[Marketing] Fwd: Proposal: "What's new"

Thu Nov 19 05:10:59 EST 2009

Yes, it's very clear there's lots of work to do. Misperceptions about
OLPC and by extension Sugar Labs are deeply rooted, we're paying the
price for OLPC's past unwillingness to combat misperceptions about the
project.

Sugar unfortunately does not even rate a mention on the GNOME-related
project listing ( http://projects.gnome.org ).

I've been on their press list for awhile, but they seem to just be
getting started.

I have seen some work on marketing and PR strategy, in particular
related to the 3.0 launch next year, but like us, their marketing team
is small.

Historically speaking, weak branding by KDE and GNOME have
unfortunately contributed to the very marginal GNU/Linux desktop
market share these past ten years. I'll elaborate on that in a post
soon. Marketing remains an afterthought in most FLOSS projects, with
unsurprising results. Their brand weakness means press release
mentions may not have any effect on developers (and none if any on
users), that said release note mentions (which are regularly read by
developers) would probably work better.

Sugar doesn't get mentioned on their marketing list, but I have just
joined that one too rather than just look at it from time to time. I
have found that speaking up occasionally in the Fedora and openSUSE
marketing lists is productive. The Ubuntu marketing team has
unfortunately been disorganized for awhile, although there is a recent
effort over there to work on that.

A thread like below is absent from both the GNOME marketing and press
lists... as so often happens, developers aren't talking to marketers
:-(

Recruiting developers is a very specific problem. I've recently come
to believe that probably the best way to reach free software
developers, aside from meeting with them in person, is to get
technical articles into GNU/Linux-oriented publications. All the
developed countries have at least one and sometimes 2 or 3 titles,
monthly or bi-monthly. Articles about the development environment,
with code... which means written by developers, with all their free
time available (I know, I know).

Perhaps the very best way to shift this quickly would be for a
respected GNOME hacker to blog about Sugar? I don't know any :-(

Sean

On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 9:56 AM, Tomeu Vizoso <tomeu at sugarlabs.org> wrote:
> Looks like GNOME is currently trying to organize their marketing efforts.
>
> Wonder if this is a good opportunity to exchange references in our
> press releases and also to increase interest in Sugar from GNOME
> developers, who are the people in this world best prepared to
> contribute to Sugar's software development.
>
> I think it has been clear after Bolzano that GNOME developers: don't
> know what Sugar is, don't know what Sugar Labs is, don't know that SLs
> is volunteer based, don't know that Sugar is being used by >1 million
> children, don't know to which point Sugar is based in GNOME, don't
> know that OLPC is _not_ shipping Windows, etc. and also that a notable
> portion of them are very interested in helping out once they know
> about us. Has this been the impression as well of other Bolzano
> attendees?
>
> Regards,
>
> Tomeu
>
>
>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Paul Cutler <pcutler at gnome.org>
> Date: 2009/11/18
> Subject: Re: Proposal: "What's new"
> To: Patryk Zawadzki <patrys at pld-linux.org>
> Cc: desktop-devel-list <desktop-devel-list at gnome.org>, Murray Cumming
> <murrayc at murrayc.com>
>
>
> I really like this idea, especially as we think about GNOME branding.
>
> One of the topics at the Marketing Hackfest last week was around our
> branding and how we partner better with the downstream distributions.
> I think this gives us a unique opportunity for users to think of
> "GNOME" and seeing the work we're doing upstream.  This may also tie
> to another idea around how we can incorporate Friends of GNOME
> opportunities as well.
>
> I don't know if this would actually make it easier to write release
> notes - it may make it harder as the release notes would probably have
> more detail than something like this, so in some ways we're adding
> work.  I really like how Fedora did their one sheet release notes via
> PDF for Fedora 12 [1] - something high level like that is what I would
> see here.
>
> Paul
>
> [1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_12_one_page_release_notes
>
> On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 4:23 AM, Patryk Zawadzki <patrys at pld-linux.org> wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 10:47 AM, Murray Cumming <murrayc at murrayc.com> wrote:
>> > On Wed, 2009-11-18 at 10:12 +0100, Patryk Zawadzki wrote:
>> >> Goals? Two really. One - to make it easier for users to discover newly
>> >> introduced features.
>> > I don't believe that most people care much, partly because they don't
>> > upgrade that often. This would be clearer if we had real personas to
>> > talk about.
>> >
>> > People who do care generally find the release notes online already.
>>
>> Not really. A lot of people have no idea what GNOME is. They just
>> launch the application (or rather click on a document and the app
>> "launches itself"), see that it looks slightly different and sometimes
>> get curious as to why it looks different.
>>
>> Several times in the past I've read through NEWS and ChangeLog files
>> just to tell someone what the exact changes were.
>>
>> >>  Two - to make it easier to write GNOME release
>> >> notes.
>> > The UI clutter seems like a high price to pay for the slight possibility
>> > that this would help with writing release notes.
>>
>> I wouldn't call adding a _third_ option to the menu that usually
>> contains "Contents" and "About..." clutter.
>>
>> Even if it is clutter, we can still add it as a section in the manual.
>>
>> --
>> Patryk Zawadzki
>> _______________________________________________
>> desktop-devel-list mailing list
>> desktop-devel-list at gnome.org
>> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
>
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>
> --
> «Sugar Labs is anyone who participates in improving and using Sugar.
> What Sugar Labs does is determined by the participants.» - David
> Farning
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