Re: Contractor status update: last week & next steps

[Allan Day <allanpday gmail com>]

Hi all,

Sumana Harihareswara wrote: 
> My last email, on April 1st, mentioned that "my main TODOs today, this 
> weekend, and early next week are to follow up on press contacts, the 
> eReleases blast, and GNOME Journal."  So I did that; that day, I got the 
> eReleases press release out [ 
> http://www.ereleases.com/pr/gnome-30-users-developers-49501 ], and it 
> went to more than a thousand publications.  And then here's a list of 
> what I did last week:
>
> * Corralled answers for journalists.  A few journalists asked me 
> followup questions after the press release [ 
> http://www.gnome.org/press/2011/04/gnome-3-0-released-better-for-users-developers-3/ 
> ], so I got answers from other GNOME people, wrote answers, replied to 
> the reporters via email and phone, and put these answers on the wiki: 
> http://live.gnome.org/GnomeMarketing/TalkingPoints#Approaches_That_Work .
>
> * Managed the GNOME Journal launch.  Nagged the last few authors, edited 
> articles for content and style, uploaded them, fought with Textpattern, 
> continued planning to move us to WordPress, and sent out the publication 
> announcement.  I'd still love for people to continue publicizing this, 
> since there are many interesting nuggets that I haven't seen picked up 
> by the larger press.
>
> * (Started planning the next two issues of GNOME Journal, including 
> hopes for a 3.x roadmap article in case anyone wants to write it.)
>
> * Did a teensy bit of web testing and feedback regarding gnome3.org.  
> Great job!
>
> * Went to the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit.  There, I talked up 
> GNOME 3 to reporters and other interested Linux folks, and made contact 
> with some KDE people and started talking about publicity for the 
> upcoming desktop summit [ http://www.desktopsummit.org/ ].  It sounds 
> like we should be working to drum up attendance now, by planning special 
> events, trumpeting rare speakers, and publicizing the unique benefits of 
> attending GUADEC & the Desktop Summit.
>
> * Attended the marketing/PR training at the Linux Foundation 
> Collaboration Summit [ 
> http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/collaboration-summit/press-training 
> ].  I sure did learn a lot, from strategies for resource-constrained 
> projects (build relationships with five key reporters) to tips for being 
> interviewed.  I will link to Cloer's slides and add my notes when she 
> puts them up.
>
>
> Undone:  I didn't put tasks in Bugzilla because they were moving too 
> fast and I was in San Francisco, many timezones away from Allan in 
> Bangalore, and couldn't coordinate effectively.  Lesson for next time: 
> do it early if we're going to do it at all.  Similarly for setting up 
> interviews with key GNOME developers; I dropped the ball there.
>
> Now that we've launched, I talked with Allan about how to best use the 
> rest of our contracts (we're booked to work on GNOME till the end of 
> April).  We think our priorities for the rest of April are:
>
> (a) reach out to not-so-news-driven (more in-depth-reporting) 
> journalists about aspects of the release that didn't get covered on 
> launch day -- once we get some bites, prep developers who have 
> volunteered, and get them interviewed
>
> (b) write up lessons learned & ideas for next time
>
> (c) infrastructure building & maintenance: update the wiki, consolidate 
> audiovisual and textual resources, and otherwise help prep for future 
> marketing, including press releases, talking points, etc. for the 
> launches of GNOME 3 within distributions that will come out in the next 
> weeks & months
>
> So I'm going to make some progress on each of those this week.  
> Specifically, I aim to reach out to two reporters, braindump a few 
> lessons learned privately, and confer with Allan and Vincent about 
> resource consolidation.  And I'm planning on pushing GNOME Journal's 
> next issue forward, in collaboration with Paul Cutler, but that's not 
> part of my contract since it's not GNOME 3-specific.  :-)

Looks good to me! I'll be writing a report on my recent activities in my
blog.

Some of the things I want to do in the upcoming weeks (apologies if this
overlaps with above):

* Get a couple of nice articles into external news sites.

* Finish up the release parties photo competition and do what I can to
get the photos on gnome3.org.

* Improve the content that's on gnome.org and maybe produce a bit more
(I'm working with the design crew to produce a nice printable GNOME 3
cheat sheet).

* Clean up the marketing wiki pages, particularly the marketing
materials, and elaborate our brand guidelines so that they cover GNOME 3
patterns (stripes, Canterall, etc).

Can anybody think of anything else?!

Best wishes,

Allan
-- 
Blog: http://afaikblog.wordpress.com/
IRC: aday on irc.gnome.org