(Also posted to marketing-list.)

My last email, on April 1st, mentioned that "my main TODOs today, this weekend, and early next week are to follow up on press contacts, the eReleases blast, and GNOME Journal." So I did that; that day, I got the eReleases press release out, and it went to more than a thousand publications. And then here's a list of what I did last week on GNOME:

• Corralled answers for journalists. A few journalists asked me followup questions after the press release, so I got answers from other GNOME people, wrote answers, replied to the reporters via email and phone, and put these answers on the wiki (Talking Points).
• Managed the GNOME Journal launch. Nagged the last few authors, edited articles for content and style, uploaded them, fought with Textpattern, continued planning to move us to WordPress, and sent out the publication announcement. I'd still love for people to continue publicizing this, since there are many interesting nuggets that I haven't seen picked up by the larger press.
• (Started planning the next two issues of GNOME Journal, including hopes for a 3.x roadmap article in case anyone wants to write it.)
• Did a teensy bit of web testing and feedback regarding gnome3.org. Great job!
• Went to the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit. There, I talked up GNOME 3 to reporters and other interested Linux folks, and made contact with some KDE people and started talking about publicity for the upcoming desktop summit. It sounds like we should be working to drum up attendance now, by planning special events, trumpeting rare speakers, and publicizing the unique benefits of attending GUADEC & the Desktop Summit.
• Attended the marketing/PR training at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit (thanks for setting it up, Dave!). I sure did learn a lot, from strategies for resource-constrained projects (build relationships with five key reporters) to tips for being interviewed. I will link to Cloer's slides and add my notes when she puts them up.

Undone: I didn't put tasks in Bugzilla because they were moving too fast and I was in San Francisco, many timezones away from Allan in Bangalore, and couldn't coordinate effectively. Lesson for next time: do it early if we're going to do it at all. Similarly for setting up interviews with key GNOME developers; I dropped the ball there.

Now that we've launched, I talked with Allan about how to best use the rest of our contracts (we're booked to work on GNOME till the end of April). We think our priorities for the rest of April are:

(a) reach out to not-so-news-driven (more in-depth-reporting) journalists about aspects of the release that didn't get covered on launch day -- once we get some bites, prep developers who have volunteered, and get them interviewed

(b) write up lessons learned & ideas for next time

(c) infrastructure building & maintenance: update the wiki, consolidate audiovisual and textual resources, and otherwise help prep for future marketing, including press releases, talking points, etc. for the launches of GNOME 3 within distributions that will come out in the next weeks & months

So I'm going to make some progress on each of those this week. Specifically, I aim to reach out to two reporters, braindump a few lessons learned privately, and confer with Allan Day and Vincent Untz about resource consolidation. And I'm planning on pushing GNOME Journal's next issue forward, in collaboration with Paul Cutler, but that's not part of my contract since it's not GNOME 3-specific. :-)