Re: Marketing Mission, Team Members & Wiki Cleanup

[Dave Neary <dneary gnome org>]

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