About Open Strategy Partners
We align your communications with your vision, strategy, and technical truth.
OSP helps you* communicate the value of what you do to connect you to the people who need to know about it, and grow.
Content Strategy + Strategic Content
We help our clients create strategic content that is both compelling and technically accurate. To do this, we combine technical analysis, research-by-interview, and systematic, repeatable writing and editing practices. Our goal is to apply empathy, communicate with clarity, and build trust — giving perspective, context, and depth to technical stories, while keeping them free of marketing hyperbole.
Product Communications & Sales Enablement
Work with us to create strategies and technically accurate, compelling communications that help you achieve your business goals. We apply empathy to create clarity and build trust with your audience. Grow adoption, increase sales, memberships, engagement, partner networks, and more with OSP!
- We create sales enablement and product communication materials with you.
- We translate complexity to business value, bridging the biz-tech gap.
- We help your high-value organization communicate effectively.
- We know Open Source.
Our clients
Our clients are (people* in) technology organizations — ranging from agencies and product companies to open source projects and associations to decentralized blockchains — each with unique communication needs and challenges. Many of them work with open source directly or benefit from the strategies and lessons learned from these value-generating, professional communities. We partner with you at a strategic level to create the effective communications you need to grow. For example, we help you increase the adoption of your technical solutions, strengthen your user communities, build partner networks, and much more.
*You! Tech lead, product marketer, salesperson, founder, at a technology organization, open source project, agency, technical product company ...
Working with Open Strategy Partners
Our mission is to create strategies and accurate, compelling communications that support business goals while applying empathy to create clarity and build trust. We help clients, for example, grow adoption of their solutions, increase sales, memberships, engagement, or partner networks, and more.
We are a human-first company. Our priority is planning and creating a fair flow of work for our team and our clients. We make our own workdays easier by focusing on repeatable, documented processes. Among many positive side effects, this means OSP delivers consistent quality that we are proud of. And we plan capacity and meet deadlines while still taking care of ourselves and our lives outside work.
We hope we can make the world a tiny bit better by helping more people than we could ever take on as clients. Therefore, we also enthusiastically teach and share our methodologies, materials, experience, and templates.
Open Strategy Partners is based in Cologne, Germany, with team members and clients around the globe in places like Hamburg, Belfast, Melbourne, Munich, San Francisco, Vancouver, and Ontario!
The OSP Manifesto: Learn, Share, Repeat
- We are human-centric and inclusive.
- We apply empathy to achieve clarity and build trust.
- We communicate to connect with others and help all of us grow.
- We ask questions to listen and learn from the answers.
- We enthusiastically share our knowledge and experiences with others.
- We say "yes, and ..."
- We build bridges between our values and the value we deliver.
We could afford a dedicated internal marketer, but we opted for a tighter relationship with OSP because the money is better invested due to the whole organizational power.
We love to work with nice people — there’s always a positive vibe! Even in challenging moments. That’s majorly important to us!
Meet the OSPeas
Meet the team! When you work with us, you get the power of all these brains (and our networks) for the price of one. Open Strategy Partners represents decades of collective experience in the business, technology, and open source sectors — with big doses of media, culture, communication, and community thrown in. From startups to agencies to the enterprise, we’ve been there. From helping you with great communications behind the scenes, to being on stage with you, there’s an OSPea for that!
Tracy Evans, Partner
Tracy Evans is a Partner at Open Strategy Partners, where she uses her deep background in marketing and business to map and define the problems, challenges, and needs of a given organization, person, target audience, or persona. Tracy has a talent for asking interesting questions and understanding other people’s perspectives and needs. Through this lens of genuine empathy and curiosity, she shapes organizations’ strategies, value propositions, and narratives into compelling digital marketing, which in turn creates the kind of authentic connections among stakeholders that drive further value creation. Tracy has an MBA from the Mannheim Business School and more than two decades years of strategic marketing, technology, and management experience, spanning classic enterprise environments and the digital startup scene, helping organizations connect their value propositions to their target audiences. She’s based in Cologne, Germany.
Jeffrey A. McGuire, Partner
Jeffrey A. “jam” McGuire is a Partner at Open Strategy Partners, where he helps organizations communicate and grow, finding and telling the stories that connect their technologies with the value they deliver. He builds on nearly twenty years of experience in open source technology, at the intersection of software, business, and culture. His approach to technology marketing is centered on sharing the human context of complex technology solutions. As co-Founder of the German Drupal Association, community-building is close to Jeffrey’s heart. He enjoys celebrating creators’ expertise and combining storytelling and performance to convey information and motivate his audiences. An experienced public speaker, he has hosted numerous awards ceremonies and delivered dozens of keynotes, 150+ conference presentations, and 220+ podcast interviews in the last 15 years. He’s based in Cologne, Germany.
Robert Douglass, Entrepreneur in Residence
Robert Douglass is Entrepreneur in Residence at Open Strategy Partners GmbH (OSP). Robert is a seasoned technology executive with more than 20 years of experience building and scaling innovative software solutions and the teams around them. At OSP, he focuses on developing software products that enhance the value of OSP's strategic and content deliverables to their clients.
OSP is a strategic B2B content marketing agency for tech product and service companies. As technology marketers, OSP designs and creates marketing content that aligns with their clients' vision, strategy, and technical truth.
Robert's professional journey includes a significant tenure at Platform.sh, where he served in various leadership roles, including VP of Customer Success, Chief DevRel Officer, and VP of Channel Development. Robert also co-founded a software startup dedicated to helping real estate investment funds benefit from investing in biodiversity.
Robert has been a key contributor to open source communities since 2004. He wrote the first book on Drupal, contributed code to four different Drupal versions, was a founding member of the Drupal Association and the German Drupal Association, served on the Drupal Security team, co-created the Drupal Prenote, and mentored many notable Drupal contributors.
Beyond technology, Robert is passionate about music production and photography.
Carl Richards, Media Producer
Carl Richards is a Media Producer at Open Strategy partners, where he produces, edits, and masters podcasts and other audio. His experience lies in creating world-class podcasts and helping others grow thriving and profitable businesses. Carl has spent more than 20 years behind the microphone on radio and on stage, entertaining and influencing audiences across North America. As a best-selling author, former TEDx Speaker and emcee, host of the Speaking of Speaking Podcast, and founder and CEO of Carl Speaks, Carl helps entrepreneurs and influencers find their voice. Based in Ontario, Canada, when he’s not working with clients, Carl can be found in the kitchen whipping up some culinary delight. Chicken Jackson anyone?
Christine Buehler, Communications Consultant
Christine Buehler is a Communications Consultant at Open Strategy Partners, where she creates marketing materials, podcasts, strategic content for open source software organizations. Her expertise lies in technical writing and making complex, technical subjects easier to understand. Christine has worked as a copy and content writer with San Francisco tech companies like Lyft, Druva, D2iQ, and more. She likes reading science fiction and roller skating in her spare time. She’s based in Berkley, California.
Christoph Berger, Communications Consultant
Christoph Berger is a Technical Writer at Open Strategy Partners, where he creates technical content for clients. During 18 years of working in Technical Support, he built up deep skills in digging into technical problems, finding solutions, and explaining technical topics in a comprehensible manner to diverse stakeholder audiences. In 2016-17, he turned this talent and experiences to sharing his knowledge about the programming language Go in the Applied Go blog and Master Go video course, which has received high praise from participants. Christoph is based in Munich, Germany.
Christopher Fenwick, Communications Consultant
Chris Fenwick is a Communications Consultant at Open Strategy Partners, where he works to devise, write, and edit content to help tech companies communicate across all channels. A versatile copywriter with 10+ years’ experience and 4+ years in the tech industry, he’s equally at home writing social media content and blogs as user guides and business presentations. Chris combines a strong academic humanities background in writing, editing, foreign languages, and research with a great interest in contemporary science and technology, and specializes in breaking down complex ideas for a general audience in clear, engaging copy. He is based in Berlin, Germany.
Felicity Brand, Communications Consultant
Felicity Brand is a Communications Consultant at Open Strategy Partners, where she writes and edits a variety of technical content, and loves to talk about the craft. She is the primary author of the TYPO3 Guidebook: Understand and Use TYPO3 CMS, and has a special knack for designing visuals to communicate technical concepts. Felicity has more than ten years of experience as a technical communicator and is passionate about developer relations and open source. She is based in Melbourne, Australia.
Jesi Driessen, Project Manager
Jesi Driessen is a Project Manager at Open Strategy Partners, where she manages client operations, ensuring our customer’s projects are staffed by the people best suited for the job. She is considered the Big Sister of Open Strategy Partners and oversees all client deadlines and deliverables so clients can be confident their project will be completed on time. Jesi has experience managing deadlines and projects, having previously worked at EY and Harlequin in resource management. Originally from Canada, she is now based in Cologne, Germany.
Joana Bagano, Communications Consultant
Joana Bagano is a Communications Consultant at Open Strategy Partners. After studying journalism, she began her career writing for business magazines in Asia, getting a deep dive into banking, healthcare, and startups. She later moved into public sector and NGO work, taking on project coordination and communications roles. Alongside her main jobs, she’s always freelanced as a tech writer, building up a wide range of work throughout her nine-year career. Recently, she moved from the Philippines to Norderstedt, Germany, with her husband and their cat.
Omar El Sabh, Content Marketing Strategist
Omar is based in Berlin. His strategic content-marketing know-how helps implement SEO-driven tactics to produce search-intent-driven content that pushes the needle toward growth and data-driven decision-making for OSP clients.
He is a Certified Digital Marketing Master (CDMM), a marketing curriculum designer and a content marketing instructor at The American University in Cairo’s Executive School of Business. From 2014 to 2023, he founded and was the managing partner of ripplemark, a performance marketing agency based in Cairo.
Omar often comments in OSP’s Asana or Google Docs, “I see keywords!” When we ask, “In your dreams?” [Omar shakes his head no] “While I’m awake.”