Re: REMINDER: Marketing meeting January 9th 20:00 UTC

[Allan Day]

Sriram Ramkrishna s...@ramkrishna.me wrote:
 Reminder that we have a marketing meeting tomorrow:

I'm afraid that I won't be able to make tomorrow's meeting. I'll
actualy be busy on Wednesday evenings for the next ten weeks. A few
comments on a few of the agenda items:

 Topics:

 1) managing classic experience expectations

Right now we don't know exactly what legacy or classic mode will
entail (we don't even have a final name decided). There will certainly
be window based alt-tab behaviour, an app menu and *some* kind of
window list along the bottom of the screen. Many of the details are
still to be worked out. The point is that this will not be exactly
like GNOME 2, and we don't know what the quality of the new mode will
be like. It seems extremely risky to promote a new feature when
neither the design nor the implementation have been finalised. Raising
expectations could lead to disappointed (although I obviously hope
that won't be the case).

How do we deal with this? First, we can try to convey the message that
it the new mode is still experimental. We could even think about
promoting the initial release as a preview release. Second, we should
promote those 3.8 features that we can be more confident about.

 2) 2.8 marketing message and materials

I presume this means 3.8. :)

There is already a long list of new features for the next release.
Going through them all, I think we can be confident that it will be
fairly strong. Looking at the list of improvements, there are a few
themes that stand out to me:

 * Settings - there will be at least three new settings panels
(search, notifications, privacy) as well as reworked panels for power,
network and color. There has been a huge amount of work invested.
 * There's a new story for search, with a new interface in the shell
and the new settings panel. This is a new and highly visible
integration point for applications.
 * Applications - Web, Documents, Contacts and Clocks are all getting
a decent amount of work this cycle.
 * Polish - Every Detail Matters has been extremely successful this
cycle. We also have Owen Taylor's graphics performance work and a new
kind of pressure sensitivity for actions like the hot corner and
triggering the Message Tray. There's also been a lot of work to refine
and consolidate the big new features we had in 3.6, such as input
methods integration and the lock screen. Oh, and the window selection
part of the Activities Overview has been massively improved.

There's a new potential messages we could talk about there: empowering
users (through new settings) as well as increasing quality and
providing a refined experience.

In terms of materials, I would like to discuss how we want to handle
the release notes for 3.8. We should also plan blog posts and news
stories about new features for the run up to the release.

Allan
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Fwd: Community programs analysis

[Sriram Ramkrishna]

-- Forwarded message --
From: Diego Escalante Urrelo die...@gnome.org
Date: Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 12:21 PM
Subject: Fwd: Community programs analysis
To: Sriram Ramkrishna s...@ramkrishna.me


Hope this still holds true after this months.

I re-read my conclusions and I think they still are valid, I don't
know/think the programas changed much lately.

-- Forwarded message --
From: Diego Escalante Urrelo die...@gnome.org
Date: Thu, Jan 12, 2012 at 7:24 PM
Subject: Community programs analysis
To: Stormy Peters sto...@gnome.org, Karen Sandler ka...@gnome.org


Hi!


As promised, here's an overview/analysis of the Ubuntu, Mozilla and
Fedora programs. I think there's some interesting data here.
I know it's really long, but I think it's jump-reading friendly.

The final blocks: thoughts and conclusions; work as a summary, so you
can check that directly if you want. Conclusions are somewhat more
tl;dr;.


=
Ubuntu Local Community (LoCo) teams
=

These are local community teams all around the world, both official
and unofficial ones.

Anyone can create a group, they only need to gather interested people
and follow a howto, which is more or less predictable if you know how
communities usually work:

- get interested peers
- create a mailing list in lists.ubuntu.com
- create a wiki homepage in wiki.ubuntu.com
- create an IRC channel in freenode
- all these resources follow naming guidelines

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LoCoTeamHowto

Also, before trying to become official you are expected to also:

- report monthly following a format
- appoint a contact person for the team

To start operating officially and be recognized you need approval of
the LoCo Council. This means writing an application with your
resources, plans and membership. The usual.

There's also a lot of documentation regarding governance and conflict
resolution.

Consider that loco.ubuntu.com provides aggregation for events, news
and twitter/identi.ca feeds of the teams. I suppose this is carefully
filtered so to avoid endless and meaningless lists like
planet.ubuntu.com and similar.

Text based information and representation.


=
Mozilla Communities
=

There's a newsletter you can subscribe to.

They have insanely iconic and graphical representations for
everything. The /contribute/ page is interesting, it's divided into:
- area of interest
- time available
  + interesting: army of awesome.
people answering questions in twitter and similar sites
- communities near you

Communities takes you to a community mindmap widget that is fancy but
a bit useless.
It seems most communities handle their own website hosting(?)

There doesn't seem to be an immediate homepage or starpage for
communities as a community of communinities. It's currently just a
regional directory.

Couldn't find the program details, I guess I overlooked it... Anyway,
googling create mozilla community didn't help. So it might not be
newcomer safe.


Side note, this is an interesting setup to invite volunteers:
- https://wiki.mozilla.org/ReMo/SIGs/Marketing
- https://wiki.mozilla.org/ReMo/SIGs/Communications


=
Fedora ambassadors
=

Has an structure around regions and a central committee. Much like
LoCo teams, but feels a bit more RedHat-ish. Specially considering
those stock market names:  Asia Pacific (APAC), Europe, Middle East,
and Africa (EMEA), Latin America (LATAM), and North America (NA).

They have a biz card generator. Handy.

Few things are demanded from Ambassadors. Unlike LoCo teams, the
Ambassadors seem to limit to individual activities. This seems to be
more similar to a local salesman than community fostering.

The wiki is a bit boring, to be honest. It lacks the colorfulness of
mozilla.org and the 1-2-3 steps of ubuntu.com

There is a constant mixture of internal information (templates,
processes) of the program with external information (howto, faq,
etc). This is extremely tiresome and considerably confusing.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ambassadors_project_structure

=
Some thoughts
=

By far, it seems ubuntu is the more succesful one based on the number of
teams.
But otoh, mozilla is a newer effort. Fedora doesn't have much excuse though.

Mozilla does a great job with its graphical material, it looks much
more professional than the other programs. This is just because they
have invested in such material design and production. We can do that,
but we have to be more demanding, beyond funny picture in the frame.

Regarding Ubuntu vs Fedora, I think Fedora's program is an
afterthought when compared to LoCo. The two programs are similar, I
believe LoCo might be the older one. Or at least it seems older given
how much response it has.

It helps that Ubuntu has had people on the payroll devoted to
community activities and fostering, Fedora hasn't AFAIK.

Also to consider, and perhaps one of my historical peeves with