NB taking off other lists, but -project I see few related aspects, where/how we could improve generic awareness about Debian
1. although twittering and other tiny-news networking is useful on its own, I think that we should aim at bigger picture... When do people hear about Debian in general? when it hits the headlines of the news. When does Debian hits headlines of the news? when major event happens, e.g. * Release (~once in 2 years) * Freeze (~once in 2 years) * Elections (once a year) * Announcement about debconf (once a year) * Major security issue comes up e.g. openssh RNG -- thanks god quite rare in those cases, attention, positive or negative (as in the later) gets diverted to Debian. Otherwise despite having some news, Debian remains in its own bubble as far as I could see it as the insider. So what could improve our appearance: * Having Debian CUT -- more release announcements * ???? 2. Another line, which shakes news lines across different media is presentation of Debian at the variety of big big expos and conferences. It provides good opportunity for targetted exposure of Debian, but alone, as Andreas pointed out, seems to be not enough. Moreover, most often Debian is exposed on IT events to those who already know about Debian, thus just showing that we are still alive without really bringing any fresh blood. Exposure at Med@Tel, and other specialized conferences (e.g. our NeuroDebian booth at SfN 2010 [1]) in our experience does bring more attention of outsiders. Partially additional complication is that usually noone invites us to those conferences, so booths do not come for free and someone needs to cover the expense. 3. In Debian we have a number of great sub-projects which are not properly exposed even within Debian itself. I have once suggested to float all the blends up to the main Debian page to make it at once look appealing and specific to a broad range of specialists. But I failed to generalize the proposal, so it hasn't worked out yet. Having 1. in mind -- Release Notes -- every subproject should have clear and catchy release goals accomplished listed in the release notes. Our section on "Comprehensive support for neuroimaging research" surprisingly caught quite a bit of attention whenever squeeze came out. Although some considered it as yet another geeky side of Debian, many people saw it as the true universality of Debian carrying about various fields of endeavor. What I was leading to: we have great stuff in Debian, it is underexposed, and whenever Debian is exposed great stuff is often hidden. Thus we need a line of presenting Debian at higher level of granularity than twits, more of little blog articles, providing high-level descriptions (not installation instructions) in the fields of endeavor which Debian has already covered quite extensively. May be something like "Debian cookbook" but without step-by step instructions. Debian blends tasks pages probably provide necessary level of groupping and just would require human interpretation into a coherent articles describing specific field, why Debian is good for it, what Debian provides (brief outline of functionality, alternatives, future) with accents on security/stability/ease of installation, where it is possibly used already, etc. And then having it as visible on Debian planet upon initial publication of the post (which might get refined through its lifetime). Upon Debian release, all those could be bundled to accompany the release in one, hopefully exhaustive, "book" to guide various newcomers from different fields into the world of Debian wheezy. How about that? [1] http://neuro.debian.net/blog/2010/2010-11-24_booth_sfn2010.html On Sun, 10 Apr 2011, Yaroslav Halchenko wrote: > Hi Andreas, > Thanks for sharing! > On Sun, 10 Apr 2011, Andreas Tille wrote: > > "byte space" by using twitter so that I'm convinced that it is a > > reasonable thing to ignore this medium - I could perfectly imagine to > > twitter any uploaded Debian package. Something like > > Uploaded <pkg> <version> - <shortdescription> > FWIW: Debian is known to twitter: > http://twitter.com/debian > And for NeuroDebian we have exactly that -- brief announcements on new > releases made available: > http://identi.ca/neurodebian > http://twitter.com/NeuroDebian > So it would only be logical to get DebianMed and DebianScience out there. -- =------------------------------------------------------------------= Keep in touch www.onerussian.com Yaroslav Halchenko www.ohloh.net/accounts/yarikoptic -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20110411134230.gg7...@onerussian.com