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[Rouben <rouben AT rouben.net>]

Hi all,

I’ve been quietly listening in to the recent discussion about the .RUS TLD, and the last comment about lack of content (and consequently engagement?) got me thinking... how can we market OpenNIC to the “masses”?

I myself got interested in OpenNIC for the following reasons:

1. I wanted to know how DNS works “in the real world” and OpenNIC provided a live DNS ecosystem I could examine closely (much closer than the more closed InterNIC). Had I had access to a decent Internet connection I would have lomg considered running a DNS server for OpenNIC to help out and gain experience of what it takes to run a public facing DNS server, whether it be an authoritative or recursor instance.

2. I like the philosophy of OpenNIC, where almost anything is possible.

Having said the above, one has to realize that DNS is a rather niche topic. It’s definitely not very “sexy”, despite the fact that it happens to be a cornerstone of the Internet.

Back to my original question: how do we attract people to the project, and once they’re here, what do we do with them?

Here are some ideas:

1. Ask popular people/orgs (LinuxQuestions, Bryan Lunduke (Youtuber, journalist), various Ubuntu forums/communities, Quidsup (Youtuber), Ronnie Tucker/Full Circle Magazine, heck, why not even LinuxJournal to do a feature on OpenNIC. Depending on the venue, make it either technical, or not so much (focus more on the high level democratic goals).

2. Start an outreach initiative where we try and raise awareness of DNS, why it’s important, and how OpenNIC fits in through these various community portals.

3. In a nutshell, attract people in 2 categories:

A) end-users - how do we promote the use of OpenNIC? And once it is used, how can we track how widespread its adoption is, without violating people’s privacy, so that we can at least know how many users we even have? These numbers can be used to attract further users and content providers.

B) infrastructure maintainers/providers - how do we get people highly interested to help run things onboard? Getting them up to speed, help guide them, foster a self-help community through the aforementioned pre-established support communities, etc

Just random thoughts...

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Rouben