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→Site Building Extravaganza - Emma Jane Hogbin
The presentation was about her experience on trying to make money from open source. This was interesting to me and others as well because she will be sharing her direct experience and I will be able to learn from her experience. Emma started to adapt open source as a form of income by creating websites. She used Drupal, which is an open source content management system. She would develop websites and sell it to clients ranging from 2000 to 10000 dollars. She says that 8000 would be the average cost of her sites. I found this to be amazing as that is pretty good money for building sites with Drupal. Emma then wrote a book on building sites with Drupal, but did not publish it because as soon as she was ready, a similar book came out and she figured that direct competition means that her book won’t sell as well. However, she saw that there was a “hole in the market” and edited her book towards theming Drupal sites. When she saw that she only made $2 per book but the professors who teach using her book is making much more than she was, she wanted, as she worded it, “a piece of that pie”.
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In order to make money instructing Emma decided that she needed to make a teaching program. The name of the program was “Site Building Extravaganza”(Which she named this seminar after). Site building Extravaganza was a 1 year long program where the users will get detailed instructions on how to build websites that the students may profit from. Emma decided to price her program $500 per person and set the minimum to 100 participants for it to start. She was able to get over $50000 by getting 107 people to sign up. This was great because she was presented with large lump sum but she would have to spend it wisely because she would need to be devoted to creating manuals for these “students” to follow.
After her program has begun, she had to put a pause because she had to run for elections. When she notified her students, some wanted their money back, which she did. Emma had to find more people to take her program before she began to make up for the loss.
She found that writing these manuals were no easy task. Some of her students had zero skill in web developing so she had to make her manuals detailed and easy to follow. That’s when she realized that building Drupal site was “time consuming”… after she has written down the steps.
She suggested that it was a risky selling the program before she had a program to sell, but Emma also pointed out that it was what was so great about it. By not having the program, she can test the market with zero effort on her part. (Unlike the book, which she spent a lot of time on but turns out to have made very little money)
==Free and Open Source Strategy as Practice: Participant Perspectives - Mekki MacAulay==