On Sat, Oct 16, 2010 at 22:26, Fernando Parra <[email protected]> wrote: > > I agree with this POV, Our main goal must be capture as many as possible > non-linux users, no cannibalize the same linux users from other distros.
Well, no, it's not, either way. (at this stage or it would be as a side effect) Please, let's focus. Mageia.org main goal is to build a community revolving around an ambitious, great Free Software project, empowering back all contributing people/companies (relationships, skills, knowledge, new appetites, technologies, products). Here and now, it is a Linux distribution - and that's something really large; right now, it is building and releasing a Linux distribution from a technical and process point of view (before December) and preparing coming February FOSDEM. Building this progressively with sound and efficient processes, plus attracting great contributors is the mean by which we can make something great and enjoy it. That's not a guarantee but a requirement. Attracting a lot of users is a consequence of... well, many things, some of which we can influence on. Partly through our contributors. It's somehow a goal as well to grow our user base, in that we hope that what will be built will be useful and liberating to many. Targetting such a very specific set of users may be done later, if it's not designed within the initial roadmap, either through a specific community initiative, either through a specific company that builds partly on that (say, a derivative from - or complement for - the Mageia main release). And such a specific initiative may or may not be of use to upgrade the next roadmap of the project (that's how we can expect several teams contributions to integrate into the main release anyway). Note that it's not a matter of marketing versus developers or users versus packagers here. It's a matter of who gives the direction and coordinates. No team takes precedence over another, Council and Board being here to articulate the whole thing, vetting proposals from here and there. Yes, teams and people making them are excellent (so we expect); yes, teams proposals/works may be excellent. No, that won't prevent us to say no to great work or great people, if it does not fit. > What should we do? Whatever it takes! (According to our values) Your sentence may just be equivocal - so, just to make sure... Mageia values barely promote a "whatever it takes" attitude. ;-) Anyway, I repeat here what I wrote above in other words: * first marketing effort to be here is _not_ defining what type(s) of specific users we would target or package the product for; a product that is not yet even built: "1. bake some cake you like; 2. present it to others; 3. learn from that; 4. repeat"; * first marketing effort to be is toward the contributors community (development, packaging, design, translation, qa, doc, triage, users return & feedback, communication, marketing, facilitators); first has been the announcement, about one month ago; next has been the values publication; next are the logo/identity ideas around that we expect to focus, next are the mission, vision, roadmap docs, missions for each team as soon as we setup collaboration platforms; that takes time, attitude, determination, adjustments; * if this effort can not be properly accomplished with and toward existing contributors, nothing else planned may ever make potential contributors tick, even less end users; moreover, it would fail at its most critical role: educating all contributors about marketing pieces relevant to them and to the project; * we take the following approach: - we first design and release prototypes for ourselves, with high enough expectations to go forward; - we try/find good experiments to understand if that matches other people needs or expectations and how; - so we refine and deliver; - iterate. We won't build the project identity and roadmap at once; it will always be an iterative process that will consolidate. Our identity won't be so much from what we planned it to be than from what we deliver and how we do it, over time. That doesn't prevent listening, analyzing and drafting things in relation to users (and including them actively in the iteration process), that just means that we have to spend a few months to build and to learn about ourselves before we can only expect to learn/project about others (such as target users we don't have a single consistent clue about but disparate opinions on, see previous discussions about targetting users). Cheers, Romain
