Community interest (was: community Digest, Vol 353, Issue 3)

L. B. lionel.broche at gmail.com
Fri Aug 30 11:45:38 CEST 2013


Hi all,

I am one of those who bought a GTA04 out of both curiosity and a feeling of
contributing to a project that, I feel, is important in many aspects. I
have read many emails from the community but as you guys say, I have not
done much more than contributing financially. the reason being that I do
not have the technical skills required to help on the software or hardware
sides.

> Third our community watched them failing without even trying to raise
> awareness for our community phone.

I would really like the phone to survive, I insist on that because it must
be quite depressing for the developers to miss the positive feeback they
deserve. however, when I discuss with colleagues or friends it is very hard
for me to argue that an open source phone is a good thing that is worth
spending money in if there is no well-known source to back me up. my
feeling is that the community is not visible enough for lay persons, so it
is hard to advertise the product.

My suggestion to try and get out of this problem is to rise interest among
the journalists. Global surveillance is a top story at the moment, so if we
succeed in attracting the attention of, say, a BBC reporter then we can
start making some noise on a large scale. And if the story is good it may
attract many people and inform them why open-source phone is important, on
the hardware side too.

Another point that I would like to rise is the fact that mobile phones are
considered as luxuary products by the consumers. Starting from this, I
would suggest either to work on making a very nice finish for the casing
(the plastic casing of the GTA02 looks very good) and for the software
(animated backgrounds, or the likes...), or to start a trend on its own
that would focus on highly personalised phones with make-your-own reprap
casing and choose-your-own operating system (which is what the GTA04 seems
to be, at least for me).

I would personally go for the second option. With a couple of good
reprappers and with a couple of working operating systems, you can make a
nice web page to present all the options availables to the buyer so that
each one can buy a specific combination of case, hardware and software.
Making the website visually attractive and more interactive would probably
contribute to getting more attention on that matter.

Anyway, all I can give to the community for now are ideas and cheerings, I
hope I am doing that well.

Lionel
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