Re: Marketing Minutes December 13, 2012

["Karen Sandler" <karen gnome org>]

On Fri, December 14, 2012 1:57 pm, Allan Day wrote:
> Thanks again for the minutes, Emily.

yes! :)

> 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).

Very strange, but let me know if you want me to set up another test call
if you want to try and troubleshoot it. Also, as I was telling Flavia, I
can call one person and conference them in too. Maybe someone else on the
call can also do that next time so that we get everyone who's having
trouble.

> 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

Oliver Propst was on the call (heavensmile), I don't think Olav was.

>> 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.

I love this - as I mentioned on a different thread, I'm working on putting
together a series of interviews of GNOME users, starting with greggKH and
Brett. Do you know of any other awesome folks we should feature?

> 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.

Perhaps one thing we can do is put together a wish list of simple things
we'd like to see done, sort of a GNOME love approach to marketing. That
way when newcomers ask for things to do we have a whole list to choose
from. We'd have to make it all things that are not very time sensitive,
but even just listing articles or interviews we'd like to see written
could be a good start.

> 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.

We talked at this meeting about inviting designers and developers to our
calls maybe on a monthly basis. If you wanted to help organize that it
would be awesome!

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

Our actual outreach efforts (mostly around OPW and GSoC) have been really
successful, maybe we need to highlight that more too? I don't think we
ever really did anything with the materials that were prepared at GUADEC
even by the newcomers...

karen