Hi DebConf orgas, thanks for your work to organise a nice conference year after year, you are doing a splendig job! But may take the opportunity to introduce you to Debians Publicity Team? We are open for collaboration, and are willing to help you in any way we can, but you don't make it very easy, although I repeatedly contacted you, and asked you to contact us well in advance.
As previous attempts didn't seem to work, I'll show you a very positive example of cooperation between Debian's release team and Debian's Publicity and Press team, when new Point Releases are announced. Weeks before an point release is created, they ask at [email protected], if we will be available on the planed date, to send out the announcement. As postings to the debian-announce and debian-news mailing list are restricted (and no, allowing some DC orga falks to allow posting there as asked previously is not an option as long as collaboration doesn't work), they make sure, that someone is available at the release date. Usually a week before the announcement has to be sent out, they contact us again, with details of the desired content - actually they do even more: By now, they have their scripts adapted so they create the announcements in the form we need them for our webpage. This allows reviews and translations of the announcements. They also keep us updated regarding the timeline, and send us patches for last minute updates. If something is found during the reviews, they are also open for patches, so furutre announcements won't have the same error. On the day the point releases are done, they also keep us updated about their progress, and when they consider it safe to send out the announcements. When our time has come, we know exactly whome to ask for a final okay, can add the announcement to Debian's web page (including translations), and finally send out the e-mail version. >From our point of view, that's a perfect workflow! Now compare that with the DebConf Orga Team. On the evening of the 7th I got hilighted on IRC, which I only saw the next morning, when I was at work. I didn't found any details or timeline, but got some pointers to a wiki page (which only seemed to me like some notes, not even a draft for an announcement and still had some questions in it) and a pointer to last years announcement 'for the usual blub' IIRC. As I was at work I didn't had much time to actually do something, so I do, what I usually do, when I'm not aware that something is urgent: I ask to contact the publicity team via the list or the irc channel. So I was quite suprised, when I looked at my mails this midday, and found, that the announcement (which IMHO still needed some improvements) has already been sent out. Without any coordination with us. I hope you understand, that it is quite frustrating for me to see press related work fail year after year. I have no idea, why cooperation between your team and us seems to be impossible... So, if anyone reading this has an idea, what's going on or how to improve things, feel free to speak up, I'm willing to listen. But by now I've lost all energy and interst in trying to try to improve things. Best Regards, Alexander _______________________________________________ Debconf-team mailing list [email protected] http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
