On Wed, 2010-02-17 at 12:34 -0600, Shaun McCance wrote: > On Tue, 2010-02-16 at 21:27 +0000, Nelson Marques wrote: > > > > > > Hi all, > > > > In attachment there is a proposal for a new campaign and it's goals. To > > unravel this a bit, it aims to position GNOME brand as an ecological > > supporting brand alongside with some things we can do to promote this. > > > > Another aspect interesting is that through this campaign we are also > > trying to mobilize new artists to cooperate with GNOME Project. > > > > There are other concerns, and this campaign was designed to be a generic > > campaign that would allow other campaigns to brew from this one, mainly > > to support GNOME through art. > > > > I am proposing with this campaign the following: > > > > 1. Give names to GNOME Releases based on endangered species which share > > strong points with the main features of GNOME. This is appealing to > > users and at some point allows the usage of a more catchy name for every > > release, thus we promote a social responsible cause and broaden our > > contributors to a new standard, including organizations which promote > > several endangered species through the donation of art and media such as > > high resolution pictures, movies, etc. > > This is also a great opportunity to advocate the usage of Free > > Standards. > > I like this idea a lot. We stopped doing release names a few > years ago, largely because of the controversy over naming one > of our releases "Temujin". Some people decided that choosing > non-controversial release names was near impossible, so we just > stopped doing release names altogether. > > This proposal would involve us making a value statement, and > that could cause some controversy. I'm not saying not to do > it. It's just something that people should be aware of if they > try to push this through. There could be pushback, and there's > some history. > > If I could make a request, could we not start with the Iberian > Lynx? Apple is well-known for naming their releases after cats, > and I fear if we started with a cat, the "endangered species" > theme would get lost, and people would just think we're copying > Apple. After we've established the theme, by all means bring > out the cats. I love cats. > > -- > Shaun > Shaun, Your arguments are valid, and of course I respect them. I am aware of Apple using big cats, but they use it because of their own reasons, we use them to alert people about the one nowadays problems, the extinction of certain species. I'm opened to further suggestions for names of endangered species. I've proposed this one, because I do know this cause. Remember that whatever name we choose there is supposed to be a background on it and a reason. The reason is that we want to sensibilize users about this or that species. Also remember that our users will be targeted by communication and explained that we use names of species that might disappear soon, and we dont use "big cats" names. Another point that is important in choosing the "species" we want to promote is that they share features that can be applied to GNOME. Remember our main goal is still advertising GNOME and lead people to join us, contributing, etc. Just for curiosity, the lynx actually is a smaller version of the leopard and shares the main features of the leopard combined with the speed of a cheetah. Don't forget that we're also giving projection to organizations that work day to day with this species, and no one can blame us for choosing this or that animal, because we need to find before support amongst this organizations. We ain't copying Apple, we're supporting a righteous cause for a gracious animal ;) Apple might be using big cats, but are they promoting any social cause with it ? :) Always open to suggestions, and remember, this isn't my campaign, it's GNOME's campaign, so I'll follow strictly the guidelines provided. I'm going to start working on selecting a couple of species so we have some options, and then someone will select one. We can even make this selection for marketing purposes, like launching a public challenge for our users and sympathizers to vote on a few, bringing more life to the project. I'm liking a lot the positive feedback. Before hand, we can establish this campaign for a certain number of releases and then change to another topic like Technology or something that is very common in people's day to day life, like "Space Exploration" I would recon that having NASA, European Space Agency and so on contributing with more raw art materials would also help. We need also to define a timeline for each campaign, so I start working on future campaigns. We can't spend 10 years advertising the same cause, we can relate a theme to each major release for instance, would sound so monolithic. Next Step: Gather a compilation of qualifying species for this theme. Will update soon. Nelson
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