Personas were made famous by Alan Moore in "The Inmates are Running the Asylum," a seminal book on user interface design for computer programmers. They have been used for decades in the marketing industry, in user experience design, and in product planning to help target specific market segments with features, ads, and product design.
Personas help you frame feature discussions while developing your software, guide your communication and event strategy, and ultimately help you to have a more popular, better project. As the OpenStack project evolves beyond its original base and seeks to engage with a broader user community, understanding the profile of OpenStack users becomes critical in increasing participation and thus improving the project.
This session will cover the basics of:
* What is a persona and why should I care?
* How do I come up with persona(s) for my project?
* What can I do with personas?
This session will be useful to those interested in better understanding their target audiences, and specifically those seeking to grow a community around an open source project.