Re: How do we want to do GNOME Marketing?

["Thilo Pfennig" <tpfennig gmail com>]

Hi Dave,

2006/12/18, Dave Neary <dneary free fr>:

> There is a continuing opportunity for someone (or some group of people)
> to get in contact with module maintainers, talk to them one-to-one, and
> see how we can/should interract with the development process. The
> marketing team can be a federator in getting a roadmap together,
> providing feedback from users, and combining that with the good sense of
> developers to set small-scale priorities, and also identify larger
> trends in requests and theme releases around those trends.

I have created a task page for marketing:
http://live.gnome.org/GnomeMarketing/Tasks
maybe describe this task there.

I suggest that we use this new page to add tasks and also put status
back on there.


> But please don't make it sound like we have not talked aout this, or
> come up with plans for this, before. This is at least the third time

I don't want to sound like this. i know we have talked a lot. I just
ment that lastly there was nt much of action as far as I could see.

> Here we disagree - the marketing team does not define the goals, it
> identifies and communicates them. We should be herding aligned efforts,
> and making people realise that they are aligned.

Well we need an overall goal. Who else can define it? if we have no
goal development goes in every direction. Sure nobody could force
development but things like the HIG compliance are also goals where
developers can orientate their work on. Goals are natural in
development (for a release) but if only the maintainers set goals it
is hard to communicate. Then success rather comes by accident. There
is progress, nevertheless. The result is, that there is no clear image
that can be communicated easily to the public (users  / potential
users). I also believe that the result is that progress is not going
to be as fast as it could be.


> It's the difference between "I'm telling you what you're going to work
> on for the next 6 months" and "Just last week I was talking to X about
> $COOL_IDEA - you guys should talk and see if you can't work on that
> together.

Yes, but there is yet another option. one could ask: "Who agrees, that
we should work on making printing better? And what can we do to make
it better? Can you do XY so that printin gets better?". So I would
agree that intense communication is needed as developers act very
independently - but I do not think that they would not agree to work
on agreed weaknesses or to work on a common goal that might not even
be an idea of a developer. Stating a goal is not the same as "stating
a goal out of every context without talking to developers".

> > Is GNOMEs goal to be the leading desktop? The best usable desktop?
>
> GNOME is currently at least 3 things - each vitally important, a
> separate entity, and with its own momentum:
>
> 1.,2.,3.
> The thing these 3 elements have in common is an adhesion to a core
> principle - what Jeff calls Software Freedom, ...

So you say that GNOME is not different to KDE in any way, because all
three points could be easily adapted to them. I think it is extremely
important to differentiate. The real important definition would be the
points where we would say "This is how we do it in GNOME". This all
sounds a bit too blurry and too broad. If we define ourselves like
that we are competing with KDE on every subject. As they are also not
working on "larger footprints" and to have a "bad plattform".

We should rethink this. My vision would be that we could tell somebody
that asks us:
* What do I get with GNOME? Why shouldn't I use something else?
 * What GNOMEs strenghts are and where it is weak - when she should
use GNOME and when she should not.

Many my think now: No, we are for everybody! Everybody should use us.
But I think
1) This will never happen
2) People like to see what they get (exactly)

So if we want to be ablet to market GNOME we not only need to know
GNOME well, but also the benefits of other platforms.

Personally I think there are some small things that nearly make free
desktops like GNOME unusable. And this is for instance that you do not
get feedback of the ink status of your printer. There are some command
line tools, but often that means that a simple users will have to
replace all inks when he cannot print any more. So if somebody wants
to print and is not a computer expert, he rather should not use GNOME
or be prepared to replace all inks all the time. This is an example
where a lack of a common goal leeds to less progress. For me this is
not a big problem, because I know how to work with such tools (like
escputil). But i did not see any priorities on that. Rather the focus
was on better printing. But that only as a very personal
problem/impression.

Thilo
--
Blog: http://vinci.wordpress.com
Linked In: http://www.linkedin.com/in/tpfennig