Commons 2.0 announcement backgrounder

Hey all -

As you probably heard, we (Acquia) announced two things this week: Release 2.0, and renaming Drupal Commons to (just) Commons.

Since many in the Commons community don't come from the software industry, I thought it might be educational to explain to everybody how we approached this - because it's much different than the "normal" open source approach.

We at Acquia are trying to increase the visibility of Commons among commercial customers - both for Commons growth in general as well as our obvious commercial interest.  This means generating PR buzz.  And products get publicity when you give industry reporters / bloggers / etc. previously-unannounced "big news."  Note also that it is easier to get the attention of the trade press during industry events, since those same reporters / bloggers / etc. will be on the lookout for announcements then.

So we timed the Commons Release 2.0 announcement just this way.  We issued a press release, and had a bunch of activities all surrounding the Enterprise 2.0 Conference being held this week in Boston.  This included a "main-stage" presentation in front of hundreds of business customers / buyers, holding a very sweetly chilled party on Tuesday night for press, analysts, bloggers, etc. (photo to the right), and setting up a booth on the show floor.

And I think we achieved our goal.  In fact this Tweet during our presentation made me especially happy:

sradick: This will go over well with the vendors here "No one should ever write a check for Social Software licenses again" - @acquia at #e2conf

We also used another technique common in the software industry: Pre-Announcing features.  Frequently, the right time for announcing something may not be the same time as you are releasing something. The schedules will often just not line up, so announcements describe features not yet available.  (Microsoft is very prolific at this...)  This is the case with Commons 2.0 - we are targeting the features we announed for release in late July.  (You'll note this date in the last sentence of the second to last paragraph of the official press release.)

The other topic is renaming.  The motivation for this is less about publicity, but (again) more about the desire to get adoption of Commons by organizations that don't know Drupal.  Our experience in the last year has been that the name "Drupal Commons" means that with every potential (non-techie) adopter, we first must describe what Drupal is and (then) what Commons is.  And honestly, non-technical people they don't always understand - or care - about the difference.  (And those who will do the actual site implementation can, and will discover that Commons is based on Drupal easily.)

So changing the name to Commons lets us keep the focus of conversations on the community solution capabilities of Commons, simplifying the discussion.

Oh, and by the way, most people are referring to it by "Commons" anyway, so let's not fight organic trends. :-)

I hope describing our approach to growing Commons adoption is informative for you.  If you have any other questions, feel free to ask here.  Now, let's go get 2.0 out the door!