Re: How do we want to do GNOME Marketing?

[Dave Neary <dneary free fr>]

Hi Thilo,

Thilo Pfennig wrote:
> I have scanned our mailing list archive and found out that WGO revamp
> had taken much of our energy, while discussion about how we should do
> marketing were rare.

I have had many thoughts on this, and the BOF from GUADEC had a
reasonable list of actions associated with it - those concrete actions
concentrate on what I think is the key to our success - federating
ground-roots support around GNOME - as I have said in the past,
"converting GNOME users into advocates, converting local free software
developers into GNOME developers, and  converting local hobbyists into
free software and GNOME users."

> We can state: We need lobbying

Not really, I wouldn't agree with that.

Well... what we need is to empower our community members to lobby (and
provide infrastructure that allows them to collaborate).

> I think that we do should not plan actual deployments, because this is
> the job of distributors and ISVs. It is nice to have the data that is
> collected at http://live.gnome.org/MarketingTeam/GnomeDeployments for
> ourselves - as motivation and also as an argument and BestPractice.
> But I think we should rather learn from the deployments and work on
> feedback also for the usability team (
> http://live.gnome.org/UsabilityTeam)

I've talked a lot about setting up a feedback loop - unfortunately
because of life, all I have done is talk.

There is a continuing opportunity for someone (or some group of people)
to get in contact with module maintainers, talk to them one-to-one, and
see how we can/should interract with the development process. The
marketing team can be a federator in getting a roadmap together,
providing feedback from users, and combining that with the good sense of
developers to set small-scale priorities, and also identify larger
trends in requests and theme releases around those trends.

> My understanding of marketing for GNOME would be to develop strategies
> and to help in communication between different parties like usabilty
> people, developers, freedesktop.org, KDE people, distributors, ISVs,
> companies, governments or simple users.

Absolutely. We've been at this stage for several months. I have a file
listing the names of most of the module maintainers in GNOME CVS, and
when I realised that I would be dropping that ball, I asked who wanted
it - one person asked, and then promptly got a new job & moved to
Finland - you can't get good help these days ;-)

It's good that you're bringing this up again, it increases the odds of
getting something done about it this time (reminder: release in 3
months, it's time to start collecting material about the 2.18 release).
But please don't make it sound like we have not talked aout this, or
come up with plans for this, before. This is at least the third time
that the role of the marketing team cas come up - we agree on what the
role is, we now need to get moving (slowly) towards fulfilling that role.

> The marketing team should define an overall goal for GNOME. We should
> not just invent slogans. We also should not try to "sell" GNOME. I
> think that we do not want that because than we would want people to
> use GNOME instead of KDE or other desktops. But that would not benefit
> but harm us!

Here we disagree - the marketing team does not define the goals, it
identifies and communicates them. We should be herding aligned efforts,
and making people realise that they are aligned.

Example: module maintainer 1 is working on abstracting away some aspect
(functionality X) of his module behind a library. The functionality he's
abstracting away could be useful for module maintainer 2, who has a
long-standing feature request to include functionality X. So one module
maintainer's "tidy up code" becomes another maintainer's "Add
functionality X".

Or, in discussing plans with 4 or 5 maintainers, you realise that
everyone really wants to implement Jono Bacon's project spaces idea -
and you get David Trowbridge together with Elijah Newren and a couple of
key application writers (say, gaim, epiphany, nautilus) to
cross-polinate tagging and workspaces, and have a couple of apps support
it, and wahay! Major new feature thanks to your insight and effort in
putting the right people together.

It's the difference between "I'm telling you what you're going to work
on for the next 6 months" and "Just last week I was talking to X about
$COOL_IDEA - you guys should talk and see if you can't work on that
together.

> Is GNOMEs goal to be the leading desktop? The best usable desktop?

GNOME is currently at least 3 things - each vitally important, a
separate entity, and with its own momentum:

1. A development platform - see Maemo, Sugar, VMWare, Acrobat Reader,
the GIMP, Abiword, ... as examples of excellent platforms or
applications which are built on top of the GNOME platform.

2. A graphical computing environment - which is heavily modified (with
the addition/removal of third party applications, patches and theming)
by our distributors

3. A community - the GNOME Foundation, GNOME User Groups, IRC channels,
mailing lists.

The thing these 3 elements have in common is an adhesion to a core
principle - what Jeff calls Software Freedom, I call Free Software,
Bruce Perens and others call Open Source. The idea that our work is
benefiting people outside our community, and that we should allow those
people to build on it.

In the broadest sense, I think that our best opportunities lie in
thinking outside the box wrt our graphical computing environment. Think
about smaller memory footprints, smaller screens, mobile devices,
limited connectivity... and also on realising that we have an excellent
platform for people to take and make custom graphical computing
environments. Maemo is a start. Wht we should be doing is helping people
(like OLPC) who are focussing on very tight use-cases to get the most
out of the GNOME platform.

So will the GNOME developers be working on GNOME Kiosk, or GNOME Mobile,
or GNOME Media Center, or GNOME Dashboard anytime soon? No, but we can
certainly work with kiosk makers, mobile device makers, media
center/settop box makers and car manufacturers to make sure that their
needs are considered in our platform, and enable as much of that
non-standard development to take place as possible - and have it
identified as GNOME.

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary
dneary free fr