Re: How do we want to do GNOME Marketing?

[Dave Neary <dneary free fr>]

Hi,

Joachim Noreiko wrote:
> --- Dave Neary <dneary free fr> wrote:
>> Example: module maintainer 1 is working on
>> abstracting away some aspect
>> (functionality X) of his module behind a library.
...
> That's going to be too technical for some members the
> marketing team.

We're a pretty technical bunch... but there are non-technical jobs we
need done too (mostly organisation, writing and advocacy, but we need to
figure out how to organise writers and advocates first).

> That's something we need 'glue-people' for --
> developers who are on several teams or hop between
> them.

'Glue people' is exactly how I would characterise good marketers. The
message is the reflection of what the company employees believe in, the
evolutions of the product are the reflection of what the market wants,
and in both cases, the marketing team is the mirror.

>> Or, in discussing plans with 4 or 5 maintainers, you
>> realise that
>> everyone really wants to implement Jono Bacon's
>> project spaces idea -
...
> Isn't it desktop-devel-list's job? Or if not them,
> who?

I saw Mr. List last week - he's going to be taking some time off to take
care of the second baby, and he just changed jobs. So the vacancy's there.

This is another case of glue people - the marketing team should be the
team that has their finger on every pulse, we need to be the connective
tissue of the project to be a success.

> The last few releases of Gnome I've been involved in
> haven't had any sort of coherency to them. They've
> just been 'here's what we all did for the last 6
> months'. 
> The marketing team's managed to sift through and
> produce some sort of theme from that but it's not been
> very successful.

There was a concentrated effort to work on printing over the last year.
Another concentrated effort to work on performance and memory footprint.
There is a significant movement towards adapting the GNOME platform for
embedded and mobile use.

The applications have perhaps not been revolutionary in their change
recently, but the platform's been making leaps & bounds. We haven't been
doing particularly well communicating that, yet.

> Like Thilo says in his later mail, we have some big
> shortcomings. Take printing -- we should be able to
> decide (ddl, or whichever gathering of glue
> developers) that 2.20 will be all about making
> printing on Gnome cool. 

The difference between printing in 2.14 and 2.18 is immense.

> A long-term roadmap like that would be a good start.

I agree, and it's our job (as the connective tissue) to try to spot
patterns in the chaos, and federate those efforts into movements. Think
of la résistance during the second world war as a model. We need a Jean
Moulin to make links between the groups. We don't necessarily need a
General de Gaulle to inspire everyone - we have, after all, got RMS.

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary
dneary free fr