Marketing goal idea: Promote the platfom

[Juanjo Marín <juanjomarin96 yahoo es>]

Hi,

After the success of our new GNOME 3 desktop I think is time of do some marketing
of our new GNOME 3 plaform. Of course, we shouldn't quit of doing marketing for
 our shiny brand new desktop, but IMHO we should start doing some marketing for 
our plaform as well.

There are many reasons because and these ones come to my mind:

- Promoting the platform is good because it can spread the use of our 
technologies. Nobody will use it if they don't know about them. In short:  
they won't love them if  they don't know them.

- More developers using our technologies increase the chances of getting 
more contributors, even if they aren't in the FOSS business. It also means more 
visibility for the project.

- It could mean more business oportunities for the companies of the GNOME 
ecosystem.

How I think this can be done:

- Find out which technologies we want to promote

- Define the key values of our technologies in general and find the differential 
factors from other technologies. For example, I think for example multilanguage 
support is one of them and introspection is one of the words for explaining this.

- We need much better branding for our technologies. GTK+ is our most well known 
technology from our portfolio, it can be thought as our flag ship component, and 
even GTK+ is poorly "sold" to developers IMHO. Alberto Ruiz in 2008 GUADEC 
defined a simple plan to taking some good steps in the right direction. 

- Much better professional look. It doesn't matter the GNOME project doesn't 
sell these technogies or there isn't a company behind, like Qt and Trolltech/
Nokia. The information offered by GNOME about our technologies should look 
more professional and appealing, because our technologies have professional 
level and they are cool and competitive.
 
- Learning and teaching materials. We have technical manuals, but we lack 
of introductory texts about our technologies. The 10-minutes tutorials is a good 
initiative in this direction. I know also of the existence of some teaching material paid by 
CENATIC, the Spanish government entity for promoting FLOSS, used to teach GNOME
technologies. In summary: help people self-learning and help people to teach GNOME
by providing a good quality material.

- In the long term, certifications 


Who should care ?

- People involved in GNOME, as always :-)

- Support from the GNOME Foundation board

- Companies which sell services related with the GNOME technologies. It is worth 
to add information in GNOME pages about these companies but they should help to 
improve the quality and marketing value of GNOME technologies pages.  

- I think it needs also some technical assessment from the project leaders
 in order to include the GNOME project point of view.