Michael Rice - 2003-10-30

Hello everyone:

Just thought I'd share some of my thoughts on how we should go about "marketing" the aikernel. By marketing I'm referring to getting a broader adoption of the aik in the open source community. I don't want downloads for downloads sake, but I would like to get a richer user base that can start to build new functionality and find innovative uses for it.

The new version 1.3.1 is almost official. I've been testing it
quite a bit on my own and I'm very happy with it. I want this version to be biggest release ever.

I've been thinking about these steps in my head for quite a while, but then I remembered: it isn't just the code the open source, its the process too!

When I say "biggest release ever," I'm not talking about kilobytes! What I'm talking about is users. I want to increase the user base. What I want to learn from you either publicly or privately, is, what do you think we need to do to get some traction behing it? Maybe it would help if you thought back to what attracted it to you in the first place?

These are just of the ideas I've had:

1) have a showdown between the chatterbots and the Aik. Maybe we should come up with a character instance of the Aik that's been supercharged to compete? We could write up some dialogs turn by turn for people to understand the point of the Aik.

2) Documentation, documentation, documentation. I'm working on (and need to finish up) a user manual that includes some technical details as well as some development insights. How valuable do you think this will be?

3) Design wins! I've already taken this product commercial, but I would like to find some open source design wins. I'm talking about integrations with JBoss or other app servers. Maybe web services integrations.

4) Articles and publicity. I want to get some articles about the design wins, or even just about how to use the dang thing getting out there. There are many online zines for Java, certainly we could get a few write ups once we hit a certain maturity level.

5) The open source community. There is so much out there, how can we position this? Do we compare it to chatterbots like, ALICE? Or do we generate our own category for this? I guess this question should really be swapped with #1.

6) Cells: this goes beyond just design wins. I want to create more real life applications of the aik, but I seem to run out of time. Have you all seen the AiRSS? I bet you've got some own ideas for what you want or wish it to do. Drop me a line and I'll help you out in anyway I can.

7) Open source directories like freshmeat, etc...

I'll probably think of a bunch more as time goes on but I'm interested in hearing your thoughts!