reviewer guide for GNOME?

["Liam R. E. Quin" <liam holoweb net>]

Hi, after some discussion on IRC today I agreed to send some mail... :-)

When I worked for a commercial software vendor, one thing we did on
each new release was to prepare a Reviewers' Guide as part of the
press kit.

The guide included usual press kit stuff -- e.g. contact info for last
minute questions a reviewer could ask, the logo in various formats,
screenshots they could use at various resolutions... but it also
included an overview of what the product was, the intended market/users,
background on the company (the gnome foundation and the gnome project),
and highlighted new features.

The idea is to head off reviews like, "this desktop is great but it
didn't seem to detect my hardware properly" or, "this image editor
is terrible because it won't open a Microsoft Word document and convert
it into a banana" (both things out of scope for the product), and also
to get the reporter thinking in the "right soft of way"... mind
control :-)

Making a special reviewer guide also makes reviews feel special and
loved, and that counts for a LOT in getting a good review.

http://www.gnome.org/start/2.6/notes/rnwhatsnew.html is a good
start in this direction, although it doesn't emphasize some of
the changes enough -- e.g. nautilus performance could easily
be a full heading and paragraph.

I'm not sure if there are enough people to make this happen,
although I'm prepared to donate a small amount of time to try
and get it started, if there's interest.

Liam

[PS: I'm not on these emailing lists, so CC me on replies]

-- 

Liam Quin, XML Activity Lead, W3C