Re: On breaking the woohoo barrier...thoughts on how GNOME can get great
Hi, On Thu, 20 Jul 2006 17:11:44 +0100 (BST) Paul Cooper [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: At the risk provoking a further rant, I suggest having a look at the latest SuitWatch from Doc Searls, http://lists.ssc.com/pipermail/suitwatch/attachments/20060720/b35fd219/attachment.cc wherein amongst other things Doc questions whether traditional marketing is viable any more. In case you're interested in a different position, here's a quote from Jono Bacon [1]: Since my entry to the Open Source community, I have seen developers evolve. Back in the early days, developers were largely code heads who cared for nothing but code. Many of these developers wrote awesome code, but produced terrible websites, ugly interfaces and terse documentation. If Doc Searls' thesis about the viability of traditional marketing is correct, why are OSS projects that care about this traditional marketing more successful than those who not? IMHO, in the field of FOSS, marketing is done more often by developers; some of them excel here -- think Firefox --, others don't. Or as Jono puts it: Some evolve! And maybe one should add: Others don't! Stated differently: Why should the GNOME project care about usability if its motivation is not to ease the life of as many people as possible? And is this not marketing? I've never really understood why so many people seem to listen to Doc Searls. Maybe, that's because he tells geeks what they would like to hear? Well, his points may hold within the area of geek2geek products but they should not be generalized -- and the text you pointed to has a strong habit of over-generalization. ;-) Cheers, Claus [1] http://www.jonobacon.org/?p=720 -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: On breaking the woohoo barrier...thoughts on how GNOME can get great
Hi Claus, Claus Schwarm wrote: snip If Doc Searls' thesis about the viability of traditional marketing is correct, why are OSS projects that care about this traditional marketing more successful than those who not? I think you have the cart and the horse in the wrong order there. What has happened is that while maturing, free software has not just changed the way we produce software, it has also changed the way we market it. From spreadfirefox and firefox flicks through the phenomenon of blogging software producers (Sun, 37signals, mozilla (again), but also GNOME, KDE, ...) free software has changed the entire culture of software over the past 10 years, including its marketing. The most successful free software products are the ones who have been leading this change, they are the ones who have clued in to the cluetrain the quickest, and who have added the slightest amount of order and direction to the massive community of users around the projects. Cheers, Dave. -- David Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: CEBIT Expo 2006 GNOME Booth
On Tue, 2006-07-25 at 15:29 +0200, Murray Cumming wrote: Hi Murray; There's a possibility that we might have a GNOME Booth at CEBIT Eurasia, and we might need GNOME Event Box for that event. Expo is 5 days long, and it's possible that we will there for 5 days. Expo starts at 5th of September, and people will start setting their stands starting at 2nd of September. Can you please tell me the availability of GNOME Event Box for that event? If you can ship one to Turkey, can you please tell me the average cost and customs information about shipment from Germany to Turkey (if possible)? Baris, yes the event box seems to be available for that time. But I doubt that we would be able to ship it to Turkey easily. We would probably have delays and costs at the border. It generally does not cost astronomic amounts. And you generally get items from customs easily (if you list the ingredients completely). (I had shipments from different countries of Europe before). Is it possible to ask for UPS, or DHL about such a delivery? Forgetting about hardware, do you have some booth material handy to ship to us? Like GNOME Poster, lanyards, t-shirt etc? Shipping them might not cause any customs problem. Feel free to CC marketing-list. Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: CEBIT Expo 2006 GNOME Booth
On Tue, 2006-07-25 at 15:29 +0200, Murray Cumming wrote: Hi Murray; There's a possibility that we might have a GNOME Booth at CEBIT Eurasia, and we might need GNOME Event Box for that event. Expo is 5 days long, and it's possible that we will there for 5 days. Expo starts at 5th of September, and people will start setting their stands starting at 2nd of September. Can you please tell me the availability of GNOME Event Box for that event? If you can ship one to Turkey, can you please tell me the average cost and customs information about shipment from Germany to Turkey (if possible)? Baris, yes the event box seems to be available for that time. But I doubt that we would be able to ship it to Turkey easily. We would probably have delays and costs at the border. It generally does not cost astronomic amounts. And you generally get items from customs easily (if you list the ingredients completely). (I had shipments from different countries of Europe before). Is it possible to ask for UPS, or DHL about such a delivery? UPS have an online calculator. But I need a postcode/Zipcode in Turkey (I guess it is in Istanbul.) Forgetting about hardware, do you have some booth material handy to ship to us? Like GNOME Poster, lanyards, t-shirt etc? Shipping them might not cause any customs problem. There is a big GNOME foot poster, but I am currently trying to get it back from Sven Herzberg. He's a pain. Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Map of gnome.org content
Here is a draft map of the current wgo structure: http://live.gnome.org/GnomeWeb/CurrentWgoStructure It was generated by running `tree -L 3 -d -I CVS` over the gnomeweb-wml module. I will try to create a new version over the actual website directory as soon as gnomeweb-wml is actually buildable again (perhaps someone could fix that too?). This should give some indication about what content we currently have, and shed light on some lesser known locations. Obviously, the projects directory is likely to be moved out of the tree during this revamp, but I have left it in this structure so that people can see the sheer volume of content it contains. I will talk to the sysadmins to see if they have anything to advise on moving the projects directory out of gnomeweb-wml. -Thomas -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: On breaking the woohoo barrier...thoughts on how GNOME can get great
Hi, Dave! Open Source is useful in a number of ways but there's no need to exaggerate its influence, especially not because some projects re-invented a known wheel after they threw the existing one away. As a very simple example: Traditional marketing theory tells you to care about the distribution of your product. Firefox cared about it, and made it as simple as possible for its potential consumers: it offered a binary package taht worked on most distributions IIRC. Could you imaging Spreadfirefox's success when they would have offered a source tarball, only? Do you really think, some people blogging about the new, cool browser would have had any effects when people were required to compile Firefox first? But that's how the majority of open source projects deal with distribution. Seems to me traditional marketing considerations are still working: Firefox is one of the most successful open source projects ever. ;-) However, the main point is: Neither Open Source nor the Internet removes the basic economic and psychological circumstances that determines marketing; they merely change the rules slightly. Whether or not one of these technologies influences what you do depends on the market you're in. And I already wrote that the points made by Doc Searls seem to fit a geek2geek market very well. Cheers, Claus -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: On breaking the woohoo barrier...thoughts on how GNOME can get great
On 7/25/06, Claus Schwarm [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I've never really understood why so many people seem to listen to Doc Searls. Maybe, that's because he tells geeks what they would like to hear? yes, exactly. we geeks love to hear these optimistic things about supposed geeky revolutions... just as we like to ignore obvious facts like most of the population not having internet access, most of internet traffic going to the same old mass media conglomerates, most of new media (blogs etc) not having 1/100 of the old media's audience, and most of the biggest companies not giving a damn about this revolution, but still selling / profiting like crazy (using this old marketing that supposedly doesn't work anymore)... http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/01/1433206 no matter how hard we geeks like to pretend old communication and marketing (the ones we don't like, the ones most of us don't understand) are dead, they're still alive and kicking (and healthy!). last time i checked, uncool non-bloggy microsoft was selling much more than your cool distro of choice. -- Santiago Roza Proyecto Tiny ERP Argentina Departamento I+D - Thymbra [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Experiences with these CMSs
quote who=Quim Gil The decision must be made also having in mind the context for next releases. Aspects as user integration with other web tools we are using, integration of eCommerce/donation system and CRM tool are also relevant. Neither of those things (including the CMS itself) has to be part of how we approach and maintain wgo. I think that's a red herring requirement. - Jeff -- linux.conf.au 2007: Sydney, Australia http://lca2007.linux.org.au/ It is said that there are only six jokes in the world, and I can assure you that we can only broadcast three of them... - John Watt, the BBC's Head of Variety in the 30's -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Experiences with these CMSs
El dt 25 de 07 del 2006 a les 11:27 +0100, en/na Thomas Wood va escriure: I still don't think we should rule out a good build system that creates static pages. As Greg requests, can the people in favor of keeping the current system make an evaluation of the requirements, as we are doing with the new CMS candidates? http://live.gnome.org/GnomeWeb/CmsRequirements About the current system, I'm specially concerned about: * a comfortable framework for editing content (commits are showstoppers) * full text search (we would need a tool for that) Also about * shall provide feeds (RSS, Atom, etc) and the goals * Own channel for publishing the official news of the GNOME project * Single gateway to all the news sources provided by the GNOME subsites Perhaps we could have all the news related stuff under news.gnome.org, manage them through a CMS fully equipped with feeds features, tags and all the marvel dynamic pages can offer to news related sites (i18n here wouldn't be a problem since news are a one-shot work easy to track, with no further editing/updating) My last but not least concern is the homepage, that shouldn't be static. Au contraire, it should reflect everyday all the activity and life generated in the GNOME project. But static PHP (or something) managed with the current system could provide a vivid homepage operating with the dynamic data spread through the GNOME subsites, isn't it. Perhaps the core reason why I think the current system is not enough is the possibility of having a 'myGNOME' alike experience being a registered user and getting the information and services tailored to my interests. Olav, Anne, Journalist A, user B, ISD C etc would get different homepages and perhaps also different wgo structure. But well, none of this belongs to the current release goals and they are not even agreed goals at all. I don't want to introduce red herrings, nor I want to stop thinking in the big picture. I hope my obsession for migrating to a good CMS is more understandable now. However, I realize the current system evolved could be a reasonably good choice for the strict wgo if we solve the content edition problem. IMO this is more important than the i18n problem, since there is no point having a good solution for translating if you don't have a good solution for publishing first. -- Quim Gil /// http://desdeamericaconamor.org | http://guadec.org signature.asc Description: Això és una part d'un missatge, signada digitalment -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
