Re: evangelist users- the other key note from LCA marketing BOF

[Luis Villa <luis villa gmail com>]

On 5/19/05, Marcus Bauer <mbauer tiscali fr> wrote:
> Some major flaws in current gnome marketing:

There are many :)

> Gnome does not really promote its ease of use. 

We don't very effectively, you're right. When I promote it at LWE
(because usability is practically the /only/ thing I talk about at
conferences or when I sell GNOME in other contexts, like press
releases), people's jaws drop, as you saw when you pointed out n-c-b.
We should be doing more, though I'm not sure how to structure the
website and other materials to do that better.

>Havoc's README that comes
> with the metacity package simply needs to be polished up into a
> press-printable form (shorter, less rant, less technical).

Which part?

> KDE embraces Gnome apps where there is no equivalent (gimp,inkscape) as
> well as technology (gnome-volume-manager). These apps are often not
> perceived as Gnome apps from KDE users. So one just needs to tell
> them ;-)

This is part of why I like the 'heart of the desktop' theme; we get to
take credit for things like gimp, inkscape, etc.

[Note that while I agree that usability is our strongest argument,
that isn't the same as making it our strongest slogan- I think the
slogan first needs to convey who we are, and be phrased so as to allow
us to simply/easily tie in our strong arguments, like usability, after
the fact.]
 
> Knoppix was one of the major precursors for KDE and there is still no
> real competition. It was spread out hundreds of thousands of copies with
> PC-Magazines and the like, being the first contact with linux for many
> people. Imho konppix is the absolut no.1 hit in KDE marketing. There are
> even books now about knoppix.

Well, let's get cracking on making the GNOME liveCD similarly well
publicized :) Besides the language stuff you and I are hopefully
working on, I want to do things like:

* work with the Ubuntu folks to make the first truly accessible Linux liveCD
* work with the monoppix folks (or others) to make the best mono liveCD

Those are the offhand things- I'm sure there are others.

> The Gnome website is - what? It exists. But from a marketing point of
> view it is not much. The navigation is sub optimal. And the layout is
> sub optimal. Some good information is now on gnomefiles but unless you
> know what you are looking for it is far from perfect.

It should be totally redone. Any suggestions on how are welcome. The
reality is, though, that it is a large task and until we agree on some
bigger-picture stuff (like markets, themes, goals, etc.) it is hard to
rework the whole thing consistently.

Luis (who some days thinks he should just take a month and rewrite the
thing after some card-sort excercizes with people)

> On Thu, 2005-05-19 at 08:47 -0400, Luis Villa wrote:
> > 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?
> 
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