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

Fri Nov 20 05:55:33 EST 2009

I've said this many times before, it's an assessment, necessary in
order to improve the situation.

And there has indeed been improvement - I am working with Ed now. For
example I had a hand in Nicolas' rebuttal to the recent PCPro piece.

Sean

On Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 8:26 AM, David Farning <dfarning at sugarlabs.org> wrote:
> 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
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> 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
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>>>
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