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

Thu Nov 19 08:03:57 EST 2009

On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 11:10, Sean DALY <sdaly.be at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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 ).

Just added Sugar to the file in git, guess it will take some time to
be up in the site.

http://git.gnome.org/cgit/gnomeweb-wml/commit/?id=4045050c0fe6094124c064aad53f8b90224e012b

> 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.

Crazy idea: could we trade mentions of GNOME in our marketing stuff
for mentions of Sugar in their community stuff?

> 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.

Maybe we could make it an article in a publication such as LWN?

> 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.

Yes, this sounds like something worth doing.

> 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).

I'm not sure many actual contributors read paper publications, AFAICS
those are targeted towards enthusiasts and beginner developers, but
people already in this world go directly to the sources (developers'
blogs, mailing lists and publications such as LWN).

> 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 :-(

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federico_Mena has supported us from the
beginning and is one of the most respected GNOME hackers. He has shown
us in the GNOME hackfest in Bolzano that he keeps an interest in Sugar
so I would say he's the best one to approach at first. Other people
who have been involved in Sugar development and are active in the
GNOME blogosphere:

John Palmieri: http://www.j5live.com/
Dan William: http://blogs.gnome.org/dcbw/
Dan Winship: http://danw.mysterion.org/
Chris Blizzard: http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/
Behdad Esfahbod: http://mces.blogspot.com/

And I'm sure I have forgotten someone.

Regards,

Tomeu

> 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
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> desktop-devel-list mailing list
>> desktop-devel-list at gnome.org
>> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> «Sugar Labs is anyone who participates in improving and using Sugar.
>> What Sugar Labs does is determined by the participants.» - David
>> Farning
>> _______________________________________________
>> Marketing mailing list
>> Marketing at lists.sugarlabs.org
>> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/marketing
>>
>

-- 
«Sugar Labs is anyone who participates in improving and using Sugar.
What Sugar Labs does is determined by the participants.» - David
Farning