Re: marketing hackfest?

[Allan Day <allanpday gmail com>]

Karen Sandler <karen gnome org> wrote:
> > > > > As per Tobi's email, we should consider again whether to organize a
> > > > > marketing hackfest! Shaun has suggested co-locating with the docs
> > > > > sprint
> > > > > in Cincinatti June 17-19.
> > ...
> > > > > What do people think? Would it be workable this time and if so would
> > > > > having it in June make sense?
> >
> > I'm definitely interested in attending a marketing hackfest. That
> > said, I am busy and my primary responsibility is design, so I'd want
> > to be confident that the event would be an effective use of time. Do
> > you (or anybody else) have any ideas for what we would work on?
>
> I think there are a lot of things we could work on, but one big thing we
> want to do is to better articulate why GNOME and free software generally
> is so important. Also, our marketing materials site is old and seriously
> out of date so on the more mundane side, combing through those materials,
> reorganizing them and figuring out if there's anything new that we need
> would probably be very useful.

With the resources that we have for marketing, there's a danger that
planning discussions would remain just that - discussions. We've been
down this road before; we all want to do more, but there are limits,
and I think we should be realistic. So I have a strong preference for
doing work at the hackfest rather than planning.

As for things that we could work on, there are a number of priority
areas for me:

 * Marketing materials - we could use the opportunity to move our
existing content over to OwnCloud and fill in any blanks
 * Updating the brand guidelines and move them to a restricted
location (this would include elaborating them to cover things like
visual style, colour schemes, etc)
 * Writing a GNOME mission statement

For some of these items, particularly the last one, we will need more
expertise than the marketing team has. If we are going to tackle these
tasks - and I think that a hackfest would be a good opportunity to do
so - we should think about getting other people to the event, either
from the GNOME community and/or specialists who can help us to
articulate our message.

(And if we do want to get other members of the community involved, New
York might be a better location.)

Allan