Re: Signing off our target audience (was Re: Example of targetted release notes)

["Thilo Pfennig" <thilopfennig foresightlinux org>]

On 3/21/07, Claus Schwarm <c schwarm gmx net> wrote:

While your answers were quite detailed, it doesn't change the
basic problem of your so-called target groups: Its definition is still
too broad.

I think maybe our problem is not that the target groups are too broad but that our "we" is too broad? I mean GNOME is not a huge organisation but action is on many levels in all countries and on so many levels. Reducing it all to the size that "we" understand may be  a bad move.

So I like to suggest that "we" talk about who "we" are. or what the "we's" are - or better what are the groups involved - and who talks to who? Yeah, that makes things complicated and in the end I think the only thing that makes sense is to reduce the talk to some groups. But those are not only potential or real users.

Wha I personally would find interesting to look on who does NOT talk to who. Maybe this is also a Foundation board task - but to market GNOME we can not only talk about the software we have but should also work in internal communication. Or where  doescommunication has its deficits? And maybe make a list of points and criticism where the "machine" is not running good.

We have the general goal to increase the user base of GNOME. Getting
more distributions to use GNOME by default increases our user base. So
one is a direct conclusion from the other.

There could be other goals, related goals including:

 * Making the available GNOME app the default one (Firefox vs Epiphany and Abiword vs. OpenOffice.org ). We at Foresight have chosen Epiphany now as the default and think about Abiword as a next possible step (But we are not their yet, because this is much more complicated and some users forced to do the opposit some releases ago) - But we should look into this: Browsers and word processors are very visible and important apps. If distributions "just" ship GNOME but then rather "hide" the GNOME apps this should not be considers five stars for accomplished task.
* Making the GNOME apps better! We know about GNOME Office. I would consider this as the most important project, because thats what we want to give ISVs - That's what they should work with. Abiword and Gnumeric are better than OOo and Koffice in many fields but also  miss some features - also we not yet have a sufficient presentation making tool
* Talk louder & Fix Marketing Bugs! If you look  at http://www.gnome.org/gnome-office/ we tell people how exciting GNOME Office was back in 2004. This should never happen with our core. ( Bug
 http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=422337) I think GNOME office is a very good idea, because we can market GNOME and a bunch of apps. If we would have a consisten communications and good information about every GNOME project we would have A LOT. I think we can hardly reach this goal - and so we could be busy in doing only this.

"Somebody should write some sort of article for some magazine!" just
means nobody will do anything, IMHO.

Yes. True. But as GNOME is no company noone can tell anybody to do something specific.

I think the best we can do is

a) Discuss what to do best
b) Define some targets
c) Encourage people to join. That also means that volunteers find their contact person or get answers quickly. I personally experienced very often no answers at all or it took months. If people like to help I think its best to point them to a group and let them get to know each other (via IRC or Jabber mostly)
 

So back to your segmentation Claus I would like to propose that we first define fields of activity. This is just a random list that comes to my mind:

* GNOME Office - define applications like Abiword, Gnumeric, Gnome-DB, Mergeant, but maybe also Evolution, Evince and Glom? Word Processing, Calendaring, Presentations.
* GNOME Desktop - Nautilus, etc. - Usability Team
* GNOME Hardware Interfaces - vial hal/dbus - GNOME Printing, Scanning, Digital Camera including Camera software like Gthumb, F-Spot
* GNOME System Tools.

* GNOME Graphics - Inkscape, GIMP, EOG,....
* GNOME Multimedia (Sound & Video) - Totem, Rhythmbox, Gstreamer, Jokosher - Record, Play, Mix, Publish
* GNOME Fun - gaming and more.
* GNOME Science - Scientific applications (ike gchemtable, gchem3d,...)
* GNOME Financial - Gnucash etc. 
* GNOME Networking - GAIM, Jabber, networking protocols
* maybe more

Ideally we would have a team for all this. I also could imagine that we have

* Teams - these are long term groups of developers and users that work together
* Projects - This can be everything - An official GNOME application but also something like "10x10" - a projectt can be owned by a team or  it can be a project owned by more than oine team - and also could be a project owned by a KDE team and a GNOME team. So these are like bigger mid term goals.
* Issues - these are what we currently find in Bugzilla and the closed Request Tracker. And also some are in the LGO wiki. These are things to solve or to accomplish. Currently the marketing team has no issue tracker. I also dont have any idea how press requests are answered (but I should know as part of a marketing team). I think many teams could use the LGO wiki as an issue tracker like its done in MoinMoin: 
http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/FeatureRequests. I had also done some example pages in Moin with the template mechanism. I think without some kind of issue tracking we will not be able to work on some subjects.

Sorry if this is all too random?

Thilo

-- 
Thilo Pfennig
http://wiki.foresightlinux.com/confluence/display/~vinci/