Re: Proposal for GNOME press release about Nokia device

[Claus Schwarm <c schwarm gmx net>]

Hi,

I know my critical note sucks. I'm sorry about that. Christian's
initiative was absolutly amazing. However, dealing with the press can be
tricky. I just wanted to point out that it might backfire.

This is not just imagination: one of the links, Tim Ney provided for
german readers a few days ago was already making a small critical joke
about GUADEC's press release, see the heise.de link.

Maybe, the best way to proceed is to prepare a press release about the
end of GUADEC, for the following reasons:

 * probably a lot of people can't follow technical discussions, or have
no time to do so, but are affected by decisions made at GUADEC. It has
news value.

 * don't know how many journalists are there right now, but they
probably can't follow every track, and they don't take part in the
closed discussions - a press release is thus useful to have for
journalists.

 * people from the marketing list, or others interested who are there
can take notes right now, and write it together!

Relevant is everything interesting around the event:

 * How many people attended officially? More than last year?
 * Have there been problems with the organization, or not? Any organizer
   that is willing to comment on possible improvements for the future?
 * Which talks attracted the largest audience? What was exciting from a
   user's point of view? What from a developer's point of view?
 * What was the main topic 'on the street' (ie in private discussions
   among developers)?
 * What decisions have been made?
 * What future directions were announce? For example, when can
   people expect GNOME 3.0?

With the straight facts written down in plain newspaper style Englisch,
(and jugdements covered in quotes of people which makes it facts,
again), the press release is nearly complete.

Don't forget to add that lots of talk was heard about Nokia's
engagement (if so, of course), and that developers already started
hacking on a few idea's or so, and that the usage of GNOME's
technologies together with the Open Source policy of Nokia secures the
viability of the platform, etc, etc.

Just add a nice header:

GNOME's developer conference finished (with new ideas for the Free
Software desktop)

and you're basically done, including a note about Nokia! Much better way
to tell everybody that we're great, IMHO.

Of course, that's just a suggestion. I'm sorry I can't be there to help.

Cheers, 
Claus



On Sun, 29 May 2005 12:47:54 +0100
Simos Xenitellis <simos74 gmx net> wrote:

> Three days later...
>
> Criticism is good, however sometimes it simply blocks attempts to do
> work. Sri, you are a  few days overdue. ;-)
>
> Simos