[Marketing] SoaS change in engineering direction: marketing questions

[Walter Bender]

On Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 10:16 PM, Mel Chua <mel at melchua.com> wrote:
> SoaS engineering just proposed a major change-in-direction for the
> upcoming (Mirabelle) release. See
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/soas/2010-March/000906.html

Thanks for bringing this up with the lists.

> Some questions for the Marketing group about this idea, based on
> discussions with Sean today (Sean, are we missing anything?)
>
> 0. Sanity check - what do you think about this notion in general? We
> apologize for the time crunch, but Beta Freeze is coming up on Tuesday,
> March 23rd, and we need to have a clear notion of our forward path by then.

The two options we discussed last night bear repeating:

(1) Making Mirabelle a "Fedora Spin" vs (2) making Mirabelle a demo
for teachers and parents and others wanting to try Sugar.

#1 will presumably lead to more long-term stability and #2 will
presumably lead to more short-term testing and feedback from
end-users. But as we discussed last night, we could do #1 (and adhere
to the Fedora deadline) and make a remix (when the activities are
tested) to serve the purposes of #2.

> 1. There was concern expressed that a SoaS image that doesn't have a lot
> of Activities "out of the box" would be less optimal for demo purposes.
> Is there a need for instructions on how people can make their own "demo
> sticks" with more Activities (any Activities they want)? Can this need
> continue to be filled by Strawberry and/or Blueberry until the next
> release (in November 2010)?

I think that "people" is a very small subset of our potential users.
So we need to acknowledge this. The typical end user has difficulty
even managing LiveUSBCreator, so to expect them to do a remix is not
realistic. Asking them to use Strawberry and/or Blueberry is fine, but
this will not help re user feedback on Mirabelle. Making a Mirabelle
remix available soon after the Spin seems a more fruitful path.

>
> 2. How can SoaS engineering keep track of development releases in a way
> that makes sense to us (for instance, this change would be a significant
> departure from the past releases, and would therefore warrant a full
> version number) while not interfering with Marketing's plans? (We
> realize this release would not be marketed to users - it would be used
> as a recruitment tool for contributors instead.)

I leave this to marketing. But maybe the spin is 2.x and the remix is
3.0? or we just keep 3.0 for Cloudberry?

> Feedback? Questions? Comments? Firestorm?
>
> We'll be tinkering further on this over the weekend - we can do another
> kickstart on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, so we have 3 drafts left to
> figure this out with. Please join us (sdziallas & mchua on #sugar) and
> ask questions if you have any, or join in and help if you have ideas on
> how to improve this.
>
> Thanks,
>
> --Sebastian and Mel
> _______________________________________________
> Marketing mailing list
> Marketing at lists.sugarlabs.org
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/marketing
>

-walter

-- 
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org