Re: Spreading the press release/release announcement and collecting press coverage

[Claus Schwarm <c schwarm gmx net>]

Hi, 

a few notes:

On Tue, 26 Sep 2006 14:24:03 +0200
Dave Neary <dneary free fr> wrote:

> So yes, I think it is important for people interested in
> promoting GNOME (and particularly release notes writers) be aware of
> it.

There's a difference between being 'aware of it' and following it
closely enought to remember certain posts, you know? ;-)

But it's sort of interesting that you think others are required to
waste their time finding the relevant post among the, well, less
relevent stuff that's posted on pgo.

Can you provide a rationale why do you think the time of developers is
so much more valuable than anybody else's time?


> I don't know what vision you have of the marketing team, but mine
> does not consist of "if you build it, they will come". marketing is a 
> pro-active task - we need to go to people inside GNOME to find out
> what they're working on, and go to people outside GNOME to tell them,
> and get feedback. Then we need to take that feedback, go back to
> people inside GNOME, and see what they think. Rinse, repeat.

I was just talking about efficient organization: to minimize the work
load for everybody, some agreements need to be taken care of. So, if
there's a wiki page to enter stuff by maintainers, it should be used.


> So, do I think that module maintainers will swarm to a wiki page for 
> 2.18 just because I write a blog entry asking them to? Hell, no.

My suggestion has nothing to do with making anybody do anything, but
with *reminding* people that certain stuff needs to be done. And that
they are the ones who can do it most efficiently.

And yes: I hope, some people just need a reminder. Some may need two or
more, but at least blog entries about this will be relevant to GNOME.

> It's our job to get that raw techie information and
> translate/interpret it. Asking for it isn't going to make it happen.
> In fact, this job is the major task that the person who takes on the
> release notes/roadmap will have to handle.

Well, yes and no. Of course, it's true that developers should not
need to write the release notes. On the other hand, it's much work for
an outsider to find out why some changes were made.

Trying to interpret stuff will either lead to errors or it will lead
to more work for everybody: for the writer to ask questions and for the
maintainer to answer them.

Funny enought, the third possibility is to use the usual meaningless 
marketing lingo that some people here don't like.

Also, there's no reason for the responsible people to *not* take a few
more minutes to make some effort on how they describe changes. Of
course, they can continue to mention a keyword and hope the writer
understands it correctly.

On the other hand, lots of open source projects posts lots of changes
all the time. Especially professional writers have the tendency to
ignore descriptions that need additional time to be checked ro
translated. They have their deadlines, too.

So, maybe this is one important difference to the KDE project, and
Firefox, and other projects that get more news coverage? That their
maintainers make more efforts to educate users and journalists about
changes they make?

Well, you may find someone who like to do it the way you described.
Davyd and others made a great job here, and it was convinient to rely
on them for doing the right stuff. But what do you do if you don't find
somebody like that, anymore? Will you do it yourself? The next years?


Cheers,
Claus