Re: Campaign Proposal

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Tue, 2010-02-16 at 21:27 +0000, Nelson Marques wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> In attachment there is a proposal for a new campaign and it's goals. To
> unravel this a bit, it aims to position GNOME brand as an ecological
> supporting brand alongside with some things we can do to promote this.
>
> Another aspect interesting is that through this campaign we are also
> trying to mobilize new artists to cooperate with GNOME Project.
>
> There are other concerns, and this campaign was designed to be a generic
> campaign that would allow other campaigns to brew from this one, mainly
> to support GNOME through art.
>
> I am proposing with this campaign the following:
>
> 1. Give names to GNOME Releases based on endangered species which share
> strong points with the main features of GNOME. This is appealing to
> users and at some point allows the usage of a more catchy name for every
> release, thus we promote a social responsible cause and broaden our
> contributors to a new standard, including organizations which promote
> several endangered species through the donation of art and media such as
> high resolution pictures, movies, etc.
> This is also a great opportunity to advocate the usage of Free
> Standards.

I like this idea a lot.  We stopped doing release names a few
years ago, largely because of the controversy over naming one
of our releases "Temujin".  Some people decided that choosing
non-controversial release names was near impossible, so we just
stopped doing release names altogether.

This proposal would involve us making a value statement, and
that could cause some controversy.  I'm not saying not to do
it.  It's just something that people should be aware of if they
try to push this through.  There could be pushback, and there's
some history.

If I could make a request, could we not start with the Iberian
Lynx?  Apple is well-known for naming their releases after cats,
and I fear if we started with a cat, the "endangered species"
theme would get lost, and people would just think we're copying
Apple.  After we've established the theme, by all means bring
out the cats.  I love cats.

--
Shaun