Re: About The GNOME Mobile & Embedded Initative

[Alex Hudson <home alexhudson com>]

On Mon, 2007-04-23 at 09:45 +0100, Joachim wrote:

> 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?

I'm not sure a mandate from the Foundation would make this group work
better - if the Foundation asks the marketing team to work on something
specifically, that could work, but it wouldn't be much different to the
marketing team sorting out for itself some concrete tasks.

One thing I was majorly disappointed with was the release of 2.18: there
is a huge perception that GNOME hasn't moved forward from 2.12/2.14 in
any significant way. This is one of the big reasons talk about GNOME 3
keeps coming around - people don't believe GNOME will go forwards much
without some kind of Topaz project.

Although there has been talking about "what is marketing?", I think the
danger there is that by trying to broadly define "marketing" we end up
with a notion of the team taking part in all sorts of activities (which,
rightly, it _could_) but with a brief so wide there's no-where to start.

I think the marketing team needs to be seen to be doing things which
matter, and that in the short term - to me, anyway - means promotion of
GNOME. Right now, Firefox, Ubuntu and similar projects are leading the
way - and really, GNOME isn't doing anything similar. 

If the marketing team could kick-start some buzz about GNOME again,
highlight the progress that is being made, and get people talking about
GNOME releases again, I think that would show people the marketing team
can be successful and they'll want to involve the team more. I don't
think the marketing team should be foisted on people.

Cheers,

Alex.