Besides the need for open source lobbyists, the biggest issue with Open Source awareness might be the clique phenomenon, resulting in open source advocates, analysts, customers, developers and users bound to each other. In other words there is also a need for connectors.
Googling around I found a pretty long list of ribbon campaigns - among them the ASCII Ribbon Campaign and the EFF’s Blue Ribbon Campaign - but there is no Free Software or Open Source awareness campaign.
Running an Open Source Awareness Campaign might help us to get in touch to individuals outside our network, since many weak ties bring more social connections.
Matt Asay, Fabrizio Capobianco, Stefano Maffulli, James McGovern, Savio Rodrigues which colour would you like for our Ribbon Campaign? Keep the ball rolling… 
Links to this post:
- Links for 2007-05-01 by James Mc Govern
- Open Source Awareness Campaign? by Savio Rodrigues
- Open source awareness is a must by Alex Fletcher
- A ribbon for open source by Fabrizio Capobianco
- Connector for the Free Software community by FSFE Fellowship
- Connector for the Free Software community by Stefano Maffulli
Promuovere l’open source (italian) by Nicola Mattina - Open Source Ribbon! (italian) by Open Source Blog
It is a very good idea… let us define a nice colour for the ribbon!
Hmm… dare I vote for green, white and red? Or maybe a different shade of blue, say RGB 106 | 152 | 212
Regardless the colour, the idea of building open source solutions communities that span projects is very good. We’ve been trying to act, in our own small way, as analysts for the open source business intelligence projects and companies. Our linkblog currently lists 46 OSBI-related projects, 14 supporting companies, 6 additional communities, and 69 bloggers that talk frequently about F/L-OSS.
Hi Joseph,
I read you are also interested in Open Source Business Intelligence, stay tuned I am going to write about it quite soon. About the Ribbon campaign I am willing to exploit it further and make it dance, but one (or more) major sponsor is needed. I am working on it..
Roberto, since 1999, we’ve been looking for Open Source projects related to Data Warehousing, Business Intelligence, Data Mining, data management, and all forms of data analytics. We started to find some projects in 2001. We’ve started an article on our wiki two years ago, that you might find interesting.
We’ll keep an eye towards your RSS feed for your posting on OSBI.