Re: Goodies for GNOME 3.0 launch parties

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me>]

On Tue, Jan 18, 2011 at 6:18 AM, Allan Day <allanpday gmail com> wrote:

Frederic Muller wrote:
> Dear marketing,
>
> Last foundation IRC meeting we touched on the Foundation approval of
> some budget for goodies to teams that will celebrate GNOME 3.0 on the
> release date.

Great stuff! I'm looking forward to hearing the details of this (as well
as trying to bag me some goodies)!

Yeah, same here.  It is possible I could throw one in Portland. This is after all open source central here.  I need to figure out how to do the logistics of it.  I should probably see if I can get some help with organizing from the local Linux community.
 

> How shall we announce this (and where)?

Planet GNOME, Identica, Twitter, www.gnome.org... any others? (I'm
interested in this too.)

Someone already mentioned facebook.  But there seems to be one or two others.  What about Orkut?  I believe that is still fairly popular in latin countries.

> In fact I am also interested in a more generic question which is how do
> we usually use our channels to announce stuff? I tried to motivate
> people with the T-shirt contest but didn't receive much feedback except
> from the people I contacted personally. How do we actually usually
> promote stuff outside of the GNOME community? (I thought GUGs would be a
> good way, but they seem a little bit sleepy ;) ).

Good question! I've been thinking for a while that GNOME needs an
outward facing media channel. The Planet and GNOME News are primarily

Well, GNOME Journal had the design of doing that since the articles were geared for both inside and outside of our community.  I'm not quite sure what a media channel like that is supposed to look like?  Sure, Planet and GNOME assume a particular set of knowlede/idioms and what not.  Would you have enough content to constantly use that channel that isn't release information on GNOME modules and what not?  I think that's what you're trying to say here, right?

 

places where we talk to ourselves. www.gnome.org is outward facing and
has a news section, but it isn't primarily a news site (you certainly
can't subscribe to it)... A blog or news site where we talk to our
partners and to GNOME enthusiasts would be a great way to promote GNOME
and to keep people in tune with where the project is going. It'd need
volunteers if it were to become an enduring reality, of course...

By partners I assume you mean distros like Ubuntu and Fedora?   Yes, it will require quite a bit of work.  Generating content is a lot of work with a set of volunteers.  Especially when apps for instance tend to be similar in scope.  You have a lot of mail clients, a lot of panel replacements and so forth they aren't particularly interesting for a working family, a family with kids and so forth.  The apps tend to reflect a demographic in GNOME that isn't quite in tune with families.  Perhaps I'm just being cynical.  As I grow older I'm not as enamored of panel replacements or funky widgets like I used to be.  I am interested in how GNOME will make my life easier by generating recipes for dinner, providing me with a list of news in the morning to read, keeping in touch with relatives and friends, reminding me that I have a doctors appt today (I really do have one), or the latest sports scores in the teams I'm interested in.  I want those apps.  If you want to market to GNOME enthusiasts, it's not just the desktop itself which we want to fade in the background as much as possible, but the apps it generates.

Food for thought.

sri