Re: Need ideas for summer interns working on marketing type projects

[Dave Neary <dneary gnome org>]

Hi,

Stormy Peters wrote:
> One of the projects I'm working on is starting an outreach program for
> marketing projects like we currently do for accessibility and Google
> Summer of Code. I could use your help with ideas.

Great initiative!

> - Putting together a web site of easy to find and use slides for
> presentations all sorts of GNOME topics.

I suggest that it would be a great use of time to work on the
storyboards idea which I was promoting & since have left neglected - for
a specific selling point, craft a script for demos which could be given
either on a stand or in a presentation. There are many ideas for such
selling points - those that come to mind straight away are:

 - Great integration of system and apps (plug in your camera, have your
pictures imported automatically into F-Spot, send a link or a file to
someone through a menu item, demonstrate how a headset & webcam are
automatically picked up when plugged in, and perhaps show how Avahi
configures & shows services available on the network automatically - my
favourite example of this is plugging in & sharing a printer, and then
just seeing the network printer pop up in an already-open printing
dialog on another machine)

 - Accessibility features - themes, shortcuts, screen reader, data
input, ...

 - Showing off multimedia support - integration with Last.fm, Jamendo
and webcasts, managing video, playing a DVD with menus, subtitles,
burning with Brasero & nautilus CD burner etc

The storyboards need to talk about prerequisites (codecs, special
packages, configuration options, required media files), and go step by
step through a show & tell - do something, say what happened & why it's
cool.

> - Putting together a GNOME slideset template, including fonts, pictures,
> slide layouts, etc.

I thoughht you were reading Presentation Zen a while ago... aren't slide
templates considered bad practice?

> - Optimizing/studying our web traffic tracking so we can improve our
> website to target the right audiences. SEO stuff in general.

Less urgent, but useful nonetheless.

> - Setting up a GNOME store.
> - Studying Friends of GNOME donations and suggesting improvements or
> marketing campaigns.
> - Following up with all of our donors - thank them, find out why they
> donated, what they like, don't like, asking them to give again in the
> future.

Lots of low-hanging fruit here, very good stuff.

> - Putting together a fundraising 101 presentation for GUADEC.
> - Putting together a presentation skills class for GUADEC.

I could do one of these... although there are surely better people than
I to give a "giving presentations" presentation, I'm sure I could give
it a go...

> - Setting up our account on SugarCRM (they've offered us a free account)
> and providing some time of initial documentation or training.

Do we have some initial accounts set up there? I haven't heard back
since I put Doug in contact with Luis to get the agreement signed.

Some other ideas:

1. Data sheets & presentation sheets for selected GNOME feature sets or
applications (examples I think would be really useful: F-Spot,
Evolution, Orca, GNOME Games, Rhythmbox, Banshee, Sabayon & Pessulus,
GNOME themes, platform bindings, Ekiga for VoIP (covering things like
where to get a SIP account and make your first video call, something
that's a little difficult for a first time Ekiga user), desktop applets
and gdesklets - I'm sure there are other GNOME or GNOME-related
applications which would benefit from a treatment.

The idea is to be able to show that GNOME is not just infrastructure
like a window manager, but has great applications as well.

2. A census of GNOME developers, to answer the following questions:

How many GNOME developers are there
 - In the big tent (GNOME application developers + GNOME community members)
 - In the GNOME community (hosted on gnome.org)
 - In the GNOME desktop (desktop + bindings + platform)

by profile (code, documentation, translations, marketing & website
maintenance, etc), by employer (how many people are paid to work on
GNOME, and by who?) and by contribution (which companies & individuals
contribute the most code to GNOME?)

This is something that would be a longish process, there are many ways
to attack the problem, and all of the answers will be fuzzy to say the
least. It's something that has been on my TODO list for a while & I have
thought a lot about how to get data for this.

It might also reveal some surprises, if attacked via SVN. We might be
able to identify some major GNOME Mobile-related contributions, for
example, and get a nice PR win of showing that the GNOME Mobile effort
has yielded some concrete results.

Some sources of data for this:

For lists of applications:
gnomefiles.org
sourceforge.net
freshmeat.net

For data on GNOME developers:
The current SCM survey
Database of SVN accounts
svn log history

It would also be interesting to track freedesktop.org statistics, where
possible, since many fdo projects are run by GNOME developers who have
moved down the stack. For example, it would be nice to spread the net of
"GNOME developers" to include external dependencies & projects in the
GNOME Mobile module set.

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary
GNOME Foundation member
dneary gnome org