Planning notes on what needs doing when promoting GNOME releases.
Essential things that need doing for each release:
- Press release
- Release announcement news post
- Microblogging (up to, for and after the release announcement)
- Web site updates
Also nice to have:
- Reaching out to the press
- Screenshot packs
- Live images
4 weeks prior
- Start planning - who is going to take responsibility for what?
- Start writing release notes
- Plan press release (particularly who to get quotations from)
- Investigate what the live image situation will be for the release
- Update press contact list
3 weeks prior
- Approach individuals for press release quotes
2 weeks prior
- Finalise release notes
- Upload screenshot packs to ftp.gnome.org
- Write press release
- Write news post
- Prepare website updates (enlist designers for help with the home page banner)
1 week prior
- Contact members of the press to inform them of the release date and give them access to the release notes
- Reach out to release team to coordinate the announcement - should be in regular communiaction with whovere is making the release
- Reach out to the sysadmin team to make sure that people are on standby to unlock the release notes and deal with the side effects of increased website load
Release Announcement
The release announcement is initially made by the release team email to the devel-announce-list. Ensure that this is only sent once all the marketing preparations are complete.
After the announcement email has gone out on devel announce list, do the following (roughly in order):
- Update gnome.org pages to reflect the new release and how to get it
- Get a sysadmin to unlock the release notes
- Post the press release
- Post the news story
- Send out the announcement tweet
- Post the announcement on Google+