Marketing Activities at GUADEC

[Allan Day <allanpday gmail com>]

Hi all,

For most projects and companies, the annual conference is an
opportunity to generate lots of media and tell the world about the
cool things they are doing. We've never really managed to do this with
GUADEC, and that has always seemed like a missed opportunity.

Ideally we would be doing live microblogging from the event, and have
regular posts describing the keynotes and summarising the highlights
from each day. Really these things should include a mixture of text,
photos and even video.

The challenge is that, with all of us busy during the conference, who
is going to do all this marketing work?

We discussed this during yesterday's marketing meeting, and the idea
was floated of getting those people who have been sponsored by the
GNOME Foundation to each do a shift as marketing volunteers. I think
that is a fine idea, although there will be more sponsored people than
slots, and not everyone has the best written English.

Thinking about this, we probably need the following:

 * Keynote blog posts - x4
 * Day summary blog posts - x4
 * Live microbloggers - x8 (assuming one for each morning and afternoon)

The hard part is also ensuring quality control - we need someone
trusted who can review each post and edit as appropriate. One way we
could do this is have duty editors also - for each day we would have
someone who is "on call" to review and post. These editors wouldn't
need to be at the conference, of course (and it might be easier if
they're not).

This will all require that we can be sure that there will be Internet
access, of course.

If this sounds like a reasonable plan, I can put a schedule on the
wiki and we can try and recruit people to fill the slots.

Allan