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

Fri Nov 20 02:26:05 EST 2009

On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 4:10 AM, 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.

I would suggest that we tread carefully about public criticisms of
past and future partners.  The OLPC association led by Chuck Kane has
been making steady progress.

> 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.

Yes, many user focused projects depend on being pulled through the
distribution chain by disto level marketing.  Sugar represents a shift
in this paradigm.

david

> 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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>> 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
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>> Marketing at lists.sugarlabs.org
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>>
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