[Marketing] getting involved: doing us a favor

[Sean DALY]

Thanks Mel

Actually I think Walter has the best handle on this - each profile
needs a Sugar Story, one of us explaining what motivates us,
communicating our passion and willingness to accept the challenges.

We've had difficulty starting this up dues to our workload (and
perhaps also because of the risk of clubby mutual backslapping), but
perhaps a way to get this going is to just post a quote from one of us
under each profile? From the Real Person?

I've said before that the profiles aren't ideal - there should be
Communicator for marketing/PR/publicist, in its absence we sort of fit
marketing into Content Writer (reductionist from a marketing POV) and
People Person (ideal profile for manning a booth, but not really a
description for event planning or marketing). Marketing (especially
with ultraminimalist budget) involves first and foremost creativity,
not tasks to do. A marketer will naturally stick her nose into other
(non-marketing) aspects to work towards objectives and the tasks are
done because we have our eyes on the prize. Whatever skills any of us
lack is quickly made up for by getting someone in the community with
the skills to help out.

In the end I'm not at all sure the pigeonholes are useful. The "grid"
seems to assign heavy workloads; there is no emotional argument or
call to action. I think we'd be better served by communicating our
ideals, for changing the world and bettering education and
opportunity, then listing major objectives; under each of these, a
line or two saying "We need someone to help us...", signed by the Real
Person. Potential contributors will want to contact a person, not a
"team" or an "alias"; it's key to make ourselves easily contactable I
think.

Group photos from SugarCamps could be enormously helpful, the smiles
on our faces showing that we like working together :-)

Sean




On Wed, Jun 17, 2009 at 11:59 PM, Mel Chua<mel at melchua.com> wrote:
> Inspired by a discussion with Caroline on IRC the other day.
>
> I was looking at
> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Labs/Getting_Involved, and... I think
> my biggest comment is "how can the page be designed so as to make it
> clear that they're doing us a favor - not an imposition - by participating?"
>
> Several years back, I met a professor once who was writing a textbook
> and beta-testing it with his class, who would have the homework of
> reading it and working problems. Not unusual. The interesting thing was
> that the assignments were phrased something like this: "I'm writing this
> textbook, and would love reviews; your assignment is to look at this and
> point out my mistakes, where I'm being confusing, where the problems
> aren't teaching you the material effectively - you're the expert on what
> makes a textbook good for you."
>
> He said he got far better - and far more - responses than the usual
> "this is your homework; do these problems." The implied subtext to that,
> especially for some newbies, is "and if you have a hard time, it's
> because you're dumb, because We Know Stuff and our materials are Perfect."
>
> So how can we make it clear that beginning participation and telling us
> about the questions and the troubles that they have in contributing
> isn't any trouble for us - and that in fact, we really like it?
>
> --Mel
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