Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
GNOME Marketing Hackfest 2010, Day Two
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2010 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
On Wednesday morning, starting around 9:30, we broke into small groups to work intensively on video, GNOME Ambassadors, and the website. For example, Bharat, Vincent, and I started a business card template for GNOME Ambassadors, and Licio, Ryan, Stormy, and Bharat worked on the Ambassador brochures and website.
I had planned on starting some group discussion and knowledge sharing when the momentum lagged in the late morning. But it never did! So our first real break happened when Jose Felix Ontanon and Juan Jesús Ojeda Croissier joined their fellow Seville technologist Lorenzo Gil Sánchez to talk with us about accessibility work in the Andalusia region of Spain.
We did make a lot of progress in the morning: a GNOME 3 website mockup, a marketing brochure template, four video scripts, Ambassador website text,
preparations for the 5-minute topic presentations, and other useful discussions and writing/communications.
After a lunch with them and with local officials and community, we heard a presentation from the city regarding their Digital City initiative. Some interesting facts:
- The proposed Art and Tech center will include four Fab Labs (as part of a hackerspace/business incubation strategy)!
- About a third of Zaragoza's university students are doing technical degrees.
- Open broadband plans include a Wi-Fi mesh network with free access in strategic public places, plus WiMax for municipal use.
- Additionally, a low-cost citizen's card will give Zaragoza citizens access to more Wi-Fi, plus city bicycles.
I believe another hackfest participant will be linking to that presentation pretty soon. After that, Paul & Stormy met with the Spanish a11y mavens to talk about how GNOME can help the community & municipality get the publicity & feedback they need to make their FLOSS a11y & GNOME initiative a success, and talked with Vincent and the local municipality about similar possibilities. (Whew!) Jason tackled some screen-recording issues. Andreas designed an SMS fundraising card for Bharat's proposed SMS fundraising initiative, and began designing the brochures that Bharat, Vincent, & Ryan continued writing, and Licio is writing GNOME Ambassadors material. I turned the next 2 months of GNOME 3 launch TODOs to http://live.gnome.org/ThreePointZero/MarketingRoadmap and people who want to grab ownership of or ask about a task should pipe up on IRC or the mailing list!
So our afternoon was pretty full. Even though the hackfest was supposed to end for the day at 7pm, people stuck around till the building closed 90 minutes
later! I threw together some plans for tomorrow; we still need to have certain
substantive discussions, and to make certain execution plans.
The Zaragoza and Aragon governments kindly picked up our lunch and a dinner at Birosta. The three vegetarians in the hackfest especially enjoyed a meal full of vegetables and free from anxiety.
I again want to thank all the organizations that are sponsoring this event: the Zaragoza Municipality, the Aragon Regional Government, the GNOME Foundation, the Technological Institute of Aragon, ASOLIF and CESLA. Also, the GNOME Foundation covered much of the cost of my travel here. So, thanks!
More reportage tomorrow...
