Yesterday’s rain disappeared overnight, and Orvieto awoke to a sunny autumn day. Today isn’t an official OpenOffice.org Conference day, but a tradition has developed that different community groups use the opportunity for face to face meetings. So time for a quick sightseeing trip round this wonderful mediaeval city. I also found the local jeweller does emergency watchstrap repairs free of charge – I’m a tourist who doesn’t speak the local language, so I expect to be ripped off, so this was wonderful!

My day began at 10am, with a workshop led by Italo Vignoli, a PR professional who has worked wonders in driving up the brand recognition and market share of OpenOffice.org in Italy. Italo’s session was a masterclass in how open source communities with zero marketing budget can compete and win against companies with six figure annual budgets – by doing what they do best.

After a quick pizza, back for a meeting of the MarCons (Marketing Contacts) again to learn from the successful Italian operation, and discuss how 2009 had gone. It was our “Year of the developer”, and we had focussed spending on going to developer conferences. We had feedback from those who had taken part – what hadn’t worked, what had, and what we should do more of. Looking to next year, we had some good discussions on priorities and budget requests – but we decided to continue this in a full conference session to canvass wider views.

The Community Council then kicked in at about 5pm – we manage to be even later when meeting face to face than we are on irc The minutes of this will be posted on the wiki, so I’m not going to duplicate them here (especially as I will be writing them…) We finally called it a day at 8pm, and went off to enjoy drinks and nibbles courtesy of the local suthorities here, grateful for the out-of-season conference business.

Just time to upload some photos to Facebook, and the end of a long day. Ten hours of meetings, and that was just the pre-conference day!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 at 7:24 am and is filed under OpenOffice.org. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.