[ubuntu-marketing] Fwd: [Fwd: FCN submission - your reaction, please]
-- Forwarded message -- From: Rubén Hubuntu [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Sun, 8 Jun 2008 13:43:14 +0200 Subject: Re: [ubuntu-marketing] [Fwd: FCN submission - your reaction, please] To: John Botscharow [EMAIL PROTECTED] I believe the best selling point we will ever have is freedom. It's price is right, it's ethical and a technologically superior software methodology. We use ubuntu because we care about freedom! R On 6/8/08, John Botscharow [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Sorry, I sent this from the wrong address. - Original Message Subject: FCN submission - your reaction, please Date: Sat, 07 Jun 2008 21:49:18 -0500 From: John Botscharow [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: ubuntu-marketing ubuntu-marketing@lists.ubuntu.com What follows is an article - rough draft which I just wrote as a possible submission to FCM as a My Opinion piece. Since it was inspired by the marketing team meeting earlier this evening my time), I'd appreciate your opinion and comments before I submit it. Excuse any typos as I have not yet proofed it. My eyes are too tired. Time for my drops and an hour or two in a dark room. I'll cgeck back later to see if anyone comments and to see what else is going on here. - -- Peace! John - - ARTICLE TEXT --- I am writing this post because of my experiences today at my first meeting of the Ubuntu marketing team using IRC chat. One of the topics near the end of the meeting was a brief discussion of various communication technologies the team currently uses, the same technologies used by the rest of the Ubuntu community and its various sub-communities. I want to address the issue of communication from the perspective of someone who is new to Ubuntu and Linux, but not to open source software, which U have been using for almost 20 yearsm first Mozilla and then OpenOffice as well as others. I am also going to address this issue from the perspective of someone who is not a developer, just a nornal computer user - like the vast majority of people who use Windows. I also want to address this issue from the perspective of someone who has a visual disability and who wants to be an active member of the Ubuntu community, and especially the marketing team. Up until a couple of years ago, I was an online marketing consultant and writer, something I did for about fifteen years, so I think I speak with a certain amount of expertise and experience. I am also a writerm abd have been one online for almost twenty years, first writing marketing articles and more recently articles on religion and politics. I also have avery strong academic background in the social sciences, which gives me a certain level of credibility when talking about group dynamics and scoial behavior. My comments about communications within the Ubuntu community need to be understood against the background of fixing Bug #1, in other words, taking away some of Microsoft's overwhelming share of the operating system market. I joined the marketing team bvecause I an committed to doing that. To give my commitment to that bug fix some credibility, even though I have only been a member of the Ubuntu community for a little over a month, and a member of the marketing team for almost exactly a month, I have become an Ubuntero. Now, it seems to me that Ubuntu, like the other Linux communities that I have had some experience with, is comprised in a very large part of software developers of varying degrees of experience and expertise. And the primary focus of the community is in improving the product - the Ubuntu operating system. That is probably the way it should be, to a certain extent. But, no matter how good a product is, and I personally believe that Ubuntu is far superior to anything Microsoft has ever turned out, if people are intimidated by the community of users, then the average person will NOT be receptive to that product. And, to be honest with you, I have found my first month of being a member of this community very intimidating and very frustrating. To actively participate in this community, I have had to join a number of mailing lists. As someone who used Windows for 20 years and all the issues that come with using email on Windows machines, I learned to be very gun-shy about email, even with PGP signatures, although that does help. I stopped publishing my newsletter using email five years ago and switched to RSS. And I set up a number of forums for people to discuss issues within my site communities. Those are STILL the technologies I use today on my site and I love them. The people in the Windows universe who will be most receptive to switching to Ubuntu will be people like me - those who hate and fear the security vulnerabilties of Windows. But then they come here and discover that the things they learned to be most wary of, like email, are the most widely used technologies here. Arguing
Re: [ubuntu-marketing] Fwd: [Fwd: FCN submission - your reaction, please]
Hello, concerning this part of the message: Even if we focus our efforts on helping the LoCos or other parts of the Ubuntu community by providing resources for their marketing efforts, our ultimate focus has to be outside the community. We are trying to convert people from Windows to Ubuntu, not from the default desktop to Xubuntu or Kubuntu or even from RedHat to Ubuntu. Our primary focus should always be on the Windows user and on showing them the benefits of both the product and the community. I'd like to remind what we discussed and decided yesterday on IRC, about the marketing team's goals ( Provide resources to assist and encourage LoCo's in marketing their release parties to the wider community. was one of them.) and, more importantly, the long discussed mission statement: The Marketing Team strives to create the building blocks needed by the Ubuntu Community to spread Ubuntu throughout the world. So if the primary focus of every marketing active Ubuntero should indeed be on showing the benefits of the product and actually *doing the marketing*, the primary focus of _this team_ should, in my opinion and following what we decided, be to provide all the necessary resources and inter-marketeer contacts to do this at its best, not on-terrain work if you see my point. After discussing the matter we agreed that this was the best and most effective way of contributing to solve bug #1, for now. A saying says: If you don't know where you're going, you'll end up somewhere else. That is why we had the meeting, and I believe that the success will greatly lie in not losing out of sight what the team's mission actually is. (Reminder: Setting up the necessary and long-discussed infrastructure, which is to be used by the marketeers, aka. anyone who talks or advertises Ubuntu, anyone basically; individuals, Ubuntu teams and LoCo teams included.) Of course, once we have achieved this goal, our mission statement will be able to change slightly, moving on to the maintenance of the infrastructure, and there will be more space for real actions, on-terrain marketing itself. But let's not precipitate us and take on one objective after the other. I think we should focus our efforts on the current objective we set ourselves yesterday, then move on to a broader one, once we have achieved it. In a ll cases, we should wait for the meetings summary on https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MarketingTeam/Agenda before leading further discussions, so that we are all talking in accordance with the outcome of the meeting. Best greetings, pep, Pierre Vorhagen. Rubén Hubuntu a écrit : -- Forwarded message -- From: Rubén Hubuntu [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Sun, 8 Jun 2008 13:43:14 +0200 Subject: Re: [ubuntu-marketing] [Fwd: FCN submission - your reaction, please] To: John Botscharow [EMAIL PROTECTED] I believe the best selling point we will ever have is freedom. It's price is right, it's ethical and a technologically superior software methodology. We use ubuntu because we care about freedom! R On 6/8/08, John Botscharow [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Sorry, I sent this from the wrong address. - Original Message Subject: FCN submission - your reaction, please Date: Sat, 07 Jun 2008 21:49:18 -0500 From: John Botscharow [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: ubuntu-marketing ubuntu-marketing@lists.ubuntu.com What follows is an article - rough draft which I just wrote as a possible submission to FCM as a My Opinion piece. Since it was inspired by the marketing team meeting earlier this evening my time), I'd appreciate your opinion and comments before I submit it. Excuse any typos as I have not yet proofed it. My eyes are too tired. Time for my drops and an hour or two in a dark room. I'll cgeck back later to see if anyone comments and to see what else is going on here. - -- Peace! John - - ARTICLE TEXT --- I am writing this post because of my experiences today at my first meeting of the Ubuntu marketing team using IRC chat. One of the topics near the end of the meeting was a brief discussion of various communication technologies the team currently uses, the same technologies used by the rest of the Ubuntu community and its various sub-communities. I want to address the issue of communication from the perspective of someone who is new to Ubuntu and Linux, but not to open source software, which U have been using for almost 20 yearsm first Mozilla and then OpenOffice as well as others. I am also going to address this issue from the perspective of someone who is not a developer, just a nornal computer user - like the vast majority of people who use Windows. I also want to address this issue from the perspective of someone who has a visual disability and who wants to be an active member of the Ubuntu community, and especially the marketing team. Up until a couple of years ago, I was an online marketing
