Re: About The GNOME Mobile & Embedded Initative

[Jeff Waugh <jdub perkypants org>]

<quote who="Joachim">

> Like someone else said, it's a chicken and egg situation.

It's not: Go and do something awesome!

> This latest announcement seems to have come from quite high up in Gnome --
> Foundation board members are involved in it, I would image.

I started it independently of the Board, then brought the Board and Advisory
Board into the loop when it was clear that the GNOME Foundation needed to be
represented as part of a major announcement.

> If even they can't be bothered to at least include the marketing team in
> the loop, what hope is there?

There's heaps of rocking stuff the marketing team could be doing of its own
initiative. I chose not to involve the marketing team in the GNOME Mobile
announcement because I wanted a degree of quietness, and could not see any
useful function of the marketing team leading up to it. We had a great team
of purposeful contributors putting this together, which is all we needed.

> Could the Foundation board decide whether Gnome needs a marketing team?

That is not a matter of "decision". I'm sure most of the Board members would
support the idea of a thriving, useful GNOME marketing team, and many have
tried to play a part in it over time.

> Could it either explicitly give a mandate to the marketing team or let us
> know if we can just go home?

What are you asking the Board to mandate? Again, this is not a matter for
the Board to decide. People who get things done in co-operation with their
peers get to make the decisions.

Why not simply *do* something, instead of asking if you're allowed to *do*
something? Start a well-defined project, such as a campaign to promote the
various GNOME language bindings. Within the context of that project, you can
decide your target audience, objectives, methods of measuring success, case
studies, how to deliver feedback back to the binding authors, etc. You won't
have to sit around having aimless discussions on this list about what GNOME
is, what our collective target markets are, etc.

That's a pretty sweet project.

- Jeff

-- 
Open CeBIT 2007: Sydney, Australia              http://www.opencebit.com.au/