Re: Outward facing media [Was: Goodies for GNOME 3.0 launch parties]

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me>]

On Sat, Jan 29, 2011 at 6:12 AM, Allan Day <allanpday gmail com> wrote:

I fully agree. We don't have the capacity to produce original content.
Linking to existing material is a good way to go for the time being [1].

Producing original content is pretty difficult, look at the ups and downs of the GNOME Journal.  To do it you have to be constantly aware of what the project is doing and be able to think 'oh, that might be interesting to write about'.  Sometimes it's not apparent. I've been bullying people to write articles for awhile.  Getting them to do it is an interesting problem.  Some people react well to just being told to write one without given a choice, others require a little finesse.  I've employed both with some measure of success.
 

One way we can do this is through our microblogging channels. I've been
doing a bit of work to develop these in recent times... if we want to
take this further, there are a couple of things we can do:

First, get more people involved. Right now, our bus-factor [2] is
extremely high. If microblogging is going to be a proper part of our
communications strategy, it needs to be stable and reliable. Any
volunteers?!

Well students are a pretty good target.  You could recruit people on facebook and twitter possibly.  People love being asked to join something because that person asked them to especially younger people.  A mild stroking of the ego if you will.  Target the people who have it running and are enthusiastic about it.
 

Second, we could tie our microblogging feeds into other channels, both
as a way to get more people following them and as a means to get that
content to people who don't use a microblogging service. Displaying our
feeds on our web-sites is one obvious possibility here. I'm sure there
are others though.

 I'm two minds of that as I like the current page, but it also has no attraction since the news is not always updated.  Having a p.g.o feed and twitter feed would be neat.  Also the ability to highlight p.g.o posts on twitter and facebook would also encourage greater readership.

[1] The difficulty with this is that much of the content that we
currently generate is written for people who already know GNOME. The
reason for a channel of the kind that I described in my previous mail is
to explain how GNOME works to external audiences.

Well, you could talk to lwn folks as one part of your media strategy.  Secondly, if you want to write articles outside of people who know GNOME then I suggest we try to break into areas where our concept of work flow design would be advantageous for that industries like manufacturing, medical, help desk, industrial design and so forth.  For instance, I would have a GNOME Journal issue talking about GNOME 3, and then we send those to various conferences outside of the usual FOSS conferences we attend.  Send the Journal or maybe some marketing stuff to those organizers and ask them to put it some place visible.  Even a looping slide show on a computer would be awesome.  Everyone thing we send out there should focus on one thing, get them to join the GNOME facebook or twitter.  I generally prefer twitter since it takes effort to go to the facebook page.. I never get any alerts when someone posts something on there.  But twitter.. you put a post on facebook page and use twitter to highlight it.

Some ideas off the top of my head.

sri