Today we had a pretty good meeting that covered a wide array of topics relating to our effectiveness and readiness for marketing the 11.4 release as well as what we can do better in the future.
The overall sense was that we need to improve our organizational abilities and identify tools that can help us deliver our tasks in a more timely manner. This doesn't mean we thought our release went badly. Rather we did great! But as is always the norm, there's always room for improvement. You can see the full text of our discussions at: http://community.opensuse.org/meetings/opensuse-marketing/2011/opensuse-marketing.2011-03-14-16.02.log.html Below I will attempt to summarize our meeting so we can continue this important dialogue here on the mailing list. I encourage all of you to speak up about your opinions as your opinion does matter and we want to see even greater success in the next cycle. I also want to emphasize that just because this is called a "post-mortem" doesn't mean that we are done with our 11.4 work. No. Our 11.4 work continues on until November when our next release (11.5 or 12.0?) comes out. This is a sprint, not a marathon. Summary-- Ambassadors: This probably was the most part of our discussion. The biggest concern we have is how to cross language barriers. When many of our ambassadors don't speak English, what should we do? Jos Poortvliet proposes that each region have their own mailing list (e.g. opensuse [email protected]) and at least one representative of that group be required to be on the main ambassador mailing list. All in all, it was raised, as has been a couple of times lately, that a fresh look at how we organize the ambassadorship should come very soon and we'd like to see an Ambassador organization meeting in the near future. We want more ambassadors to generate launch parties and we want to ensure that Tools: Tony Su felt that with a clearer set of tools to drive our tasks, we'll be more organized and able to manage our tasks more easily. We discussed some of the existing tools like Connect and Retro, but Tony has taken on the action item to review other tools. We're wary not to overload ourselves with tools that we become too fragmented, but finding a good integrated way of making our tasks more manageable is clearly needed. News: We agreed that this topic is quite broad and the news team needs to come together for its own meeting to review its processes and see where things are at today. We also need to increase our pool of writers and get more stories out there. Having a plethora of writers will make it easier to get more stories out there and keep the noise level high throughout the year, not just at release time. News team is doing a great job so far, but we need more. Who on the news team wants to take the action item to do this process review? Social Networking: Chuck Payne has agreed to develop a long-term strategy for our social networking efforts and is welcoming comments on ideas how to improve. We were happy with our presence on Facebook, but we want to see more on Twitter, Identi.ca, Reddit and Digg. Scheduling: A clearer schedule for mapping out our steps pre- and post- release is important. As we got down to the wire, several people became overloaded and there was clearly a lack of sleep amongst many of us due to trying to finish things such as the Product Highlights. We proposed to begin working on the Product Highlights around the time that Milestone 5 is released. AJ has updated the Launch Checklist and we'll continue to finetune it over the next few weeks with comments from all of you. As Tyler pointed out, he simply showed up in the marketing channel and accepted tasks as he saw them fly by. Good, but would be easier if we had a clear definition to point to that would make it easier for him and others to grab tasks earlier. We failed to do proper announcing of release candidates and we need to do *more* to attract testers so that we can identify more of the bugs and verify the claims we put in our product highlights. AJ also brought up that the next three months we should focus more on attracting bugfixers. How should we approach this effectively? We also believe that with a product highlights page developed much earlier, it will become easier to spin off to other things like presentation development, articles, etc. We now view the Product Highlights as the information center from which we build many of our campaign materials. Jos will set up guidelines for making an awesome product highlights structure that we can reference in the future. Consolidation: Too many channels and mailing lists are making it more difficult to keep track of the noise. We have Ambassadors, Artwork, Marketing, and Multimedia mailing lists. There was no opposition to combining the artwork, multimedia and marketing lists, but more discussion needs to be made about the ambassador list. Bryen will send out a separate email to each of the lists to get opinions about consolidation. Ultimate review: We had great successes, but each segment of our marketing efforts could stand to use a little direct review to boost the organization and tools and communication methods. Bryen M Yunashko openSUSE Marketing Team -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
