Re: [fdn-ann] messaging statement

[Bart Decrem <bart eazel com>]

Maciej Stachowiak wrote:

> BTW, I do think we should get more people
> representing the community rather than corporations in the press
> conference. We have Miguel and then it's all corporate
> executives. That risks having the press conference sound like lots of
> corporate stuff, and a little about GNOME.

I totally agreed.  I brought this up during the first phone conference call with the PR team
(Nat, Jacob and Miguel participated) and I suggested that any members of the Gnome Steering
Committee or other Gnome hackers should feel free to join on stage.  So I'm kind of counting
on that.  So all Gnome steering committee members who will be at LWE are hereby invited to
join us on stage!


> Well, the office suite integration thing is a completely separate
> issue from the foundation. We could have a "look at all this cool
> GNOME stuff" press release that summarizes all of it, but the office
> suite merge intention announcement is not really related to our
> formation of the foundation except temporally.

OK, I was just thinking about what the news of the day will be.  And I see for pieces of
news:
1- Gnome is getting more organized and creating a Gnome foundation
2- All these companies are expressing their support for Gnome
3- Open Office is going to get integrated with Gnome Office ("wow, Sun is really embracing
Gnome")
4- Sun is going to adopt Gnome as the Solaris desktop

I think 2, 3 and 4 are bigger news items than 1 (from the perspective of the NYTimes) and
will help generate tremendous momentum for Gnome.

So the question is, how do we get these 4 key messaging points across in:
- the pre-briefings
- the press release or press releases
- the press conference

It's a lot of work to make a press release, and reporters want all the information distilled
for them, so, in general, fewer releases are better than more.

Can Greg or Russ take the feedback from Havoc and Maciej and propose a way to bring this all
together?

On a different but related topic, I'm wondering what work the Steering Committee needs to do
to pave the way for the Open Office / Gnome Office announcement.  Does this need to be
broached on Gnome hackers?  Is there going to be a flamewar if this just gets announced at
the press conference?