Contractor status update: last week & next steps

[Sumana Harihareswara <sumanah panix com>]

My last email, on April 1st, mentioned that "my main TODOs today, this 
weekend, and early next week are to follow up on press contacts, the 
eReleases blast, and GNOME Journal."  So I did that; that day, I got the 
eReleases press release out [ 
http://www.ereleases.com/pr/gnome-30-users-developers-49501 ], and it 
went to more than a thousand publications.  And then here's a list of 
what I did last week:

* Corralled answers for journalists.  A few journalists asked me 
followup questions after the press release [ 
http://www.gnome.org/press/2011/04/gnome-3-0-released-better-for-users-developers-3/ 
], so I got answers from other GNOME people, wrote answers, replied to 
the reporters via email and phone, and put these answers on the wiki: 
http://live.gnome.org/GnomeMarketing/TalkingPoints#Approaches_That_Work .

* Managed the GNOME Journal launch.  Nagged the last few authors, edited 
articles for content and style, uploaded them, fought with Textpattern, 
continued planning to move us to WordPress, and sent out the publication 
announcement.  I'd still love for people to continue publicizing this, 
since there are many interesting nuggets that I haven't seen picked up 
by the larger press.

* (Started planning the next two issues of GNOME Journal, including 
hopes for a 3.x roadmap article in case anyone wants to write it.)

* Did a teensy bit of web testing and feedback regarding gnome3.org.  
Great job!

* Went to the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit.  There, I talked up 
GNOME 3 to reporters and other interested Linux folks, and made contact 
with some KDE people and started talking about publicity for the 
upcoming desktop summit [ http://www.desktopsummit.org/ ].  It sounds 
like we should be working to drum up attendance now, by planning special 
events, trumpeting rare speakers, and publicizing the unique benefits of 
attending GUADEC & the Desktop Summit.

* Attended the marketing/PR training at the Linux Foundation 
Collaboration Summit [ 
http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/collaboration-summit/press-training 
].  I sure did learn a lot, from strategies for resource-constrained 
projects (build relationships with five key reporters) to tips for being 
interviewed.  I will link to Cloer's slides and add my notes when she 
puts them up.


Undone:  I didn't put tasks in Bugzilla because they were moving too 
fast and I was in San Francisco, many timezones away from Allan in 
Bangalore, and couldn't coordinate effectively.  Lesson for next time: 
do it early if we're going to do it at all.  Similarly for setting up 
interviews with key GNOME developers; I dropped the ball there.

Now that we've launched, I talked with Allan about how to best use the 
rest of our contracts (we're booked to work on GNOME till the end of 
April).  We think our priorities for the rest of April are:

(a) reach out to not-so-news-driven (more in-depth-reporting) 
journalists about aspects of the release that didn't get covered on 
launch day -- once we get some bites, prep developers who have 
volunteered, and get them interviewed

(b) write up lessons learned & ideas for next time

(c) infrastructure building & maintenance: update the wiki, consolidate 
audiovisual and textual resources, and otherwise help prep for future 
marketing, including press releases, talking points, etc. for the 
launches of GNOME 3 within distributions that will come out in the next 
weeks & months

So I'm going to make some progress on each of those this week.  
Specifically, I aim to reach out to two reporters, braindump a few 
lessons learned privately, and confer with Allan and Vincent about 
resource consolidation.  And I'm planning on pushing GNOME Journal's 
next issue forward, in collaboration with Paul Cutler, but that's not 
part of my contract since it's not GNOME 3-specific.  :-)

Best,
Sumana