RE: university outreach project

["John Williams" <JWilliams business otago ac nz>]

> > Again, my question is: Who does?  The GNOME foundation?  If 
> not, who?
> 
> This is open source. Because contribution is purely voluntary without
> financial consideration, the people who do the actual 
> development work are
> the only ones who have any real control. 
That is what I thought.  I simply wanted to make sure that there was not
some control structure in place that I am unaware of.

So I think in summary the marketing problem that GNOME is faced with is:

(1) How to convince developers to produce what the users need/want
(2) How to tell the users that GNOME has what they need/want

Of course, (2) is predicated on (1) being successful.  So the number one
task of the GNOME marketing team should be to target developers.  But in
order to do that we need to know what users want.  This brings me back
to my original entry into this debate:

Where is the empirical information on what users want?

"Which users?" you may ask.  "Existing GNOME users; and people who have
a high probability of using GNOME in the near future" is my reply.

Once we have that information, we can try to convince developers to
address those needs.  A parallel effort needs to be undertaken to reduce
the barriers to developing for GNOME.  This is, of course, not a
marketing issue.  (I mean, the implementation of barrier reduction is
not in the marketing domain.)

I am a marketing researcher.  I volunteer to help design research and
analyse & report results.  I cannot help financially in any way; but am
willing to help in any other way I can, in order to gather this
empirical information on user wants and needs.