Re: Minutes from 2004-12-8 marketing meeting

[Dave Neary <dneary free fr>]

Hi,

Just a couple of things (clarifications and additions).

Quoting Ian McIntosh <ian_mcintosh linuxadvocate org>:
> Sbiot and Bolsh think LiveCD on campuses offers "limited returns."

What I meant by this is that if we target campuses, then we're targeting college
computer users. I don't know about you guys, but when I was in college only the
geeks used the computers a lot.

What you really want to target is the college IT infrastructure, to have
computer labs using GNOME on GNU/Linux, and that's a tougher call. It's also a
different target audience. A healthy GNOME user group in the college helps, but
it's not even 10% of what you need to get a college department to switch, or
even to install some GNOME machines alongside the Windows machines.

The ideal (as someone said last night) is to arrive at a stage where people are
asked to submit course material in open standards, and encouraged to use
programs like Abiword, GNUMeric and OpenOffice.org.

> Bolsh thinks publishing posters and t-shirt designs on gnome.org is
> enough (LUGs will print them up locally)

I actually meant that it would be useful, but that we shoudl do both (provide
designs online, *and* be aware of events and ship stuff out when practical).

> Bolsh likes Claus's "My desktop of choice" line, Sbiot doesn't.
> Claus suggested "Our desktop of choice."
> Sbiot thinks "of choice" implies that people do choose which is not true
> and "desktop" is a geek word.

I liked the dual sense - "I choose this desktop" and "this desktop is about
choice". But yes, I agree that desktop is a little too computery for a wider
audience.

One thing we talked about that I didn't see was the idea of asking distros to
use GNOME. I think it was Claus who thought that this might be an easy win, if
we get one popular distro to install RedHat by default, we automatically get
lots of users. I agree, I don't think there is any harm in asking. I also agree
with Sebastien that distros aren't our primary focus. But they could be an easy
win :)


By the way, I have started to add some data to the page
http://live.gnome.org/MarketingTeam/ExistingGnomeDeployments and I would
appreciate some help. I am sure that I don't know even half of the high profile
deployments we could talk about, and each of the deployments mentioned could do
with some more links to supporting material - case studies and news reports,
ideally. The questions that you want to be able to answer are "Why did X choose
GNOME? What did it offer over the competition?" I think in the case of GNOME,
that will have very little to do with cost, and more to do with the things we
consider important - particularly usability.

Cheers,
Dave.

--
Dave Neary
Lyon, France