Re: Marketing Minutes December 13, 2012

[Allan Day <allanpday gmail com>]

Thanks again for the minutes, Emily.

I was unable to attend the meeting, due to not being able to dial in
again (this time I kept being told that the PIN was wrong).

Emily Gonyer <emilyyrose gmail com> wrote:
> Minutes from Marketing Tele-Conference, December 13, 2013
>
> Participants: Sririm Ramkrishna, Karen Sandler, Andreas Nilsson, Emily
> Gonyer, Alan Day, Olav Vitters, Flavia Weisghizzi
>
> Topic: Community Outreach/Development
>
> Sri: Theres a common wisdom that GNOME will throw out features and are
> unfriendly. We've let others tell our story for us. As a result, most
> of the press we receive is negative, focusing on GNOME 3's failures
> and shortcomings.
...

I don't think it's actually that hard to figure out what we need to do
to improve the perception of GNOME and GNOME 3. There are lots of
examples that run contrary to the negative discourse that has been
circulating - you don't have to look far to find people who love GNOME
3, or to find developers and designers who are receptive to feedback
or who are doing cool stuff.

It might be an obvious point, but GNOME contributors don't actually
conform to the way that they are often described. Our task is to let
the world know about the great side of GNOME that people don't often
hear about, by sharing positive stories about GNOME 3 and our
community. That can be through writing blog posts, talking to the
press, sharing posts on social media channels (either personal
accounts or the GNOME ones), or by participating in forums and mailing
lists. We also need advocates who can liaise between our core
contributors and the disparate communities that are interested in
GNOME.

The difficult part is finding people to take on all these tasks, and I
actually think that growing and sustaining the GNOME marketing effort
is the biggest challenge that we face: we need to focus on how we can
grow the GNOME marketing effort. The telephone meetings are a
fantastic start here, but we need to do more.

One thing we obviously need is critical mass - a few core contributors
who can drive things forward by coordinating activity and by enabling
and encouraging people to participate. We also need our contributors
to feel motivated and valued. One possible way we could help with this
would be to invite designers and developers to come and speak to the
marketing crew as a part of regular meetings (I'd be happy to help
organise that). Another thing we should think about is how to give
exposure to marketing contributors. Things like having identifiable
authors on gnome.org could really help. It could also be good to have
regular activity reports on the list as a way to celebrate the work
done by our marketing contributors.

What do others think? What can we do to grow the GNOME outreach effort?

Allan
--
IRC:  aday on irc.gnome.org
Blog: http://afaikblog.wordpress.com/