-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Sorry, I sent this from the wrong address.
- -------- Original Message -------- Subject: FCN submission - your reaction, please Date: Sat, 07 Jun 2008 21:49:18 -0500 From: John Botscharow <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: ubuntu-marketing <[email protected]> What follows is an article - rough draft which I just wrote as a possible submission to FCM as a "My Opinion" piece. Since it was inspired by the marketing team meeting earlier this evening my time), I'd appreciate your opinion and comments before I submit it. Excuse any typos as I have not yet proofed it. My eyes are too tired. Time for my drops and an hour or two in a dark room. I'll cgeck back later to see if anyone comments and to see what else is going on here. - -- Peace! John - ----- ARTICLE TEXT ------- I am writing this post because of my experiences today at my first meeting of the Ubuntu marketing team using IRC chat. One of the topics near the end of the meeting was a brief discussion of various communication technologies the team currently uses, the same technologies used by the rest of the Ubuntu community and its various sub-communities. I want to address the issue of communication from the perspective of someone who is new to Ubuntu and Linux, but not to open source software, which U have been using for almost 20 yearsm first Mozilla and then OpenOffice as well as others. I am also going to address this issue from the perspective of someone who is not a developer, just a "nornal" computer user - like the vast majority of people who use Windows. I also want to address this issue from the perspective of someone who has a visual disability and who wants to be an active member of the Ubuntu community, and especially the marketing team. Up until a couple of years ago, I was an online marketing consultant and writer, something I did for about fifteen years, so I think I speak with a certain amount of expertise and experience. I am also a writerm abd have been one online for almost twenty years, first writing marketing articles and more recently articles on religion and politics. I also have avery strong academic background in the social sciences, which gives me a certain level of credibility when talking about group dynamics and scoial behavior. My comments about communications within the Ubuntu community need to be understood against the background of fixing Bug #1, in other words, taking away some of Microsoft's overwhelming share of the operating system market. I joined the marketing team bvecause I an committed to doing that. To give my commitment to that bug fix some credibility, even though I have only been a member of the Ubuntu community for a little over a month, and a member of the marketing team for almost exactly a month, I have become an Ubuntero. Now, it seems to me that Ubuntu, like the other Linux communities that I have had some experience with, is comprised in a very large part of software developers of varying degrees of experience and expertise. And the primary focus of the community is in improving the product - the Ubuntu operating system. That is probably the way it should be, to a certain extent. But, no matter how good a product is, and I personally believe that Ubuntu is far superior to anything Microsoft has ever turned out, if people are intimidated by the community of users, then the average person will NOT be receptive to that product. And, to be honest with you, I have found my first month of being a member of this community very intimidating and very frustrating. To actively participate in this community, I have had to join a number of mailing lists. As someone who used Windows for 20 years and all the issues that come with using email on Windows machines, I learned to be very gun-shy about email, even with PGP signatures, although that does help. I stopped publishing my newsletter using email five years ago and switched to RSS. And I set up a number of forums for people to discuss issues within my site communities. Those are STILL the technologies I use today on my site and I love them. The people in the Windows universe who will be most receptive to switching to Ubuntu will be people like me - those who hate and fear the security vulnerabilties of Windows. But then they come here and discover that the things they learned to be most wary of, like email, are the most widely used technologies here. Arguing that this is what is and what has been and what everybody else in the community uses will not reassure them. My email has increased, quite literally, a thousand fold. Although I know at an intellectual level that there is no reason for fear, at a visceral level, I am still quite concerned. Then there is the IRC chat. I have never been a big one for text chats. And, given my vision problems, it is very hard, as I discovered at the meeting today, a fast-paced chat session is almost impossible for me to follow. Hopefully, with some experience, I will get better, but there will always be a bit of a handicap there for me. And, if my eyesight gets worse, am I to be excluded from serious active participation in the community because of my handicap? I certainly hope not. Finally, there is the wiki. I LOVE the concept, but using a wiki, for me and for many non-technical users, means learning a whole new set of codes. There is some help available for editing a wiki, but it is, for a novice, not as clear and user-friendly as it could be. If there are other resources like tutorials, I have not been able to find them. Sometimes it seems that ubuntu.com is not one web site but a whole set of them with little integration between them. That can be very daunting for someone new. Whether this community is willing to accept it or not, there will be no even partial fix of Bug #1 until this community, and especially its marketing efforts. look outside of the community or even outside of the Linux community. We need to look to the people who use Windows and everything we do must be focused on making them understand the superiority of Ubuntu and to make this community a place where they will feel welcome and comfortable. Switching to Ubuntu from Windows requires a lot of adjustments, not only technical, but in how one sees things. It should be our responsibility as a community to help ease that adnustment as much as possible. Microsoft does not have a user community and that is one of the real plusses of Ubuntu, but only if new users from the world of Windows feel comfortable here, If they don't. more than likely they will return to the more familiar world of Microsoft. Finally, I want to address a "philosophical" issue that was raised at the marketing team meeting. Should the marketing team focus its efforts on inside the Ubuntu community or ourside? In thinking about it after the meeting, it struck me that this is a non-issue. Even if we focus our efforts on helping the LoCos or other parts of the Ubuntu community by providing resources for their marketing efforts, our ultimate focus has to be outside the community. We are trying to convert people from Windows to Ubuntu, not from the default desktop to Xubuntu or Kubuntu or even from RedHat to Ubuntu. Our primary focus should always be on the Windows user and on showing them the benefits of both the product and the community. That is my opinion. - -- Peace! John -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFIS0kg3oYFui6B2koRAgANAJ9m7YMpNR7Cq9oaxYd4f2ZbZm5h4gCg8WYH yZdFlbPwMoMzg+Lgfwa7XBc= =J8a5 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- ubuntu-marketing mailing list [email protected] Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-marketing
