Episode 61: Melissa Logan on Marketing Open Source Effectively and Sustainably

Panelists Justin Dorfman | Richard Littauer Guest Melissa Logan Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! Our special guest today is Melissa Logan, Founder of Constantia.io, a marketing consultancy that focuses on open source and enterprise tech companies. She pioneered the role of open source marketer that helped fuel the rise of open source software development. She also launched the Sexism Field Guide to help people identify and confront all forms of sexism. We will learn why Melissa created Constantia, her work at The Linux Foundation, Apache Cassandra, and Isilon. Also, Melissa talks about having the right personality to do marketing in a community and why she thinks about the community like a prism. Download this episode now to find out more! [00:00:48] Melissa tells us all about Constantia and why she created it. [00:02:30] Since Melissa has worked mainly with large OSPO’s, Richard wonders if she has had any experience working with smaller organizations or smaller repositories on GitHub type stuff. She also talks about what she did at the Linux Foundation and the projects they started, one specifically called OpenDaylight. [00:06:38] When Melissa talks about open source there are two key ways that she describes it. [00:07:43] We learn about Melissa working with the Apache Cassandra Community. Justin wonders if there was a company that did support contracts for Cassandra funding this or if this was a grassroots type of deal. [00:11:03] We learn what Melissa did at Isilon. [00:13:00] Richard wonders how Melissa gets marketing copy in front of people because mailing lists are important to getting into people’s inboxes. [00:16:23] Richard asks Melissa if she has any insight on how to market somebody who runs a small react library and she gives some great advice. [00:18:47] Melissa tells us how to pitch marketing to open source foundations as something they need to do because the return is so small. Richard wonders if she’s ever had to deal with people who are closed sourced and try to convince them to go o