Long email, sorry. This thread hits a topic that got me thinking a lot in the last weeks. First of all, thank you specially to Claus, Vincent, Panos and Alex Smith. Thanks to them we had 2.16 release notes on time.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/index.html
Right, let's start doing things right for the 2.18 release. You like that Apple example. Ok. Let's analyze not that page but what is behind that page: - A clear marketing strategy integrated with the technical strategy and of course the business strategy, since the first day. Apple knows which audiences they target and these three strategies are targeting the same audiences. - A marketing planning and production that starts, evolves and is completed almost during the same timeline as the technical development process, with a regular communication between both processes. - A good chunk of resources invested in marketing & design, not only in the web pages and the ad campaigns, also in technical parts of the development. Instead, we have at least these weaknesses: - No clear audiences to target with a release, nor with the release notes. Is the home user a target of our release notes or not? Is the press a target or not? Are we targeting the distro managers or not? And so on. - No marketing strategy for the releases in the context of no clear marketing strategy for GNOME either. The release cycle has no marketing intervention, only at the end we come and try to find what is most remarkable and how to sell it. We do this alone, only few developers provide feedback on time because we are overwhelmed finishing their stuff. And we do this without a clear GNOME marketing strategy, a roadmap or any solid guideline, all is personal choice with high levels of time pressure and improvisation. - 1-2 weeks to market what it took 6 months to develop. In terms of human resources, 10 volunteers at most take part in the marketing part in spare hours, while the development is held by dozens of teams summing up more than... 100? 200? developers, many of them working professionally full time. Looking at this it would be almost a miracle that we could produce release notes as good as the release itself. What we can do in the 2.18 release cycle in order to improve considerably the release notes (and, what is most important, probably the release process and the released software): - Integrate marketing and ""business"" visions with the technical vision that is guiding the 2.18 release. Since day zero. - Marketing vision means that someone in the release team is thinking how are we going to sell 2.18, which are the core points, achievements, novelties, and how this release fits in the GNOME roadmap (we need one). - Business vision. GNOME si not doing business as Apple does, but we need to be a sustainable community and each release needs to enforce and consolidate the GNOME project if we want to achieve our long term goals. Our sustainability depends on the sustainability of our stakeholders: individual contributors/volunteers, project teams, ISDs, deployers, distros, advisory board companies, the Foundation itself... Someone needs to think what these bodies need and how the next release is going to help them, be useful to them. - Planning and production of the ""release notes"" following the release cycle. We start deciding who are our audiences, what we want to give them, how we present the information to them. We don't need to wait a feature freeze to go ahead with this. This work would be coordinated with the production of the new ""About GNOME"" section, the GNOME Products tool, the Press kit and any other element in the neighborhood of the ""release notes"" (that perhaps would need a new name). This is a wgo 2.18 goal, and it requires the same level of planning and commitment (or more) as other goals we are facing in the current release cycle. -- Quim Gil /// http://desdeamericaconamor.org | http://guadec.org
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