Re: User oriented release notes



Long email, sorry. This thread hits a topic that got me thinking a lot
in the last weeks.

First of all, thank you specially to Claus, Vincent, Panos and Alex
Smith. Thanks to them we had 2.16 release notes on time.

> http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/index.html

Right, let's start doing things right for the 2.18 release. You like
that Apple example. Ok. Let's analyze not that page but what is behind
that page: 

- A clear marketing strategy integrated with the technical strategy and
of course the business strategy, since the first day. Apple knows which
audiences they target and these three strategies are targeting the same
audiences. 

- A marketing planning and production that starts, evolves and is
completed almost during the same timeline as the technical development
process, with a regular communication between both processes.

- A good chunk of resources invested in marketing & design, not only in
the web pages and the ad campaigns, also in technical parts of the
development.


Instead, we have at least these weaknesses:

- No clear audiences to target with a release, nor with the release
notes. Is the home user a target of our release notes or not? Is the
press a target or not? Are we targeting the distro managers or not? And
so on.

- No marketing strategy for the releases in the context of no clear
marketing strategy for GNOME either. The release cycle has no marketing
intervention, only at the end we come and try to find what is most
remarkable and how to sell it. We do this alone, only few developers
provide feedback on time because we are overwhelmed finishing their
stuff. And we do this without a clear GNOME marketing strategy, a
roadmap or any solid guideline, all is personal choice with high levels
of time pressure and improvisation.

- 1-2 weeks to market what it took 6 months to develop. In terms of
human resources, 10 volunteers at most take part in the marketing part
in spare hours, while the development is held by dozens of teams summing
up more than... 100? 200? developers, many of them working
professionally full time.

Looking at this it would be almost a miracle that we could produce
release notes as good as the release itself.

What we can do in the 2.18 release cycle in order to improve
considerably the release notes (and, what is most important, probably
the release process and the released software):

- Integrate marketing and ""business"" visions with the technical vision
that is guiding the 2.18 release. Since day zero.

- Marketing vision means that someone in the release team is thinking
how are we going to sell 2.18, which are the core points, achievements,
novelties, and how this release fits in the GNOME roadmap (we need one).

- Business vision. GNOME si not doing business as Apple does, but we
need to be a sustainable community and each release needs to enforce and
consolidate the GNOME project if we want to achieve our long term goals.
Our sustainability depends on the sustainability of our stakeholders:
individual contributors/volunteers, project teams, ISDs, deployers,
distros, advisory board companies, the Foundation itself... Someone
needs to think what these bodies need and how the next release is going
to help them, be useful to them.

- Planning and production of the ""release notes"" following the release
cycle. We start deciding who are our audiences, what we want to give
them, how we present the information to them. We don't need to wait a
feature freeze to go ahead with this. This work would be coordinated
with the production of the new ""About GNOME"" section, the GNOME
Products tool, the Press kit and any other element in the neighborhood
of the ""release notes"" (that perhaps would need a new name).

This is a wgo 2.18 goal, and it requires the same level of planning and
commitment (or more) as other goals we are facing in the current release
cycle. 

-- 
Quim Gil /// http://desdeamericaconamor.org | http://guadec.org

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