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

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

what i feel here
....

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

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.

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

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.

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!

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

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