyways, just a suggestion. Keep up the great work as this is no small task!

Re: Community driven PR
 

For most of the development, a Neo900 would look just like a N900. Developers of a different OS would only really need a Neo900 prototype if they want to explore special features, things like the modem monitoring.

So let me bounce that question back: what's keeping those security OS developers from already porting their work to the N900 ?

And you'd think the story of the monster of Loch Ness was persistent :-) As far as phones are concerned, RYF is a red herring. There are numerous components that have upgradeable closed firmware that will never be Free.

Personally, I also wouldn't trust the "don't recommend non-Free software" clause. It practically begs for discretionary application and is likely to lead to conflict in the community, especially when actively encouraging an open platform. And there are a few more items that leave a bad taste and don't contribute to the objective at hand.

Neo900 is basically as free as practically possible for a smartphone-type device. In fact, it goes well beyond what others do. But that still doesn't help with RYF, and that's why those discussions (it comes up every few weeks) never lead anywhere.

If you want a RYF-compatible phone, please talk to the the regulatory bodies that define telecommunication technology and that control spectrum use. Convince them that regulations must allow for RYF-compatible hardware. Once you've done that, talk to makers of telephony chipsets or modules and convince them of the general benefits of openness, at least where the firmware-hardware interface is concerned. Or, if they won't listen, develop your own chips. Last but not least, implement a Free telephony stack, or convince the telephony chip makers to open theirs, and renegotiate any licenses on components that are not compatible with RYF. There may be a few more obstacles, but that's basically the preconditions before someone like Neo900 would be able to incorporate RYF-compliant telephony.

In any case, despite lacking RYF compliance, people are free to look at all specifications and details of the project and decide for themselves if it meets their own criteria for sufficient openness, i.e., whether it respects the freedoms they are personally interested in.

Maybe we should make our own certificate, call it UYL (Upholds Your Liberties), that drops/modifies the incompatible bits and adds, say, open schematics (which RYF doesn't have), then celebrate Neo900 as the first product meeting the stringent certification requirements ;-)

- Werner

Re: Community driven PR
 

remains to be added: FSF suggests to add components for no other purpose than blocking a feature like updating the modem firmware. It makes sense for FSF to ask for tweaking the design into something that fits into their political agenda around RYF (peripheral == "a blackbox that doesn't have visible firmware"), however for the user this definitely doesn't add to the value of the device. And in the end of the day it's not feasible since such a blocker circuit inevitably consists of a MCU which again has firmware, and we don't want to add our own BLOB firmware in MCU on top of the modem firmware BLOB. But then when MCU is no BLOB, user can modify it and thus re-enable the modem update feature.
And actually you never can provide proof that there's no hidden path to still update the firmware blob in your peripheral, no matter which measures you implement to block such feature.
Same general plot appies to other peripherals with BLOB firmware, like WLAN.

excellent idea :)
/j

Re: Community driven PR
 

How about offering a modem-less, RYF compliant Neo900? An RYF certified pocket computer (rather than phone) may still be appealing to FSF crowds and may draw further media attention.

Re: Community driven PR
 

Lack of awareness of its existence maybe? It's a good question. Perhaps we should be engaging more with these security-focused OS communities to find out why. The Neo900 has a potential audience there.

Re: Community driven PR
 

I'm not an OS developer, so I can only make assumptions.
Generally speaking about phones :
1) Maybe too time-consuming compared to the lifespan of a given phone ?
2) Maybe the number of non-free component in each phone requiring heavy retro-engineering ?
3) And why developing anything on a phone whereas user-friendly systems such as android already exist and have a wide community who probably wouldn't want to try another OS.
In our case, the n900 isn't anymore on the market, and at this state, neo900 is only vaporware.
Why would people outside of our community even consider beginning to hack anything for n900, in the case a phone they don't even heard about may (or may not) be released with a similar (but still different) hardware ?

That's why I propose to contact various developer teams to make them aware of the project, and send them prototypes if they are serious and interested, to make the project more concrete for them than "only vaporware". I don't know if it will lead to something, but I know not doing anything will not lead us anywhere.

I understand certain criteria of this certification could raise a debate in the community.
Actually, I'm not either 100% motivated by the "don't recommend non-Free software" clause (I consider myself more on the BSD-side of openness than GNU's). Anyway, the RYF certification exists and I don't see any phone more open than neo900. It would be sad if we don't even try to deal with it. About openness of baseband, telephony stack, etc., isn't the sandboxing of the modem (and the possibility to disable it) enough ?
Why not beginning a discussion about RYF certification and neo900 with FSF to put some light on what can or can't be allowed in the special case of a phone ?
Why not making two devices instead of one : The actual neo900 on one side, and the RYF-compliant neo900 on the other side, which would follow the rules discussed with FSF ?

Re: Community driven PR
 

Just what came to mind: learning from others?:
F.i. the Novena Laptop is also such a niche device, and they managed pretty good (using crowdsupply, roughly 1100 pledges). You could check on the Inet, how they created momentum - and you could even talk to them.
F.i. the Fairphone is such a niche device - and they did their own 'crowdfunding' (pre-orders).
Then there is the Librem laptop by Purism (crowdsupply, roughly 700 pledges). They also managed pretty good, although these devices obviously not that open as they advertised. Yet an example of well working PR, I guess.

Re: Community driven PR
 

Another idea I've had to boost PR...

How about contacting the KDE community to see if they would be interested in porting Plasma Mobile to the Neo900?

KDE recently presented their vision for the future which I think goes hand in hand with the aims of the Neo900 project, particularly the control, freedom and privacy parts.

With the possibility of Fremantle not being ready, it would be great if Plasma Mobile was running on top of the Debian that the Neo900 is expected to ship with. It's an opportunity for the Neo900 to be the flagship Plasma Mobile device. I think that both the Plasma Mobile and Neo900 communities could benefit a lot from the mutual exposure of both parties.

Re: Community driven PR
 

@wicket: excellent idea. Could you investigate further, make contacts, evaluate opportunities etc?

two little corrections though: we won't ship debian but a https://devuan.org/ which is barebones and only has factory test (cmdline) software to ensure the subsystems are working within parameters, and probably an installer wizard to help users to pick the community driven FOSS OS of their choice. Neo-fremantle looks rather promising already, SHR should work OOTB, and yes since this is a plain linux compliant ARM platform, basically almost all linux flavors that have a armel/armhf build should probably work instantly, with exception of a few subsystems like slider/kbd-backlight or camera that are unique to N(eo)900 and thus need some love to adapt them.

/jOERG

Re: Community driven PR
 

I'd gladly help with this, make contacts and even try building it myself for the N900, but not for a couple months. I'm extremely busy right now and probably shouldn't be spending my time on TMO. Hehe.

[OFFTOPIC]
I'm very pleased to hear that it will ship with Devuan. I fully support this choice. My experiments with running sane Linux include running plain Debian sid with System V init but also running Debian stretch (testing) with the Devuan ascii (testing) repositories enabled. Whilst they both work, both have some package compatibility issues with systemd-less installations but Devuan edges it. I guess Devuan are focussing on their stable release so hopefully things should improve. Another positive note is that it looks like there will be better support from Debian too.
[/OFFTOPIC]

Re: Community driven PR
 

Re: Community driven PR
 

Any updates, PR or otherwise?

Re: Community driven PR
 

Hellekin is now preparing pretty frequent short summaries and also the occasional longer article. Please check the "Archive" column at
http://neo900.org/

- Werner