Re: Marketing Mission, Team Members & Wiki Cleanup



Hi,

Stormy Peters wrote:
           *
             *Research <http://live.gnome.org/GnomeMarketing/Research>* -

             Collaboration with universities and private R&D programs.


    This is very much aspirational right now - it's one of those things
    we'd like to see done, if you know what I mean. When we have one
    final year student doing a project, or one masters/PhD student
    thesis to put up here, I'll be a happy man. Right now, ...


Hmm. Lots of university folks have studied or are studying GNOME. (Although they don't like the fact that we have lots of subrepositories.) I'll post a link to a GIMP study I have and I know there's more.

Yes, indeed "GNOME as anthropomorphic oddity" is alive and well. When I think of R&D though I think of working with universities to make the software better by integrating cutting-edge features and technology, or recruiting new developers through college projects (and growing the pool of qualified GNOME hackers at the same time for our ad board members), rather than the sociology projects that we've seen a lot of.

InGimp is an interesting experiment - they created a retooled version of the GIMP and got lots & lots of data from how people used the GIMP - they stored the various actions people used, and sent them to a central location for analysis. This kind of "phone home" usability analysis is morally a grey area, though - and whjile it makes a nice research project is probably not generalisable to millions of users. (as a data point, Microsoft did a similar thing in their requirements analysis phase for Office 2007: http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2008/03/12/the-story-of-the-ribbon.aspx)

Maybe if we can get it going centrally and in one or two locations, then we can have "case studies" to highlight in blogs and GNOME Journal for others who want to replicate it in their area.

Yes - I agree, encourage local action, and then centralise & publicise reports of this more widely to ensure people feel empowered to do similar things.

The issue is typically that we're pushing the responsibility of centralising the information to people who are already doing the local work. Take for example GNOME's presence at Solutions Linux in France - we had a stand, well manned, and got some good feedback - to get the word out would require someone already putting a lot of time into organising and manning the stand to write a report/article on it too.

If we can lighten the load for publicising local activities, that would be great.

Cheers,
Dave.

--
Dave Neary
GNOME Foundation member
dneary gnome org



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