Positioning, Mission Statements and READMEs

Even if open source projects do not technically have a profit motive, in practice they are not that dissimilar from commercial products. First of all, most open source maintainers would like people other than themselves to use the open source project, and ideally contribute back to it. Second, making this happen requires investing in… marketing! As well as my speciality, positioning the project right and identifying who is most likely to benefit from it. 

Anyway, I wrote a piece for The New Stack about how to write a better mission statement for the README. A good mission statement is essentially a positioning statement : This project does X for Y type of user. Positioning an open source project is fairly similar to positioning a commercial project, but you’re talking to contributors, not customers. Those contributors are ‘paying’ with their time, not their money.

Anyway, read the full article about positioning, mission statements and READMEs here.