Promoting FreeCAD

Have some feature requests, feedback, cool stuff to share, or want to know where FreeCAD is going? This is the place.
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ole84
Posts: 55
Joined: Thu Sep 02, 2010 9:15 am

Promoting FreeCAD

Post by ole84 »

I want to start a new topic especially for promoting FreeCAD in the public and other projects and so on. This project seems to be the most developed so far, but it as a lot of potential and could use a bigger community and more support etc. And the point is, even if FreeCAD isn't interesting for engineering projects yet, it might become so in the future, and with a bigger community the FreeCAD development improves and becomes faster.

This Thread aims to collect also the progress and actions everyone does in this matter. Here we can inform the community about the actions someone did promoting FreeCAD and post ideas and sources for open marketing and stuff.
For example: I started the german translation of the FreeCAD wiki to improve the useability for german people so it hopefully becomes more attractive. And I'm planning to set some notifications about this project on other Forums and pages...another very small usability thing was to put the translation icons on the frontpage on the top, so that every user can see them directly.
Same thing with translations in other languages which started before and of course translating the program itself...

Here are some ideas collected and things done yet, which we talked about on another thread:
yorikvanhavre wrote:...
I "registered" FreeCAD on a couple of places already, but there could be more (facebook fan page, etc)
kwahoo wrote:ole84, maybe we (users) should start with FreeCAD-oriented blog? We can write simple tutors, exercises with FreeCAD, record videotutorials etc.
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normandc wrote:I created a blog 6 months ago dedicated more widely to CAD on Linux:

http://courira.ca/en/cad-on-linux

(it's the same link as under my forum profile)
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kwahooo wrote:I record some short videos (salceson2* on Youtube) http://www.youtube.com/user/salceson2?feature=mhum

*salceson is a kind of sausage;) Don't ask about reason this account name:)
splineman wrote:There is a FreeCAD group in Facebook
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so i´ve created a new page. This is the rigth link http://www.facebook.com/pages/FreeCAD/153482088014175
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splineman wrote:i think that could be a good idea create also a twitter profile and connect it with facebook. I don´t know if there is an email account of FreeCAD that we could use?
normandc wrote:A CAD library would be a terrific idea. Submited formats could be FCStd (native FreeCAD format), STEP, IGES for 3D, SVG and DXF for drawings. And why not combine with other open source projects like HeeksCAD. I'd limit it to open and documented formats (no DWG or CATIA or the like).

Problem is, I don't think the current SourceForge hosting would allow for such a platform. It would probably need to be built from scratch, and hosted elsewhere.

There are already existing repositories, like the new GrabCAD sharing platform. There's not much content yet. It's free, but it's not open source.

What I would like to see is live 3D previews like in Google's 3dwarehouse. It doesn't require to install a plugin in your browser, I'd very much like to know how they do that. Maybe with O3D, which is apparently open source.
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klyttle wrote:I like the sponsorship idea. Figuring out what kind of companies [or people] would be most interested in FreeCAD is perhaps the first order of business, then getting them sold on it.
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