Re: Pulling this together...

[Claus Schwarm <c schwarm gmx net>]

On Thu, 21 Oct 2004 21:03:06 -0700
Sri Ramkrishna <sri aracnet com> wrote:

> So, I've sent out some items about how I feel Marketing should go from
> a top level group.  There are a lot of conversations going on about
> outreach and audience and what not.  But I feel we have not gotten
> solid foundations as John has mentioned earlier.
> 
> I know for instance there is some disagreement on who we are marketing
> to.  So we need to first decide who we are target audiences are.  

I didn't see any disagreement, just people arguing, and trying to
find out what others think. If somebody believes, some important aspects
are not discussed yet, please mail to the list.

Additionally, the community has been gladly hacking for years now on
GNOME without any serious marketing consideration; we can't expect to
make a decision and then just go for it.

It will take some time. It will take time to figure out who's going to
actively help. It will take time to figure out what things need
improvement - and I believe there are some things that need improvement.
It will take time to figure out which means we have to reach any goal,
audiance, whatever.

It will take years.

For example, just consider the GNOME Science CD: We'd need somebody to
organize the local national groups, we'd need somebody to talk to the
local national groups maintainers, we'd need somebody to talk to other
application maintainers for eventual ports or updates of their
applications, we'd need several people to organize the different GNOME
love projects, we'd need somebody to organize eventual press releases,
we'd need somebody to talk to companies if we can expect sponsering,
we'd need somebody to do the artwork, etc.

And although this is not even considered yet, we have already two
parties discussing which distribution the LiveCD should be build on!

But maybe it would make more sense to ask some of the local
distributions it they are willing to do a local copy of a GNOME Science CD?
Maybe it would make sense to ask Mandrake, for example, to do the french
GNOME Science CD ? As far as I know, they are using Perl-GTK for their
installation routine, so maybe they are willing to do a special CD
featuring GNOME and the science software we suggested.

What about a proper installer? The point of the project is to get on
people's harddrives to be used! In the best of all world, an installer
encourages to do a data backup, lets users partion the harddisk in a
friendly way, configures all hardware, looks for existing mail,
bookmarks, adressbooks, and converts them after the install.

If we made it onto the peoples harddisk, what software will people be
able to install in a friendly manner? Who's going to teach several
thousand people worldwide the "./configure && make && make install" or
"apt-cache search && apt-get install" way ?

What about support ? Do we expect users to figure out which mailing list
is right for their problems ? Are we going to accept feature requests
and future development discussion on gnome-devel ? Or do we expect
people to set up blogs for getting heard ?

What about all the information we don't have yet? Which faculties do
exists in different countries? What organizations do exists in
universities? When do their studies start? Which software do new
students need in their first years?

Which media can we talk to for national promotion? Do mailing lists
exists for the different sciences, and can we ask questions about
software, there? Are there dedicated web pages, forums, etc. to ask or
announce the project?

What can we do to keep the Mono enthusiasts busy, so that they don't
keep on reinventing the wheel but add additional utility ?

Who's going to talk to the KDE guys so that they adress a seperate
target audience? I'm not convinced that they will watch silently if we
really do this.

The nice thing about the project is that it uncovers all the marketing
problems GNOME got right now.  ;)

And most of these questions would arise, too if we'd switch target
audiences. Seems to me, we still have a few weeks to get the foundation
right. No need to hurry. :)


Claus