Marketing/Ideas/Cooperation with other projects

Contact, cooperation and liaison with Linux distributions
There are a number of Linux distributions that, to date, have shipped OOo and that have said that they'll be shipping LibO in their upcoming releases. It would be important to actively liaise with these distributions, to help them better integrate LibO into their distributions, and to see what are their needs regarding LibreOffice. David Nelson has started doing some advocacy and relationship-building. He has joined selected mailing lists, and put out a call for graphic artists to contribute to the LibO project, and for mentoring and support for LibO/TDF during these early days of existence.

The first distributions contacted were Ubuntu, Debian and Gentoo. In particular, there was very positive interest from the Ubuntu artwork project, with an offer of active and organized help and work contributions. There is currently e-mail contact between Ubuntu Artwork, David Nelson, Florian Effenberger and Christoph Noack, and David will be following through on this to ensure that durable results are achieved.

David plans to work further on Debian and Gentoo, and next will be Fedora Core, Red Hat, OpenSuse and some other distributions (details of all this will be posted in some days, so that others can get involved if they like).

Inkscape
It has also been suggested to David that it would be well worth contacting the Inkscape project, which confirmed an idea he already had in mind and is a subject that has been discussed recently on the marketing list. It would be a good idea for LibO to develop a relationship with Inkscape, to explore the possibilities of some kind of integration between the two software packages (via libraries, for instance), and of some kind of collaboration. Feedback about that will be upcoming in the near future.

Call for ideas
It would be great to hear some discussion about how to conduct and shape the communication with Linux projects. It would also be interesting to identify other organizations and projects to contact.