-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Matthew Revell wrote: > > Hi Paul, > > > > On 28/07/06, Paul O'Malley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > >> >> So to hammer my point with a very big blunt hammer ask yourself this >> >> is the mission to: >> >> a) Create confusion in the minds of your victims. >> >> b) Create clarity in the minds of your readers. > > > > Can you give examples of these? I'm finding it difficult to see your > > point. > > Hi Matthew,
To give you one from the mailing list today: Ubuntu Abantu, which while I like the words in an individual fashion Ubuntu is a philosophy, a style of behaviour towards other humans. News / Talk in any language would be a better idea. Why? It translates easy. It does not confuse the issue. Why am I doing such a rant? We already have a brand name. We already have a simple and well functioning set of images. What we need is to keep it functional, and keeping clarity in what we communicate. We should be simple in our communication, keep it easy to access. If you have to explain how clever a name is, then I fear the game is lost before it is started. News is actually a great word, my understanding is that it comes from the following. North East West South :-) There are people who you will have problems saying Ubuntu to, or Linux for that matter. Introducing more words into the conversation detracts from the value of a simple conversation. The simplicity of Ubuntu as a community where people develop this software and respect each others values is mind blowing. The simplicity of Ubuntu and its variants logos says everything. There is no need to "put a wrapper on this" like it was some packet in an ssh session. What is eating me alive is that there is there seems the a huge amount of new ideas on this list. However there seems to be no "end game" in sight. There is this thing that reminds me of the question I used to ask in the early days of the www, where is the value? Marketing has a job that I really do not see being addressed. It has been alluded to several times, but it seems to be missed. However I do not see clearly how it will be achieved with the current objectives and tools. So excuse me if I twist my own mail back on itself and muddy the waters. The task is simple, to help people use free software though helping in a community style. To do this the thing that seems to be missing from where I stand is a single API that allows people plug their values into the "UBUNTU SYSTEM" and then they get back a simple, you may be interested in these teams, thus growing the organisation organically. Ubuntu without the marketing team has some interesting statistics to its credit. The pre ordered numbers of CDs before breezy badger was a seven figure number and the first digit was not 1. A wiki that in about two years has grown to 12300 web pages. That does not include, www.ubuntu.com, or help.ubuntu.com. or art.ubuntu.com, and that is before someone mentions the forums, or the other ubuntu support pages or blogs, counters or anything else for that matter. What about localisation, last time I looked it was 95 languages. Now we have x86, PPC, AMD64, and Sparc as supported software platforms. We have - End of list (100/372 matches shown) --for /list *ubuntu* now I know that they are all not official but this is just to show the size of the project. We know that people often come into the wrong channel / mailing list and then leave, or get redirected to the right place. That is good. However we also know that people are working on specs of what the future of Ubuntu might look like, we also know that people are looking at how things are done at a marketing level. It should make it easy for a user to inform themselves how to get information on their current task in hand. It should make it easy for a user to inform themselves how they could contribute. It should make it easy for the community to see what people think works for them. This is one place where launchpad is a huge jump forward from bugzilla. What we also know from sales 101 is that people have four drivers. Greed, what is in it for me. Fear, what happens if I don't do something. Sense of duty. Pleasure/Comfort factor, how nice something is to be along side. (The manual calls it sexy but perhaps that is not as accurate a meaning as the one I have used.) We need to move people by appealing to which ever one people are inspired by. We need to allow them find the shortest path to the place where they can gain that access, with minimal effort. Maybe I am missing something. I see a huge amount of positive energy and work here, however like some of the other old timers what I will call "old timers" I see some of it misspent, given that I have over 10 years of saying there is another way to compute, and I have not always the most eloquent when delivering this message. (Ok, my hands are up, I was downright crass on some occasions.) OSS does not work like the regular software world. My experience tells me that when people first grok it they say, "How can I contribute?" If a person wants to contribute they should be able to find a way in. What marketing could do is provide that path from pointers informing desktop user help through to how someone can generate a spec, so that anyone can see how to do things. For instance there is (maybe was) a perception that a vote on the forum meant more than that, well it used not, however if marketing went grabbed that detail and converted it into a you know if you put this in through the correct channel "name channel" it would stand a better chance. State in simple, clear terms what the access points to the project are, what skill sets can be used and where. Along side this a very important thing is to also show to people how not to burn out, how not to over commit until it becomes no longer something they enjoy. This is about caring for all the Ubuntu family, while trying not to reinvent the wheel, and even if we do happen reinvent it to do so in such a way that everyone knows where it is. Sorry if it is a bit long but as you might gather at this stage I have strong thoughts about how to promote Ubuntu. However an issue has prevented my participation as fully as I wanted to fully until this end of this week for most of the last month. In case it is not obvious I for one do not see this being addressed, and yes I did say that earlier, maybe I am missing a thread or two. Regards, Paul -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.2.2 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFEylGWoWm0gT2CRXkRAjswAJ4szVkyx/ogHExL0uxYRx9vKyfR7gCdG42i b0k71X3mBtLsgRfGWL68bZ0= =kgzL -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- ubuntu-marketing mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-marketing
