Re: Short slide decks for use in GNOME community presentations

[Brian Cameron <brian cameron oracle com>]

Vikram:

>     My name is Vikram Vaswani and I work with Initmarketing, the open
>     source marketing agency (www.initmarketing.com
>     <http://www.initmarketing.com>). We've been working with the GNOME
>     Foundation for the last few weeks to build a set of modular slide
>     decks for community members to use when making presentations.

These look great.  I understand these were provided as consulting work
for The GNOME Foundation.  Note that the GNOME Foundation did recently
announce an interest in receiving bids for doing additional GNOME
Marketing related work, perhaps with more of a focus on GNOME 3.

Overall looks really good.  Some comments I have...

Template:

- The "GNOMETemplate" file downloads as a binary blob without an
  OpenOffice extension, as just "GNOMETemplate" instead of
  "GNOMETemplate.odp" or whatever the suffix should be.

- Considering GNOME 3 is a big release, maybe a "Try out GNOME 3"
  slide to encourage users about the new release would be something
  useful to include.

- Should the "Sponsored By GNOME" page also include a link to
  http://live.gnome.org/CodeOfConduct/SpeakerGuidelines?

- It might be good to encourage people to license their presentations
  showing how to do so with a good free license such as CC-BY-SA 3.0
  http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

  Can these templates be released under a good license like this?
  A license could go near the beginning of a slideset after the
  title page or at the end, I'd think.  It could just include the
  CC license logo and a sentence highlighting that the presentation
  is released under this license.

Accessibility:

- I think that this slide deck lacks good use of branding the GNOME
  logo to the accessibility project.  Only the term "GNOME" is used
  on the slide title.  This slide does does do a good job of listing
  out the various GNOME accessibility programs.  Perhaps using the
  GNOME logo on these pages to clearly highlight that these are
  programs in the "GNOME" accessibility suite would help.  Also,
  perhaps a page declaring and defining what "GNOME" Accessibility
  means specifically.  Now that KDE is adopting the "GNOME"
  Accessibility infrastructure, it is perhaps a bit confusing what
  parts of A11Y are GNOME cross-desktop and which are not.  This
  slide deck could discuss what "cross desktop" means a bit more.

  I think this page has a cool GNOME branded a11y logo that would
  be nice to include in this slide deck, I think.  Perhaps removing
  the "Outreach Program:" text from the top or just using it in ways
  that relate to "reaching out".

  http://projects.gnome.org/outreach/a11y/

- The Accessibility slide deck says "The GNOME Accessibility project
  develops and fosters compelling free open source accessibility
  solutions for graphical user interfaces."

  The term "graphical" should probably be removed.  The accessibility
  project also supports tactile user interfaces (e.g. braille displays).
  Or perhaps this could be reworded to highlight that a11y interfaces
  do not always relate to graphics.

  Slide 3 says "Winner of numerous rewards".  Which ones?

  Slide 4 says "Available to other desktops".  I understand what you
  mean, but I'd think this could be explained a bit more clearly to
  avoid confusion.  Which desktops?  Available how?

  Slide 6 says "Mouse tweaks" which is an application while the
  other bullets are all general categories.  Might be better to
  explain what "Mouse tweaks" does rather than its name.

  Slides 7-12 could use a bit more description.  What does "Mouse
  only access" mean?  What is a "Screen reader"?  Why does "Head
  Movement" relate to accessibility? seems the sorts of questions
  I'd expect people to have seeing these slides.

  Accessibility is very much a humanitarian project.  A slide
  showing a photo of someone who benefits from GNOME accessibility
  with a quote or something would be a nice way to add a bit
  more humans into the slideset.

- The resources page should contain a link to a top-level a11y
  page like http://projects.gnome.org/accessibility.  Perhaps
  users can figure out there are screencasts there without
  needing to provide the most specific link.

- The Accessibility slide deck doesn't have any page asking
  people to become Friends of GNOME.  Considering that accessibility
  probably has unique opportunities for seeking donations to help
  the disabled, it might be useful to have a slide that reaches out
  to people to donate to improve free software a11y tools.

Applications

- It is important to many people that GNOME interoperate with some
  popular non-GNOME programs such as Firefox, Thunderbird, GIMP,
  OpenOffice, Flash, KDE applications, etc.  Some of the organizations
  providing these programs are a part of The GNOME Foundation and
  community, so it would be nice to highlight this relationship.  A
  page that discusses how well GNOME integrates with such popular
  programs would be nice, perhaps with a caveat that support does vary
  between distros.

- I think PDF support is an important feature to many people, so
  evince might be nice to discuss.

- It might be cool to highlight that GNOME media programs make
  use of the GStreamer engine which supports plugins for popular
  non-free media formats (such as MPEG, Windows Media, etc.) via
  vendors like Fluendo.  Then it could be made more clear that codec
  supports works well across all GNOME media programs.

- Why only discuss audio media programs?  Perhaps a videoconferencing
  program like ekiga would be good to highlight more.

- GNOME does have an "Office" suite.  Should we highlight
  this better, or perhaps organize those "Office" programs this
  slide already talks about so they are more clearly branded as
  "GNOME Office"?

  http://live.gnome.org/GnomeOffice

- I like how the programs graphics are used.  Why not use graphics
  where programs are discussed in the "Accessibility" slide?

Developers:

- I do not like the use of the term "Rule".  A lot of them do not
  really seem like rules.  "Examples are good!" or "Learn from
  documentation" are not really rules.  These seem more like Guides or
  Best Practices.

- Would it be good to highlight the process for how a module can be
  accepted into GNOME?  Perhaps a mention that it must meet certain
  requirements such as a reasonable plan for accessibility support.

- Should we highlight some general information about how GNOME manages
  licensing?  What licenses are normally used by GNOME, whether we
  require copyright assignment, perhaps an opportunity to highlight
  the benefits of being a free software project a bit more specifically.

- Additional resources to consider adding:

  http://developer.gnome.org
  http://live.gnome.org
  where to find developers on IRC,
  the "Getting Started" web page http://www.gnome.org/start, etc.

Contributing

- On the Marketing tab, could we use the "Spread the word" image
  instead of the text which is conveniently also green.

  http://live.gnome.org/GnomeMarketing

- Perhaps a Resources page like in the "Developers" slide deck would
  be useful to have here also.