(this message is for the kde-ev-marketing mailing list members, and is CC'ed to the release-team and kde-promo mailing list for information purposes only)
So guys, I figured I'd keep those of you not directly involved in planning the release event know a little of what's going on. this is the current situation, although I'm thinking we might want to change tracks on this a little. Wade and I have reserved the email address [EMAIL PROTECTED] for invitation responses. Right now emails to that address are going directly to Wade and Myself - but there's no traffic there yet as we haven't sent out the invitations... We do have the invitation text prepared already, and have a fairly extensive list of people we would like to be there. This list includes just about anyone remotely involved with KDE that lives in North America (and south america too, if they want to come), the promo people from the major KDE projects (like KOffice, for example), the e.V. board, distro and industry partners, Trolltech people, press, and a few others that we feel would benefit from this event. However, we have 200 rooms available and we don't have 200 people on our list (nor would we expect 100% of those invited to attend). Our plan is to send the official invites to those on the list as of October the 1st, giving them a few weeks to RSVP, after which we'll open up the invitation to 'anyone else that wants to come' on a first-come, first-served basis. We will have BoF's and micro-talks at this event, so we hope to get a lot of people coming in to talk about their projects, so it's not going to be just a party and keynote. We still have no budget from the KDE e.V., so we have no idea about travel considerations. Nor do we have any official sponsors for this event other than Google (sponsoring the hotels and catering, which is worth a lot of money when you think about it). I don't know if there was ever a conscious decision not to pursue other sponsors, but that is our current situation. [beat] Okay, so that's what we're working with so far. When at Akademy, Aaron was talking about his vision for this event - the whole 'wow factor', and giving them an apple style keynote where people are actually excited about 4.0. That vision is nice, except that our release will not be that good in spite of everyone's best efforts. Right now, from my experience with trying to use KDE 4 on a day-to-day basis, we are looking at a serious lack of 'wow factor' and while I anticipate some improvement between now and december, we're not going to have people convinced. I've been thinking that we need to adopt a new press strategy altogether. We cannot market KDE 4.0 to the users if their distros are not willing to ship it, and with the state of KDE in 4.0, they probably will not be using it. We ought to be pimping Sebas' Development Platform to the distros, to ensure that it gets included in distros being released in the next 6 months. At the same time, we really should be playing down 4.0 as a sort of early KDE 4, and treat it almost like a beta, after all, plasma will still be having 'monthly' releases in the post-4.0 world, just like a beta would. I'd even go as far as to cancel the 4.0 release party and just turn it into a KDE developers meeting to help get the polish on 4.0.x if it meant we didn't get negative backlash about 4.0 which will do more damage to KDE than I'd like to deal with. Call it a micro-akademy, with a few talks and some hacking and planning sessions. *shrug* Anyway, we need to talk about expectations for this release - we should arrange a time for a meeting in #kde-promo or something... Cheers for now folks -- Troy Unrau Geophysics Student - University of Manitoba KDE Gearhead _______________________________________________ release-team mailing list [email protected] https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/release-team
