Re: About The GNOME Mobile & Embedded Initative

[Dave Neary <bolsh gnome org>]

Hi Thilo,

Thilo Pfennig wrote:
> a) I do not like that this was not discussed at all in the marketing
> list. Such major things and announcement have to be discussed with at
> least the marketing team

<snip>

> we are going into new directions without further
> consultation of the marketing team.

Where do you think the marketing team's mandate comes from, Thilo?

We're not hired, elected, chosen, appointed or otherwise ordained by the
foundation or the community. What do you think would make a community
member working with a group of companies want to come to talk to the
marketing team?

Perhaps it's our great track record in getting press releases out in a
timely manner.

Perhaps it's the way we have come up with plans to address key gaps in
the platform, gathered the main developers and maintainers involved
together and pushed that agenda through to a main release.

Perhaps it's the way that we have achieved such concrete results in
raising the awareness and popularity of GNOME.

Perhaps it's the valuable quantitative data that we have been feeding
back into our development community to help them decide what the best
direction to take is.

I probably shouldn't start a Monday morning this way, but let me give
the list a reality check.

To be relevant, we have to be proactive. I've said this before, but
perhaps I've been diluting the message. Here it is again: no-one cares
about the marketing team. We produce nothing. We have not shown
ourselves to be useful. So no-one is going to come and talk to us about
anything until that changes.

The marketing team is currently an island unto itself. We talk about
stuff, and no-one is listening. We are navel gazers in the extreme. We
have not had any significant successes come out of this group, certainly
not as group efforts. The most significant successes have been
individual efforts, or have come from outside this group.


But let me finish with a word of hope.

The marketing team can provide huge value to the GNOME developer
community if:
1. We organise and encourage GNOME communication - working to
co-ordinate user groups, conference representation, stands, marketing
material and press relations
2. We take the feedback from that interaction (case studies, interviews,
surveys) and condense that information into a useful form to identify
gaps in the product(s).
3. We take those gaps, identify the people in the GNOME community who
can help feed them, and sell our ideas to them.
4. Communicate about the filled gap, get more feedback, rinse, repeat.


If you look at the key advances in GNOME, they all follow that pattern -
embedded companies started getting interested in GNOME, we listened, got
them collaborating (leading to key successes in the platform), and are
now pushing the envelope even further in that direction.

Federico Mena Quintero did a survey of big deployments, identified some
technology gaps around lock-down and admin management tools, worked on
fixing those, and the feedback loop reaches completion.

We're still stuck on 1 - although we have lots of resources for that mow
- mailing lists, servers where people can set up websites for user
groups, a calendar where we can add GNOME events, a publication we can
publish stories and case studies in, and some useful marketing material.
There's nothing stopping us from moving into 2nd gear on that, and
starting work on that feedback loop.

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary
GNOME Foundation member
bolsh gnome org