Re: About The GNOME Mobile & Embedded Initative

[Joachim <joachim gnome googlemail com>]

On 4/23/07, Dave Neary <bolsh gnome org> wrote:

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?

Like someone else said, it's a chicken and egg situation.
The marketing team needs to show itself to be useful, but in order to be useful, it has to be taken seriously and included by the rest of Gnome.
This latest announcement seems to have come from quite high up in Gnome -- Foundation board members are involved in it, I would image.
If even they can't be bothered to at least include the marketing team in the loop, what hope is there?

The same thing happens with documentation, I might add. I only found out there was a new design for the control panel by chance, and I only found out it was pulled from 2.18 at the last minute by chance.
Would you say documentation has a mandate? Would you say that it's useful and required by Gnome?

Anyway, while Thilo leaves (and I don't blame him at all), I'm going to ask this:
Could the Foundation board decide whether Gnome needs a marketing team? Could it either explicitly give a mandate to the marketing team or let us know if we can just go home?