[Community] Growing the Community

[Bob Ham]

On 2013-06-19 07:23, openmoko at pulster.de wrote:

> FIRST have a product, second talk about it.

> As Openmoko shop owner (former OM distributor) I am interested the 
> story
> continues. I'm ready to invest 10-20.000 eur for now, later more.

If you're really willing to invest in the GTA04 to move things forward, 
I would recommend donating some of this money to cover the one-time 
costs of a production run for the new A5 board, with the remainder being 
used to purchase boards from the run.

As I've said before, I strongly believe that the dependence on existing 
cases is a major block for the GTA04.  With the new A5, we will be able 
to produce complete new phones using case kits and 3D-printed cases 
(assuming Nikolaus has the GSM antenna ready for the case kit; I can't 
remember if that's been done yet?).  I believe the A5 will open up 
wonderful opportunities for the community, and will also attact new 
community members.

Alongside this new case-building activity, if we continue developing 
Replicant, one would hope we can bring it to a point of "working".  In 
the future then, we would be able to create a more complete product of 
boxed GTA04 phones consisting of a board from another A5 run (or 
possibly A6), a case kit and 3D-printed case, loaded with Replicant and 
ready to be used out of the box.

Coupled with an aggressive and polished marketing campaign, possibly 
involving crowd-funding, this has the potential to be very successful, 
perhaps even reaching the volume of orders to allow a more affordable 
sale price.  There has been concern from Nikolaus about running such a 
marketing effort so I'll say now that I could be willing to volunteer 
for dealing with crowd-funding and marketing, if and when the technical 
side is at the right level (that is, it "works" ;-)

-- 
Bob Ham <rah at settrans.net>

for (;;) { ++pancakes; }