Outward facing media [Was: Goodies for GNOME 3.0 launch parties]

[Allan Day <allanpday gmail com>]

Stormy Peters wrote: 
>         > In fact I am also interested in a more generic question
>         which is how do
>         > we usually use our channels to announce stuff? I tried to
>         motivate
>         > people with the T-shirt contest but didn't receive much
>         feedback except
>         > from the people I contacted personally. How do we actually
>         usually
>         > promote stuff outside of the GNOME community? (I thought
>         GUGs would be a
>         > good way, but they seem a little bit sleepy ;) ).
>         
>         
>         Good question! I've been thinking for a while that GNOME needs
>         an
>         outward facing media channel. The Planet and GNOME News are
>         primarily
>         places where we talk to ourselves. www.gnome.org is outward
>         facing and
>         has a news section, but it isn't primarily a news site (you
>         certainly
>         can't subscribe to it)... A blog or news site where we talk to
>         our
>         partners and to GNOME enthusiasts would be a great way to
>         promote GNOME
>         and to keep people in tune with where the project is going.
>         It'd need
>         volunteers if it were to become an enduring reality, of
>         course...
>         
> There are people that have been helping with Facebook and Twitter. 
>
> I think a blog would be hard but perhaps a blog that gives excerpts
> and points to other articles. That way someone could follow Planet
> GNOME, GNOME News and other channels, make a judgement call on what
> would be interesting to our users and add them to the feed.

I fully agree. We don't have the capacity to produce original content.
Linking to existing material is a good way to go for the time being [1].

One way we can do this is through our microblogging channels. I've been
doing a bit of work to develop these in recent times... if we want to
take this further, there are a couple of things we can do:

First, get more people involved. Right now, our bus-factor [2] is
extremely high. If microblogging is going to be a proper part of our
communications strategy, it needs to be stable and reliable. Any
volunteers?!

Second, we could tie our microblogging feeds into other channels, both
as a way to get more people following them and as a means to get that
content to people who don't use a microblogging service. Displaying our
feeds on our web-sites is one obvious possibility here. I'm sure there
are others though.

Best,

Allan

[1] The difficulty with this is that much of the content that we
currently generate is written for people who already know GNOME. The
reason for a channel of the kind that I described in my previous mail is
to explain how GNOME works to external audiences.

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor
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