[Community] Growing the Community

[Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller]

Am 19.06.2013 um 12:22 schrieb 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?).

Almost. There is a first prototype that has shown its strengths and weaknesses but needs a small redesign and optimizations.

>  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" ;-)

Yes, we need a team for such an activity. And someone really fluent in english language like you are.

Nikolaus