Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

08 Mar 2011, 13:59 p.m.

Writing, Delegating, Researching: Marketing GNOME 3

Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2011 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 So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it!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.

Allan and I discussed some near-term priorities today in #marketing, so I'll document them here (and on the marketing list).

panorama shot of the Zaragoza hackfest room by Jason D. Clinton Allan this week is concentrating on release notes. He feels he has a good handle on what to write for the user side, but would like more input on what's changed for developers, so he wants advice/contacts on how to get that. I've suggested he do a session in #gtk+ or some other popular IRC channel and crowdsource some rough bullet points. He's also working on the Porting Guide -- as of today, he's working with Shaun McCance and the docs team. (This is part of our marketing to distributions.) We're hoping to coordinate with the docs team on this during their May hackfest.

He's already blogged/emailed what he's done so I won't rehash.

Sumana: Between my last note and now, I chased distribution marketing, clarified the role of the release roadmap, started a press release, got a CiviCRM account and started accumulating press contacts, chased video from launch parties and restarted the conversation about GNOME 3 videos, communicated & thought with Brian and Allan about promoting FLOSS and not promoting unfree software, reached out to potential volunteers (including on foundation-list), and recruited and edited articles for GNOME Journal's Issue 23 (GNOME 3.0 issue). And then today Allan and I hashed out some priorities in #marketing.

Sumana next to the crossed-off TODO items from the Zaragoza marketing hackfest, photo by Paul Cutler This week, to balance Allan's focus on two big things, I intend on doing a lot of smaller things.

  1. Get into CiviCRM and input our press contacts, start seeking the ones we want but don't have (Ars Technica, Wired, TechCrunch, O'Reilly online) in collaboration with Zonker
  2. Continue drafting 2 press releases, 1 for a Linux-specific crowd (like LWN) and one for a more general tech crowd (like Wired)
  3. Try out the GNOME install of Collabtive and see if Allan and I should switch our task management to that, or to Bugzilla (trying to track tasks in live.gnome wiki tables is not my idea of pleasant)
  4. With a little input from Allan, start setting up another GNOME User Day for late March
  5. Ask Licio to chase marketing localization
  6. Continue recruiting and editing GNOME Journal's GNOME 3 edition
  7. Reach out to docs team and other potential volunteers
  8. If I have time, chase videos/screencasts
  9. If I have time, some wiki cleanup
This is a lot and so it might change if more pressing matters come up, but I think it's a good place to start. Thanks again, GNOME community, for the opportunity to work on this!

(photos from last year's marketing hackfest in Zaragoza, Spain)

Comments

korbe
http://identi.ca/korbe
08 Mar 2011, 15:48 p.m.

The marketing for Gnome 3 will not be easy, starting with some blogs thath say it's a "crap" or "broken by design" without any constructives arguments and impartial reviews.

I try as I can to defend Gnome 3, in trying to start a constructive debate, but I'm a bit alone for do this. So, if some peoples can try to help me it will be very cool.

korbe
http://identi.ca/korbe
08 Mar 2011, 16:43 p.m.

@Capsiplex:

You ask about the marketing or about my comment ?