Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier has been writing about Linux and open source professionally for more than seven years. He's currently the editorial director for Linux.com, and has written for Linux magazine, UnixReview.com, Linux Weekly News, ZDNet, and a number of other publications. During this time, he's had the opportunity to see how projects succeed -- and good PR and marketing for a project is crucial to its success. In this talk, Brockmeier will discuss the best ways for projects to promote themselves and ensure success.

Brockmeier will start by briefly emphasizing the importance of PR and marketing -- which also coincide nicely with community building -- and point to some projects that have done well in this area, such as GNOME, PostgreSQL, KDE, Mozilla, and others.

The discussion will include ways that projects can promote themselves, both to users and developers, including:

Improving the project's homepage.
Finding volunteers to handle PR and marketing efforts.
Improving documentation.
Community code of conduct.
Announcing releases and providing useful reviewer information.

Brockmeier will also provide some templates for release announcements and discuss the best ways to ensure that projects receive press coverage.