Building An Open Source ERP Company From Pamplona, Spain: OpenBravo CEO Paolo Juvara (Part 2)

Sramana: What was the impact of using SourceForge.net for the repository, and when did that happen?

Paolo Juvara: We put the product on SourceForge.net in 2006, and the result was amazing. There was such a high level of activity that OpenBravo was on the front page of the website. OpenBravo was consistently among the top six projects, which resulted in a lot of visibility.

Sramana: Once you got to the first page, that must have been an immense amount of visibility, and I can certainly see how that would get your project rolling. What did you do to get to the first page?

Paolo Juvara: There actually was not a huge open source culture within the company when OpenBravo was first placed on SourceForge.net. The company decided to hire a community manager who was very active in the OpenOffice project and had been instrumental in getting that project traction in the Spanish community.

He not only energized everybody in the company, but he posted the project to SourceForge.net and went and spoke about it on a lot of forums and blogs. That is very common today, but at the time it was something new. Those efforts created a sense of community among our users, and word about OpenBravo started spreading virally.

Sramana: What did the community manager to do plant the seeds for OpenBravo and create an open source community around that product?

Paolo Juvara: The most important thing is that he was familiar with how the activity rankings on SourceForge.net worked. He determined that the SourceForge.net activity rating was based on the amount of code changed and contributed to the project. Another important aspect of the ranking was the amount of activity in the forums. The final key metric for activity rankings was the level of activity a project would have in the SourceForce.net Issue Tracker.

He established the SourceForge.net Issue Tracker as a business process for us and got other people in the company involved in the forums. We made sure there was always somebody from the company active addressing topics in the forums. Every post was answered in a timely manner with a good level of competence.

Another benefit was that we were the only major open source ERP. The only other open source company had two people, and it eventually collapsed and was acquired by another company. They did not have the bandwidth needed to create a community around themselves. That is why we were able to consistently get ranked in the top six every day where other projects could not.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Building An Open Source ERP Company From Pamplona, Spain: OpenBravo CEO Paolo Juvara
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