Last week, I sent a barrage of recruiting emails for a number of roles --
packager, tester, writer, etc. -- needed to produce releases that Just Work.
(Many thanks to all the folks who've volunteered so far!)
While there are still some gaps to be filled among those roles (it's not too
late, folks!), now I'd like to solicit volunteers to help with the other
part of a successful release:
Making sure that all interested users know about it!
While it's theoretically possible to overdo things on the evangelism front,
that's not a problem we've ever had. :-) As mentioned in the original
message about the release process, our current userbase is so diverse that
reaching them all takes real work:
http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/01/August/0401.html
Thus, we could use help from a few witty, well-spoken folks who'd like to
help spread the work about how cool each new release of AbiWord is.
Basically, this breaks down into two kinds of jobs:
- XP evangelist ... responsible for crafting the overall "spin" & message
- platform evangelists ... who each spread the word in their community
I won't describe the former job here -- if you know what that takes, and
would like to help with that task, please email me privately. My main focus
today is to recruit folks for the more well-defined, bounded job of platform
evangelist.
customized release announcements
--------------------------------
While the AbiWord user experience should be essentially the same for anyone
who uses it -- regardless of what locale they're in, or what their platform
of choice is -- a "one size fits all" approach just won't cut it, for two
reasons.
1. Each community has its own gathering places. For example,
announcements to news.gnome.org are a wonderful way to reach
GNOME users, but that's not a great place to keep BeOS users
informed.
2. Each community has its own interests. People in the QNX community
are naturally going to care most about how *their* version of
AbiWord is doing, as of each release.
Thus, the "short and sweet" announcements to each community are likely to
emphasize different things ... to at least some degree. Ideally, there
won't be a lot of variation here -- most feature work gets done in XP code,
and ideally, all the platforms will stay more-or-less in sync. However, in
any given release there are likely to be bug fixes or feature work which are
specific to each platform.
job description
---------------
Thus, for each significant user population, we need at least one evangelist
for that platform who'd be willing to:
- tailor a release announcement to meet their community's interests, and
- see that it gets included in all the "right" places for that platform.
To make things go this smoothly, first you need to do some up-front work to
figure out:
- what the important sites are for your platform (see below),
- what information they want for each release, and
- what you need to do to make sure that your blurb gets published.
Once you get used to the job, the total effort required per release should
be less than half a day total, broken down as follows:
- A day or two before the release, draft and circulate your tailored
version of the release announcement. Depending on how good a writer you
are, this need not take much time at all.
- On the day of the release itself, notify the relevant download and news
sites that the new version is there. The time required for this can
vary significantly, depending on how easy it is to notify each site.
(In some cases, this is as easy as sending an email or copying your
blurb into a form. In a few rare cases, a lot more persistence is
required.)
Of course, if you want to do *more* evangelism than this within your
community, the sky's the limit. For example, users love to see polite,
positive, and/or humorous responses from AbiWord folks to discussions on
their community sites.
extra credit
------------
Finally, if you want to be a *really* savvy platform evangelist, you can
track how effective a job you're doing by seeing how many downloads your
release announcements generate, and how satisfied those new users are.
(Hint, hint.)
communities and sites
---------------------
To get things started, here's a list of high-volume sites for each of the
communities we serve. The idea is to maximize our bang-for-the-buck factor
here.
Our goal is to try to ensure that, with a minimum of effort on our parts, we
maximize the chances that an interested user in that community hears about
each release. Of course, the larger the community, the more sites there
will be who want to serve that community. That's fine, but as an
evangelist, where would you rather spend your time?
- honing the message seen on a 200,000 user site, or
- submitting a quick-and-dirty message to twenty 1,000 user sites
While the following list is by no means exhaustive, it should make for a
great start. If you can think of other widely-read sites in your community
which make it easier to reach large numbers of people who wouldn't see your
message on one of these sites, then by all means add 'em! :-)
Linux downloads and news
http://freshmeat.net/
http://lwn.net/
http://www.linuxtoday.com/
http://slashdot.org/
GNOME news
http://news.gnome.org/
Win32 downloads
http://download.com/
QNX news and downloads
??? (ask Thomas) ???
FreeBSD news and downloads
http://daily.daemonnews.org/
http://www.bsdapps.org/
BeOS news and downloads
http://www.bebits.com/
http://www.be.com/software/beware/
http://www.benews.com/
http://www.thebesite.com/
http://www.beoscentral.com/
http://www.beforever.com/
Mac refugees (kept the hardware, switched OSes)
http://www.linuxppc.com/
http://www.imaclinux.net/
http://www.maclinux.de/
http://www.mklinux.org/
http://www.linuxppc.org/
Mac die-hards
http://www.macintouch.com/
http://www.macnn.com/
http://www.macdiscussion.com/
http://www.macgeeks.com/
http://www.maccentral.com/
http://www.ogrady.com/
http://www.mactrack.com/
http://www.macweek.com/
bottom line
-----------
If you're willing to be an AbiWord evangelist, please send us a message at
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (you'll need to subscribe first), introducing
yourself, and describing which platform (and sites) you'd like to be
responsible for.
Thanks!
Paul
motto -- many hands make light work
