Re: Marketing Minutes December 13, 2012
Karen Sandler ka...@gnome.org wrote: ... I don't think it's actually that hard to figure out what we need to do to improve the perception of GNOME and GNOME 3. There are lots of examples that run contrary to the negative discourse that has been circulating - you don't have to look far to find people who love GNOME 3, or to find developers and designers who are receptive to feedback or who are doing cool stuff. I love this - as I mentioned on a different thread, I'm working on putting together a series of interviews of GNOME users, starting with greggKH and Brett. Do you know of any other awesome folks we should feature? I'm sure I could come up with a few names for you. I'll make some enquiries. ... Perhaps one thing we can do is put together a wish list of simple things we'd like to see done, sort of a GNOME love approach to marketing. That way when newcomers ask for things to do we have a whole list to choose from. We'd have to make it all things that are not very time sensitive, but even just listing articles or interviews we'd like to see written could be a good start. I'd say that the key tasks look something like: * Ensuring that there's a steady stream of messages from the GNOME social media channels * Regular posts on gnome.org * Monitoring of (and engagement with) blog comments, social media sites and forums (we should have a list of sites we want to cover) * Semi-regular events (an announcement can be an event, so can the completion of a new feature) - accompanied by press packs Having a check list of what needs to be done every week (and perhaps every month) could be a good start, perhaps with a way for people to record when they've taken care of something. This would help contributors get started and would also be a way for us to evaluate our performance. It could also be a good basis for regular meetings (less strategy, more tactics). ... One possible way we could help with this would be to invite designers and developers to come and speak to the marketing crew as a part of regular meetings (I'd be happy to help organise that). ... We talked at this meeting about inviting designers and developers to our calls maybe on a monthly basis. If you wanted to help organize that it would be awesome! My idea was to have the guest talk about what they have been working on, and then answer questions from our marketing contributors. One of the objectives would be to create opportunities for marketing contributors to find stories to write about. Another would be to help them establish contacts with the development community. What do others think? What can we do to grow the GNOME outreach effort? Our actual outreach efforts (mostly around OPW and GSoC) have been really successful, maybe we need to highlight that more too? I don't think we ever really did anything with the materials that were prepared at GUADEC even by the newcomers... Sorry, outreach was the wrong word to use there. I should have said marketing... I meant community outreach as community relations, not new contributor programmes. Allan -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
First time contributors : WAS Re: Marketing Minutes December 13, 2012
On 12/14/2012 07:21 PM, Dave Neary wrote: Hi, Sorry I couldn't attend - a sick son bedtime meant that 8pm yesterday was rush hour in the Neary household. On 12/14/2012 03:24 PM, Emily Gonyer wrote: Sri: Theres a common wisdom that GNOME will throw out features and are unfriendly. We've let others tell our story for us. As a result, most of the press we receive is negative, focusing on GNOME 3's failures and shortcomings. Andreas: Whats the biggest drawback of this perception? I would say that the biggest draw-back of this perception is that we are not growing as a developer community, because we're seen as a conservative project where code is as likely to be rejected as accepted once the work is done, it's not clear how to get pre-approval before developing something that it'll be accepted. I can see this and it's something we can improve over time. Related to this (and sorry for hijacking the thread here), is that I think we currently do a very bad job at having a first time contributor experience. We have https://www.gnome.org/get-involved/ but I feel it's currently pointing to a bunch of loose ends (especially Test and Code). I was in #gnome-love the other day and someone joined and asked Hey! I want to start contributing to anything with code! How can I get started? and I was like Let me walk you through jhbuild hell The whole experience was extremely frustrating to me, I can't imagine how it was for this person. I know Sri and Colin are looking at OSTree for some of this, but just having the jhbuild documentation sorted out would be a massive help. It's a mess right now. Also clearer documentation on who to talk to, what to download, etc. would be a massive help. Dave, since you have experience in this realm, any suggestions on what else we need to do to fix this? - Andreas -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: First time contributors : WAS Re: Marketing Minutes December 13, 2012
Yes, volunteer capture was one of the issues. That's why one of the projects was toe QA our website to make sure that we have a method of doing volunteering capture. I saw a similar issue in IRC where somebody came in and wanted to hack on something and nobody answered him. (I was reading from IRC history) At the very least we should maybe have our bot answer that question on volunteering so they know where to go. We even have that trouble here in this list. I know I sent a couple of people here and we weren't quite able to use them because of disorganization. In order to help with volunteering we kind of have to know what help people need. Anyways, good observation, Andreas! sri On Sat, Dec 15, 2012 at 5:57 AM, Andreas Nilsson li...@andreasn.se wrote: On 12/14/2012 07:21 PM, Dave Neary wrote: Hi, Sorry I couldn't attend - a sick son bedtime meant that 8pm yesterday was rush hour in the Neary household. On 12/14/2012 03:24 PM, Emily Gonyer wrote: Sri: Theres a common wisdom that GNOME will throw out features and are unfriendly. We've let others tell our story for us. As a result, most of the press we receive is negative, focusing on GNOME 3's failures and shortcomings. Andreas: Whats the biggest drawback of this perception? I would say that the biggest draw-back of this perception is that we are not growing as a developer community, because we're seen as a conservative project where code is as likely to be rejected as accepted once the work is done, it's not clear how to get pre-approval before developing something that it'll be accepted. I can see this and it's something we can improve over time. Related to this (and sorry for hijacking the thread here), is that I think we currently do a very bad job at having a first time contributor experience. We have https://www.gnome.org/get-**involved/https://www.gnome.org/get-involved/but I feel it's currently pointing to a bunch of loose ends (especially Test and Code). I was in #gnome-love the other day and someone joined and asked Hey! I want to start contributing to anything with code! How can I get started? and I was like Let me walk you through jhbuild hell The whole experience was extremely frustrating to me, I can't imagine how it was for this person. I know Sri and Colin are looking at OSTree for some of this, but just having the jhbuild documentation sorted out would be a massive help. It's a mess right now. Also clearer documentation on who to talk to, what to download, etc. would be a massive help. Dave, since you have experience in this realm, any suggestions on what else we need to do to fix this? - Andreas -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/**mailman/listinfo/marketing-**listhttps://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Marketing Minutes December 13, 2012
Minutes from Marketing Tele-Conference, December 13, 2013 Participants: Sririm Ramkrishna, Karen Sandler, Andreas Nilsson, Emily Gonyer, Alan Day, Olav Vitters, Flavia Weisghizzi Topic: Community Outreach/Development Sri: Theres a common wisdom that GNOME will throw out features and are unfriendly. We've let others tell our story for us. As a result, most of the press we receive is negative, focusing on GNOME 3's failures and shortcomings. Andreas: Whats the biggest drawback of this perception? Emily/Karen: Because the result is many people who have simply never seen GNOME 3, and are surprised by it when they do. Because of the perception we are limiting both our development and user bases. Karen: Addressing these myths is hard, though there may be an opportunity coming up with Vincent Untz's “Has the GNOME community gone crazy?” talk at FOSDEM. Sri: We need to have people on Twitter during the talk addressing comments on Twitter in real time. Overall we need to be more vocal about what we're doing. Need to expand outside of IRC mailinglists. Forums are going well, but input from real GNOME developers/contributors would help them expand much more rapidly. Be open to outside ideas – express more clearly that we want to hear from outside users developers. Also be open to outside contributors and accepting of whatever they have to share. Sri: How do we continue to support our theme/design while being open to outside ideas? By promoting extensions? Karen: We have this message/theme of 'Simple by default. Configurable by design.' - extensions are how we make it configurable and we should be promoting them. But we need to figure out the issues with extensions and any infrastructure issues related to them. Sri: Back to communication – we have problems as well communicating what we're doing to each other. Emily: Should we revive the GNOME Ambassadors program? Sri: Rename my 'community outreach' to GNOME Ambassadors – will look into it. Olav: We should continue having these meetings – they are helpful. Emily: Should look into including the release team other key members of GNOME community in these meetings. Action items: Everyone should be participating as much as they can. Look at the design area of the forums, as well as at re-doing their theme. (Andreas) Talk with Vincent Karen about talking to the press. (Karen) Look into the GNOME Ambassadors program. (Sri) Setup a regular call (bi-monthly? Around releases?) with the release marketing teams to better coordinate between them. (Karen) Next meetings topic: Friends of GNOME campaign on Privacy Security. -- Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. - Goethe Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind. - Dr.Seuss Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. - Albert Einstein -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Marketing Minutes December 13, 2012
Just to expand on the meeting frequency - we should continue to do bi-weekly 'tactical' meetings where we focus on our action items and getting them completed. In addition, any news of the day type of items. Once every two months prior to freezes we have planning meeting where we figure out where we want to go and so forth. For instance, in January, we should have a meeting focusing on conferences for this year that we want to be present at. Then tacticals tracking such things. Conference talks etc. As we get closer to a release, we should increase the number of times we meet to maybe once a week tactical and every 3 weeks planning. The reason is that we want to start creating momentum. It will also focus on a message on what we want this release to be. It's around here we probably should be meeting with the release team as well. We can start giving interviews, participate in forums, write blog entries etc. We had talked about alignment with distros. So for Ubuntu GNOME spin, Fedora, Arch, Debian and others we should again work on getting visibility so that people have a chance to download and try it. Since we lost Ubuntu as a default desktop environment we have also in essence lost marketshare and we will need to use brand recognition to get people to switch. Finally, one final point, community outreach should continuously try to challenge any of the old beliefs of GNOME taking away features and so forth. We have a lot of baggage that we got from the switch from 1.0 to 2.0. Which was quite painful since everything had to be re-written. We pretty much started over. A lot of people who complain probably haven't used GNOME since 1.x days. They have never gotten over the fact that GNOME changed. In fact I think a presentation talking about what happened during that time frame would be excellent. I have an idea in mind already. Anyways, jut some additions to the minutes. On Fri, Dec 14, 2012 at 6:24 AM, Emily Gonyer emilyyr...@gmail.com wrote: Minutes from Marketing Tele-Conference, December 13, 2013 Participants: Sririm Ramkrishna, Karen Sandler, Andreas Nilsson, Emily Gonyer, Alan Day, Olav Vitters, Flavia Weisghizzi Topic: Community Outreach/Development Sri: Theres a common wisdom that GNOME will throw out features and are unfriendly. We've let others tell our story for us. As a result, most of the press we receive is negative, focusing on GNOME 3's failures and shortcomings. Andreas: Whats the biggest drawback of this perception? Emily/Karen: Because the result is many people who have simply never seen GNOME 3, and are surprised by it when they do. Because of the perception we are limiting both our development and user bases. Karen: Addressing these myths is hard, though there may be an opportunity coming up with Vincent Untz's “Has the GNOME community gone crazy?” talk at FOSDEM. Sri: We need to have people on Twitter during the talk addressing comments on Twitter in real time. Overall we need to be more vocal about what we're doing. Need to expand outside of IRC mailinglists. Forums are going well, but input from real GNOME developers/contributors would help them expand much more rapidly. Be open to outside ideas – express more clearly that we want to hear from outside users developers. Also be open to outside contributors and accepting of whatever they have to share. Sri: How do we continue to support our theme/design while being open to outside ideas? By promoting extensions? Karen: We have this message/theme of 'Simple by default. Configurable by design.' - extensions are how we make it configurable and we should be promoting them. But we need to figure out the issues with extensions and any infrastructure issues related to them. Sri: Back to communication – we have problems as well communicating what we're doing to each other. Emily: Should we revive the GNOME Ambassadors program? Sri: Rename my 'community outreach' to GNOME Ambassadors – will look into it. Olav: We should continue having these meetings – they are helpful. Emily: Should look into including the release team other key members of GNOME community in these meetings. Action items: Everyone should be participating as much as they can. Look at the design area of the forums, as well as at re-doing their theme. (Andreas) Talk with Vincent Karen about talking to the press. (Karen) Look into the GNOME Ambassadors program. (Sri) Setup a regular call (bi-monthly? Around releases?) with the release marketing teams to better coordinate between them. (Karen) Next meetings topic: Friends of GNOME campaign on Privacy Security. -- Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. - Goethe Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind. - Dr.Seuss Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. - Albert
Re: Marketing Minutes December 13, 2012
Hi, Sorry I couldn't attend - a sick son bedtime meant that 8pm yesterday was rush hour in the Neary household. On 12/14/2012 03:24 PM, Emily Gonyer wrote: Sri: Theres a common wisdom that GNOME will throw out features and are unfriendly. We've let others tell our story for us. As a result, most of the press we receive is negative, focusing on GNOME 3's failures and shortcomings. Andreas: Whats the biggest drawback of this perception? I would say that the biggest draw-back of this perception is that we are not growing as a developer community, because we're seen as a conservative project where code is as likely to be rejected as accepted once the work is done, it's not clear how to get pre-approval before developing something that it'll be accepted. We have also had a couple of examples of new applications being built which compete with existing apps, and the process for choosing has been unclear - Photos Shotwell comes to mind, as do Files and Zeitgeist. I think this is also hurting the GNOME ISV community (such as it is). In addition, the reputation of GNOME as a conservative project is worse in the platform, with the result that we have few developers working on the foundations of the project at this point. I don't have any good answers to how to turn this around, but it seems to me that these are the biggest costs of the reputation - because if we don't figure out how to grow our developer community, the rest doesn't matter. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary, Lyon, France Email: dne...@gnome.org Jabber: nea...@gmail.com -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Marketing Minutes December 13, 2012
I would like to correct something here. Zeitgeist is not a file browser and has no UI anymore. It is just a History storage for the user. What you are talking about is the Activity Journal, which is now not needed and thus dead. On Fri, Dec 14, 2012 at 7:21 PM, Dave Neary dne...@gnome.org wrote: Hi, Sorry I couldn't attend - a sick son bedtime meant that 8pm yesterday was rush hour in the Neary household. On 12/14/2012 03:24 PM, Emily Gonyer wrote: Sri: Theres a common wisdom that GNOME will throw out features and are unfriendly. We've let others tell our story for us. As a result, most of the press we receive is negative, focusing on GNOME 3's failures and shortcomings. Andreas: Whats the biggest drawback of this perception? I would say that the biggest draw-back of this perception is that we are not growing as a developer community, because we're seen as a conservative project where code is as likely to be rejected as accepted once the work is done, it's not clear how to get pre-approval before developing something that it'll be accepted. We have also had a couple of examples of new applications being built which compete with existing apps, and the process for choosing has been unclear - Photos Shotwell comes to mind, as do Files and Zeitgeist. I think this is also hurting the GNOME ISV community (such as it is). In addition, the reputation of GNOME as a conservative project is worse in the platform, with the result that we have few developers working on the foundations of the project at this point. I don't have any good answers to how to turn this around, but it seems to me that these are the biggest costs of the reputation - because if we don't figure out how to grow our developer community, the rest doesn't matter. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary, Lyon, France Email: dne...@gnome.org Jabber: nea...@gmail.com -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Marketing Minutes December 13, 2012
Hi, On 12/14/2012 07:29 PM, Seif Lotfy wrote: I would like to correct something here. Zeitgeist is not a file browser and has no UI anymore. It is just a History storage for the user. What you are talking about is the Activity Journal, which is now not needed and thus dead. Indeed. I was, more specifically, thinking of the Finding reminding work which you Federico did together. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary, Lyon, France Email: dne...@gnome.org Jabber: nea...@gmail.com -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Marketing Minutes December 13, 2012
Thanks again for the minutes, Emily. I was unable to attend the meeting, due to not being able to dial in again (this time I kept being told that the PIN was wrong). Emily Gonyer emilyyr...@gmail.com wrote: Minutes from Marketing Tele-Conference, December 13, 2013 Participants: Sririm Ramkrishna, Karen Sandler, Andreas Nilsson, Emily Gonyer, Alan Day, Olav Vitters, Flavia Weisghizzi Topic: Community Outreach/Development Sri: Theres a common wisdom that GNOME will throw out features and are unfriendly. We've let others tell our story for us. As a result, most of the press we receive is negative, focusing on GNOME 3's failures and shortcomings. ... I don't think it's actually that hard to figure out what we need to do to improve the perception of GNOME and GNOME 3. There are lots of examples that run contrary to the negative discourse that has been circulating - you don't have to look far to find people who love GNOME 3, or to find developers and designers who are receptive to feedback or who are doing cool stuff. It might be an obvious point, but GNOME contributors don't actually conform to the way that they are often described. Our task is to let the world know about the great side of GNOME that people don't often hear about, by sharing positive stories about GNOME 3 and our community. That can be through writing blog posts, talking to the press, sharing posts on social media channels (either personal accounts or the GNOME ones), or by participating in forums and mailing lists. We also need advocates who can liaise between our core contributors and the disparate communities that are interested in GNOME. The difficult part is finding people to take on all these tasks, and I actually think that growing and sustaining the GNOME marketing effort is the biggest challenge that we face: we need to focus on how we can grow the GNOME marketing effort. The telephone meetings are a fantastic start here, but we need to do more. One thing we obviously need is critical mass - a few core contributors who can drive things forward by coordinating activity and by enabling and encouraging people to participate. We also need our contributors to feel motivated and valued. One possible way we could help with this would be to invite designers and developers to come and speak to the marketing crew as a part of regular meetings (I'd be happy to help organise that). Another thing we should think about is how to give exposure to marketing contributors. Things like having identifiable authors on gnome.org could really help. It could also be good to have regular activity reports on the list as a way to celebrate the work done by our marketing contributors. What do others think? What can we do to grow the GNOME outreach effort? Allan -- IRC: aday on irc.gnome.org Blog: http://afaikblog.wordpress.com/ -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Marketing Minutes December 13, 2012
On Fri, December 14, 2012 1:57 pm, Allan Day wrote: Thanks again for the minutes, Emily. yes! :) I was unable to attend the meeting, due to not being able to dial in again (this time I kept being told that the PIN was wrong). Very strange, but let me know if you want me to set up another test call if you want to try and troubleshoot it. Also, as I was telling Flavia, I can call one person and conference them in too. Maybe someone else on the call can also do that next time so that we get everyone who's having trouble. Emily Gonyer emilyyr...@gmail.com wrote: Minutes from Marketing Tele-Conference, December 13, 2013 Participants: Sririm Ramkrishna, Karen Sandler, Andreas Nilsson, Emily Gonyer, Alan Day, Olav Vitters, Flavia Weisghizzi Oliver Propst was on the call (heavensmile), I don't think Olav was. Topic: Community Outreach/Development Sri: Theres a common wisdom that GNOME will throw out features and are unfriendly. We've let others tell our story for us. As a result, most of the press we receive is negative, focusing on GNOME 3's failures and shortcomings. ... I don't think it's actually that hard to figure out what we need to do to improve the perception of GNOME and GNOME 3. There are lots of examples that run contrary to the negative discourse that has been circulating - you don't have to look far to find people who love GNOME 3, or to find developers and designers who are receptive to feedback or who are doing cool stuff. I love this - as I mentioned on a different thread, I'm working on putting together a series of interviews of GNOME users, starting with greggKH and Brett. Do you know of any other awesome folks we should feature? It might be an obvious point, but GNOME contributors don't actually conform to the way that they are often described. Our task is to let the world know about the great side of GNOME that people don't often hear about, by sharing positive stories about GNOME 3 and our community. That can be through writing blog posts, talking to the press, sharing posts on social media channels (either personal accounts or the GNOME ones), or by participating in forums and mailing lists. We also need advocates who can liaise between our core contributors and the disparate communities that are interested in GNOME. The difficult part is finding people to take on all these tasks, and I actually think that growing and sustaining the GNOME marketing effort is the biggest challenge that we face: we need to focus on how we can grow the GNOME marketing effort. The telephone meetings are a fantastic start here, but we need to do more. Perhaps one thing we can do is put together a wish list of simple things we'd like to see done, sort of a GNOME love approach to marketing. That way when newcomers ask for things to do we have a whole list to choose from. We'd have to make it all things that are not very time sensitive, but even just listing articles or interviews we'd like to see written could be a good start. One thing we obviously need is critical mass - a few core contributors who can drive things forward by coordinating activity and by enabling and encouraging people to participate. We also need our contributors to feel motivated and valued. One possible way we could help with this would be to invite designers and developers to come and speak to the marketing crew as a part of regular meetings (I'd be happy to help organise that). Another thing we should think about is how to give exposure to marketing contributors. Things like having identifiable authors on gnome.org could really help. It could also be good to have regular activity reports on the list as a way to celebrate the work done by our marketing contributors. We talked at this meeting about inviting designers and developers to our calls maybe on a monthly basis. If you wanted to help organize that it would be awesome! What do others think? What can we do to grow the GNOME outreach effort? Our actual outreach efforts (mostly around OPW and GSoC) have been really successful, maybe we need to highlight that more too? I don't think we ever really did anything with the materials that were prepared at GUADEC even by the newcomers... karen -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Marketing Minutes December 13, 2012
Karen - perhaps Jakub Steiner would be a good person to interview (since you had suggested having a designer in there, he's a great place to start I think!) -Brett On Dec 14, 2012 4:22 PM, Karen Sandler ka...@gnome.org wrote: On Fri, December 14, 2012 1:57 pm, Allan Day wrote: Thanks again for the minutes, Emily. yes! :) I was unable to attend the meeting, due to not being able to dial in again (this time I kept being told that the PIN was wrong). Very strange, but let me know if you want me to set up another test call if you want to try and troubleshoot it. Also, as I was telling Flavia, I can call one person and conference them in too. Maybe someone else on the call can also do that next time so that we get everyone who's having trouble. Emily Gonyer emilyyr...@gmail.com wrote: Minutes from Marketing Tele-Conference, December 13, 2013 Participants: Sririm Ramkrishna, Karen Sandler, Andreas Nilsson, Emily Gonyer, Alan Day, Olav Vitters, Flavia Weisghizzi Oliver Propst was on the call (heavensmile), I don't think Olav was. Topic: Community Outreach/Development Sri: Theres a common wisdom that GNOME will throw out features and are unfriendly. We've let others tell our story for us. As a result, most of the press we receive is negative, focusing on GNOME 3's failures and shortcomings. ... I don't think it's actually that hard to figure out what we need to do to improve the perception of GNOME and GNOME 3. There are lots of examples that run contrary to the negative discourse that has been circulating - you don't have to look far to find people who love GNOME 3, or to find developers and designers who are receptive to feedback or who are doing cool stuff. I love this - as I mentioned on a different thread, I'm working on putting together a series of interviews of GNOME users, starting with greggKH and Brett. Do you know of any other awesome folks we should feature? It might be an obvious point, but GNOME contributors don't actually conform to the way that they are often described. Our task is to let the world know about the great side of GNOME that people don't often hear about, by sharing positive stories about GNOME 3 and our community. That can be through writing blog posts, talking to the press, sharing posts on social media channels (either personal accounts or the GNOME ones), or by participating in forums and mailing lists. We also need advocates who can liaise between our core contributors and the disparate communities that are interested in GNOME. The difficult part is finding people to take on all these tasks, and I actually think that growing and sustaining the GNOME marketing effort is the biggest challenge that we face: we need to focus on how we can grow the GNOME marketing effort. The telephone meetings are a fantastic start here, but we need to do more. Perhaps one thing we can do is put together a wish list of simple things we'd like to see done, sort of a GNOME love approach to marketing. That way when newcomers ask for things to do we have a whole list to choose from. We'd have to make it all things that are not very time sensitive, but even just listing articles or interviews we'd like to see written could be a good start. One thing we obviously need is critical mass - a few core contributors who can drive things forward by coordinating activity and by enabling and encouraging people to participate. We also need our contributors to feel motivated and valued. One possible way we could help with this would be to invite designers and developers to come and speak to the marketing crew as a part of regular meetings (I'd be happy to help organise that). Another thing we should think about is how to give exposure to marketing contributors. Things like having identifiable authors on gnome.org could really help. It could also be good to have regular activity reports on the list as a way to celebrate the work done by our marketing contributors. We talked at this meeting about inviting designers and developers to our calls maybe on a monthly basis. If you wanted to help organize that it would be awesome! What do others think? What can we do to grow the GNOME outreach effort? Our actual outreach efforts (mostly around OPW and GSoC) have been really successful, maybe we need to highlight that more too? I don't think we ever really did anything with the materials that were prepared at GUADEC even by the newcomers... karen -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Marketing Minutes December 13, 2012
Doh, forgot one other thing - we could have google hangouts on GNOME and talk with people about the design. So for instance, Andreas and Allan could hold an open chat with people. It might be interesting to try. This is especially true if we start doing them as we get close to release. On Fri, Dec 14, 2012 at 9:23 AM, Sriram Ramkrishna s...@ramkrishna.mewrote: Just to expand on the meeting frequency - we should continue to do bi-weekly 'tactical' meetings where we focus on our action items and getting them completed. In addition, any news of the day type of items. Once every two months prior to freezes we have planning meeting where we figure out where we want to go and so forth. For instance, in January, we should have a meeting focusing on conferences for this year that we want to be present at. Then tacticals tracking such things. Conference talks etc. As we get closer to a release, we should increase the number of times we meet to maybe once a week tactical and every 3 weeks planning. The reason is that we want to start creating momentum. It will also focus on a message on what we want this release to be. It's around here we probably should be meeting with the release team as well. We can start giving interviews, participate in forums, write blog entries etc. We had talked about alignment with distros. So for Ubuntu GNOME spin, Fedora, Arch, Debian and others we should again work on getting visibility so that people have a chance to download and try it. Since we lost Ubuntu as a default desktop environment we have also in essence lost marketshare and we will need to use brand recognition to get people to switch. Finally, one final point, community outreach should continuously try to challenge any of the old beliefs of GNOME taking away features and so forth. We have a lot of baggage that we got from the switch from 1.0 to 2.0. Which was quite painful since everything had to be re-written. We pretty much started over. A lot of people who complain probably haven't used GNOME since 1.x days. They have never gotten over the fact that GNOME changed. In fact I think a presentation talking about what happened during that time frame would be excellent. I have an idea in mind already. Anyways, jut some additions to the minutes. On Fri, Dec 14, 2012 at 6:24 AM, Emily Gonyer emilyyr...@gmail.comwrote: Minutes from Marketing Tele-Conference, December 13, 2013 Participants: Sririm Ramkrishna, Karen Sandler, Andreas Nilsson, Emily Gonyer, Alan Day, Olav Vitters, Flavia Weisghizzi Topic: Community Outreach/Development Sri: Theres a common wisdom that GNOME will throw out features and are unfriendly. We've let others tell our story for us. As a result, most of the press we receive is negative, focusing on GNOME 3's failures and shortcomings. Andreas: Whats the biggest drawback of this perception? Emily/Karen: Because the result is many people who have simply never seen GNOME 3, and are surprised by it when they do. Because of the perception we are limiting both our development and user bases. Karen: Addressing these myths is hard, though there may be an opportunity coming up with Vincent Untz's “Has the GNOME community gone crazy?” talk at FOSDEM. Sri: We need to have people on Twitter during the talk addressing comments on Twitter in real time. Overall we need to be more vocal about what we're doing. Need to expand outside of IRC mailinglists. Forums are going well, but input from real GNOME developers/contributors would help them expand much more rapidly. Be open to outside ideas – express more clearly that we want to hear from outside users developers. Also be open to outside contributors and accepting of whatever they have to share. Sri: How do we continue to support our theme/design while being open to outside ideas? By promoting extensions? Karen: We have this message/theme of 'Simple by default. Configurable by design.' - extensions are how we make it configurable and we should be promoting them. But we need to figure out the issues with extensions and any infrastructure issues related to them. Sri: Back to communication – we have problems as well communicating what we're doing to each other. Emily: Should we revive the GNOME Ambassadors program? Sri: Rename my 'community outreach' to GNOME Ambassadors – will look into it. Olav: We should continue having these meetings – they are helpful. Emily: Should look into including the release team other key members of GNOME community in these meetings. Action items: Everyone should be participating as much as they can. Look at the design area of the forums, as well as at re-doing their theme. (Andreas) Talk with Vincent Karen about talking to the press. (Karen) Look into the GNOME Ambassadors program. (Sri) Setup a regular call (bi-monthly? Around releases?) with the release marketing teams to better coordinate between them. (Karen)
