How do I promote my Open Souce tech project?

March 9, 2012 7:30 AM

How do I promote my Open Souce tech project?

I have an open source project I've been working for quite some time, I want people to start using it.

I don't want to spam my friends on Twitter, FB and so on because most of them aren't interested in tech projects.

Just put some sort of pitch for it on forums or even Craigslist? Visit with people at trade show? Maybe that kind of networking?

I consider it a more advanced online content management system with most things that people need already built for you. It has very concise ways for others in a community of programmers/designers to add new functionality or new themes.

Thank you for your help.

posted by KHinds10 to computers & internet (7 answers total)

You can start with the 'Projects' link up at the top of this page.
posted by carsonb at 7:46 AM on March 9, 2012

I've had some good results by promoting my scripts at hotscripts and other script posting sites.

Post it at sourceforge.net too
posted by bleucube at 8:03 AM on March 9, 2012

I'm fascinated by this sort of stuff--definitely post it in projects here, but also please get active on Twitter if you're not already. Follow people who you respect or people who share interests and be sure to tweet your updates as you work on the project.

I also look at Freecode.com (used to be Freshmeat) and search for "CMS", then sort by latest updated, to see what might be new. I'm sure there are lots of other sites like that.
posted by circular at 10:47 AM on March 9, 2012

Put it on github?
posted by scottatdrake at 12:25 PM on March 9, 2012 [1 favorite]

Find communities that might be interested. Obviously the communities built around your project's competitors are a good place, especially if you can phrase your pitch as something like "Use $COMPETITOR for your complex, custom sites, but use $MY_THING for simple projects!"
posted by vasi at 8:22 PM on March 9, 2012

Try lurking on Hacker News for a while, putting your URL in your profile, and commenting on some threads to get a feel for the kinds of things the community there finds interesting. Then you can post a "Show HN" thread to try to get some suggestions for your project and spread the word about it; see this post or this one for some recent popular Show HN threads. They're into open source and business, so they may be interested in your project.
posted by dreamyshade at 1:45 PM on March 10, 2012

Thanks for the help!
posted by KHinds10 at 7:13 AM on April 5, 2012