evangelist users- the other key note from LCA marketing BOF

[Luis Villa <luis villa gmail com>]

A dump of my notes (slightly expanded) from the discussion on
'Evangelist Users' at the LCA marketing BOF. In a nutshell, the
discussion was about users who go out and evangelize GNOME- how have
firefox/KDE been so succesful at this, why are we not doing so hot,
how can we (should we?) etc. My notes, with my editorial comments as
Ed.:

MozillaOrg does a good job of this, see spreadfirefox.com

jeff: 'hemorrhaging users' because we haven't reached out to the early
adopters, etc.- not leveraging community to do our marketing for us.
(Ed.: I'm not sure we're actually hemorrhaghing users, as we have no
actual numbers on this, but we're certainly not leveraging the users
we have for this.)

mozilla used to have an active HTML correctness evangelism team, do we
need a 'media correctness team' to go out to bad (FUD-y?)
articles/media and show them how great gnome is/or research why they
didn't like it?

need to hype our user forums more? how did UbuntuCom get such great,
friendly forum?

how do we make gnome 1337 without compromising our 'core values'?
(flip side: os/x is not particularly 1337, or not compromised, but
obviously it gets evangelized- partially because of the
depth/flexibility- easy for newbies, powerful for experts)

alternately: how do we make gnome more fun? maybe better question than
making ourselves more 1337?

get a superstar? we as developers need to be more public, more
unabashed about our endorsements- havoc, miguel? what about kernel
people? others?