Re: community managers
Jon/Dave: On Fri, Nov 16, 2012 at 10:50 AM, Dave Neary dne...@gnome.org wrote: On 11/16/12 11:28 AM, William Jon McCann wrote: I was attracted to the GNOME project because of the vision and because I was excited by it. [...] I continue to be inspired by it - going on 10 years now. Inspired enough to put up with a lot of negativity. It's good for your karma. :) Despite how some would portray it, this vision is shared by the current core contributors. You'll find evidence of this everywhere, if you look. That said, we should do more to make it explicit. Make it clear. Not because of threads like this but because we are proud of it. Because we want to shout it and we know people will respond. I agree GNOME Rocks! We can be different, have different ideas, have different goals, and still be friends. Sharing where it is mutually beneficial but still appearing separate and distinct. Standing on our own, proudly. With individual rights and responsibilities. I very much agree. You and I, for example, have had many differences over design choices relating to GDM, yet I also respect the significant amount of work you do leading the project. Friendship is more like a spectrum than an on-off switch, so I think it can mean different things amongst different people, but I am proud to be associated with so many brilliant GNOME engineers. George Lebl, the maintainer of GDM before me, indicated in his source code comments that the believed that fixing crack gave one a certain license to introduce more. Modernizing GDM has broken configuration features and caused pain for users. Criticism aside, I do think George would applaud the fact that GDM is finally ported to using sensible interfaces like D-Bus. While the new GDM is a step back in certain ways (such as XDMCP support since you cannot launch the GDM chooser from the GUI anymore), I think it was overall a step in the right direction. I am not sure if this lack of XDMCP chooser support breaks LTSP, though I wonder. Interfaces like GTK+ and the entire GNOME Platform have had a stellar ABI stability over the years, yet stability seems to be breaking down recently. I think ABI stability and providing existing users important updates like security fixes are important parts of project management. GNOME should accept that interfaces exposed to users, such as theming interfaces, need to be better supported if we want to build a stronger relationship with the actual userbase. GNOME will benefit from the stronger interface stability that comes with maturity, but now is probably a good time to consider what configuration interfaces should be more stable, such as GTK+ theming, obviously. In the GNOME 2 cycle, it was GNOME 2.16 before GNOME really started being usable when HAL started fixing a lot of serious desktop bugs and GStreamer started being used. I would say that GNOME 3.6 is already much farther along than 2.16 was at its stage in the development cycle. So, there is progress. :) I have absolutely no problem with Cinnamon. I think I give them more credit than you do. They took a name, on purpose. To differentiate themselves - to allow people the freedom to choose a different user experience. They have different goals. A different appearance. Different behaviors. A different future. And that is fine. Does the GNOME community have a plan for how to deal with providing GNOME 2 users important fixes like security bug fixes? By making a small committment to release new GNOME 2 tarballs with security updates as needed and making sure that updates to things like D-Bus do not break the GNOME 2 experience, then I think GNOME maintains stronger control over the GNOME 2 source code. People should want to use the GNOME source code repository if that's where they get security fixes. Does the GNOME community have any recommendations about how a distro should deliver a secure GNOME 2 experience? I think it's a shame that Cinnamon users don't realise, for the most part, that they are using GNOME Shell, and the rest of the GNOME 3 stack How could they be expected to realize unless GNOME were to support them with the GNOME brand. GNOME provides too little guidance to distros that use GNOME, such as OLPC, about how to reference the GNOME brand in their products. Or do you think GNOME should not work to encourage the GNOME brand gets effective placement in products that use it? It is not a shame that users aren't concerned with or interested in implementation details. That is as it should be. We welcome it. Users are concerned, though, with brands. The implementation detail of how GNOME makes effective use of its brand is something of their concern. How do you think Cinnamon should use the GNOME brand? We are not sending any message other than: We are deeply sorry that we could not agree on goals. We are always willing to have a conversation about how we may find common ground. We respect your difference of opinion and your right
Re: push back on negative articles
On 08/20/12 09:00 AM, Stormy Peters wrote: On Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 12:36 AM, Olav Vitters o...@vitters.nl mailto:o...@vitters.nl wrote: As stated before: you can disagree what you want. But do so nicely. You've given no arguments, just focussed on trying to rile emotions. Such behaviour is not acceptable here. So bye. Olav, I respectively disagree with you. I think Larry's emails were fine. +1 While it is important to push back on negative articles, we should focus on finding positive ways to respond. I agree that it would be good if we could find more ways to focus media attention on how upcoming releases, like 3.6, have been addressing real user concerns, bugs, and complaints. GNOME 3, like many new technologies, has been controversial. Public opinion will sometimes challange our technical leadership, and that is probably a good thing. While I found some of Bruce Byfield's criticisms to be over the top, many of his concerns did seem fair. Also, I found that I most disagreed with Bruce about points where I could understand him being misinformed. Many of Bruce's most serious concerns seemed to be about the future of GNOME Fallback. I think the GNOME community could set these kinds of concerns at rest easily by making a reasonable commitment to support the userbase that wants it. The GNOME community could, I think, be more clear and proactive about how GNOME 2 and GNOME Fallback will be supported going forward. But, in the long run, we can never be reminded too much to focus on our end users, who we strive to keep things simple for. Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Annual report - ready to print (almost)
That link does not work for me, but the following one does and I see this version was updated just today: http://andreasn.myownb3.com/temp/annual-report.pdf Brian On 07/23/12 07:24 AM, Andreas Nilsson wrote: On 07/23/2012 01:35 PM, Karen Sandler wrote: Well, we need to just get this printed and maybe we can add this for the web version? Andreas, thanks for working so hard on this! Can you send the final copy to Chema so we stand a chance of getting a few print copies asap (we can make do with just 20 or even 15 for the adboard meeting, I think)? Print ready version is now on: http://andreasn.myownb3.com/andreasn/annual-report.pdf Now I need to run and catch my flight! - Andreas -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Annual report - ready to print (almost)
Andreas: Designed and ready, now ready for proof reading before we print it. http://andreasn.myownb3.com/temp/annual-report.pdf Would it be possible to include a photo of the board members? Are there no group photos of the board? Perhaps ones that aren't scary: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=670619 I think it would be good to attribute the photos. It is interesting to understand that some of the photos were contest winners and represent GNOME users from various parts of the world, to understand what event the large group photos were taken, etc. Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Announcing Board of Directors Elections 2012
Foundation Members: Anyone considering running for the board should read this: http://vote.gnome.org/overview.html On 05/16/12 09:10 AM, Tobias Mueller wrote: Just a quick reminder that as per http://vote.gnome.org/2012/rules.html the last day to announce candidacies and submit summary statements is this Sunday, the 2012-05-20. Thanks for the reminder, Tobias. Already several exciting candidates have stepped forward, including: - David Nielsen (GNOME Community Volunteer) - Bastien Nocera (Red Hat UK Ltd) - Emmanuele Bassi (Intel Corporation) - Andreas Nilsson (GNOME Community Volunteer) - Joanmarie Diggs (Igalia, S.L.) Having worked closed with all these people, I highly recommend them all. It is great to see that 3 of these candidates are folks who have served as officers on the board before, a candidate who will represent the FOSS a11y community, and GNOME Community Volunteers. Yet, with only 5 people, more people need to step forward or we will need to extend the deadline. So, as we are rapidly approaching the 11th hour, I want to encourage those people who have been seriously considering running for the board to do so. The GNOME Foundation needs your help. There is a lot of work to do in the upcoming months. For example, it has been a tradition at GUADEC to announce the location of the next year's GUADEC event. The GNOME Foundation and the KDE e.V. board is currently working to put together a Press Release that will highlight our future plans. You should expect to see this shortly. Until then, it is not possible to start the bidding process for next year's event. So, we are running late on this. GUADEC planning like this is going to be the amongst the first big tasks that the new board will need to help with. Boston Summits and hackfests need to be organized. So, I am disappointed that to see that nobody who is on the GUADEC or GNOME.Asia organizing committees or others with event planning experience seem to be considering representing their teams on the board. Likewise, I think the board would particularly benefit from more representation from the marketing, usability, and design teams. I would like to encourage more GNOME Community Volunteers to consider running, and people with other affiliations (Lionel?). I would like to encourage people who are considering running to do so, and particularly encourage someone from Canonical (Rodrigo?) or Suse to consider. I privately encouraged Joanie and Max (from GNOME.Asia) to run and am especially happy to see you took the dive, Joanie. Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Website(s) todo list
Andreas: While foundation.gnome.org is looking much better, it seems really hard to find pages like: http://www.gnome.org/foundation/governance/ http://www.gnome.org/foundation/membership/ http://www.gnome.org/foundation/finance/ http://www.gnome.org/foundation/reports/ https://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard And the voting section used to be part of fgo, but seems unlinked at all from the fgo pages. The voting section still seems to use the old look and feel but is not listed on the TODO page: http://vote.gnome.org/ So, I think the foundation section has some TODO's remaining. Brian On 04/26/12 08:19 AM, Andreas Nilsson wrote: Just a quick heads up that I had a chat with Christy on IRC the other day and we came up with a short todo list for a bunch of our websites to make them fit in better with the new gnome.org site. https://live.gnome.org/GnomeWeb/ToDo There are a lot of open questions about how to make this happen for some of the sites (none of these are hosted anywhere in git that I know of, and some of them runs technologies that almost don't have any kind of styling system), but we'll try to grab some sysadmins and figure these parts out. Related to this, Elena Petrevska have been accepted as an intern to work on implementing the style changes to these sites during the summer, but if anyone else have experience with say cgit or mailman styling, I'm sure she'll appreciate any help she can get. Oh, and thanks to the hard work from Christy, we finally managed to release the new Friends of GNOME page, that not only is integrated in the wordpress system, but also have a donation process that is a lot more straight forward and allows you to make a donation with a fewer clicks compared to before. - Andreas -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: GNOME Annual Report Deadline
Telling us on the 24th that the deadline is on the 23rd? Is that an error? Brian On 03/24/12 09:17 AM, Emily Gonyer wrote: Hi everyone, just wanted to let everyone know that the deadline for reports for the 2010/2011 Annual Report is April 23rd. Please ensure all articles you are working on have been submitted by then! Thanks! Emily -- Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. - Goethe Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind. - Dr.Seuss Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. - Albert Einstein -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Annual Report Status?
Dave: On 02/28/12 03:47 AM, Dave Neary wrote: I hope I understand you correctly - are you suggesting that the annual report is somehow a brochure we use for sponsor AB recruitment? Yes, this was my suggestion. To be honest, I do not care if they are are a single or separate documents. I mostly think they should be harmonized so that the documents all look like they came from the same organization. I think we need to consider how we should modify the way we approach potential sponsors so that we only need to approach them a single time instead of multiple times. Having sponsorship options that better take into consideration how sponsors could be involved with both events would be an improvement. The current brochures on the table make funding both events at a Gold or Platinum level extremely expensive, for example. Is this sensible? While I think it is useful for that, because it's showing the value of the foundation, I don't think that's its primary purpose. I see it as our annual magazine, an opportunity to spread news about GNOME far wide. As you say, the Annual Report has multiple purposes. I think that adding a donation form targeting individuals might be a good idea, but I don't think that mixing advisory board budgets with the annual report is appropriate. I do not understand your point. Including some information in the Annual Report to highlight how organizations can sponsor upcoming events is just useful information and need not dig too deeply into the advisory board budgets. In fact, advisory board budgeting is necessarily very high-touch, hand-holding, and I wouldn't expect a brochure to impact that budgeting decision at all. I see the GUADEC brochure as being aimed at potential sponsors not on the advisory board, or as an infoirmational document for advisory board members. Either way, it is just a way to communicate a good starting point for discussion. A way to highlight the sponsorship levels and benefits. Personally, I think there is value in just having a single document for people to keep track of. But I am not opposed to multiple documents if people prefer, though they should look more like they were designed by the same marketing team. Also, I'm not sure we're in a position now to have a one-off what's our budget next year conversation with most advisory board members. We currently have no sponsors for either GUADEC or GNOME.Asia, both events happening in the summer. That's a conversation to have in August and September, when the annual budget is being finalised, not in March. So the GUADEC brochure may well end up being a useful tool for advisory board members too. We need to approach our regular sponsors anyway before the summer to get sponsors for our upcoming events this year. In other words, we will need to seek sponsorship around the same time we plan to have the Bi-Annaul Report done. Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Annual Report Status?
Emily: As for the Annual Report, what I'm hearing is a conflict somewhat in what the vision for the annual report is/should be. Do we want it to be an overview of what has gone on in GNOME over the last year (or in this case, two years) - ie the quarterly reports condensed into one report? Or do we want to focus on one or two 'important' areas of each teams work for the last year? I can see the benefits to each vision, and I'm honestly not sure which one is preferable, although I lean towards the second. The same answer may not be the right answer for all GNOME teams. The production of reports is very dependent on volunteer effort, so I think it is good to have a process that gives project teams some flexibility. Ultimately we want to communicate that we are a vibrant and productive community with a strong, positive vision. To do this, we do not need to include updates from every team, but focus on the ones that make a strong impact. The only real problem I see with it is time - if we want to get the annual report out within the next month, the second route will be much harder to accomplish. I think I should be able to read through the quarterly reports and hash something together for each team fairly easy in the next couple weeks, but writing completely new content/articles will take longer. Alternatively we can start contacting the bloggers as suggested by Dave and see if any of them would be willing to contribute, and go from there. I would recommend using the quarterly reports more as a guide to better understand which teams we should be contacting and pushing the hardest to provide content. I also like the idea of contacting bloggers and doing a call for contributions and inspiration from the GNOME community. Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Annual Report Status?
On 02/27/12 03:50 PM, Dave Neary wrote: IMHO, it's better not to have homework articles - if a team doesn't have anything compelling to write about, they shouldn't be in the report. +1 Though it is pretty sad if any GNOME team has nothing to report of anything done in the past 2 years, considering that's when GNOME 3 released. But we definitely should not be wasting our time waiting around for teams that cannot get their act together. Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Where is the Foundation vote page?
The following website used to have information about GNOME Foundation voting, election rules, and results of past votes: http://foundation.gnome.org/vote Where is this website now? --- Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: GNOME Journal Contributors
Emily: There has been talk of combining the GNOME Journal and the Quarterly Reports. If this could be done, perhaps we could merge the people who write articles into more of a single team. Have you discussed this with Emily Chen? Brian On 02/15/12 11:41 AM, Emily Gonyer wrote: Hi there, my name is Emily Gonyer and I'm currently working with the GNOME Marketing Team on the GNOME Journal. You have all contributed to the journal in the past and we are currently seeking articles for upcoming issues. If you would be interested in writing an article again please let me and/or the Marketing Team know. Thanks! Emily -- Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. - Goethe Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind. - Dr.Seuss Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. - Albert Einstein -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Gnumeric still available?
Another interesting point is that our lawyers recommended that we find ways to better associate the GNOME logo with various GNOME products. For example, we added a GNOME foot logo on the GNOME Mobile page so that we could make it more clear that the GNOME logo relates to mobile. It would be better if GNOME projects had a more clear relationship to the GNOME brand. The GNOME Office front-door is a particularly bad example of poor brand association: https://live.gnome.org/GnomeOffice It really isn't even clear if there is a GNOME Office suite, or if we are just recommending various cool free software. I'd only guess it is the former since it doesn't mention LibreOffice or OpenOffice at all. --- Brian On 02/13/12 04:09 AM, Dave Neary wrote: Hi, (list only, CCing marketing-list, setting follow-up there) On 02/13/2012 10:48 AM, Andre Klapper wrote: On Sun, 2012-02-12 at 16:22 -0800, Steve Talley wrote: I just went to your website, and it wasn't clear to me how to download Gnome, which I did some months ago, and which provided Gnumeric and many other free applications. If you go to http://www.gnome.org/gnome-3/ there is a Find out how to get GNOME 3 link at the bottom leading to http://www.gnome.org/getting-gnome/ which includes a Distributions section. If you would just like to download Gnumeric I would recommend http://projects.gnome.org/gnumeric/ as a start. This raises an interesting point about the GNOME web page - we don't currently provide an easy way to find/find out about GNOME applications (hosted on gnome.org) which aren't part of the GNOME desktop, outside of the few applications we promote on gnome.org/applications http://projects.gnome.org/ gives an index, looking through the list, some interesting apps we could promote are Abiword, Balsa, Banshee, Déjà Dup, Dia, F-Spot, GIMP, Gnumeric, GNU Cash, Hamster (although I think this is included in GNOME now?), Inkscape, Nanny, PDF Mod, Planner, Rhythmbox, Tasque, X-Chat... Some of these are not hosted on gnome.org - Banshee, GIMP, GNU Cash, Inkscape, X-Chat all have their own websites, and for good reason. Some of them are on Launchpad (Déjà Dup, for example). And several excellent GNOME applications (like Shotwell, SimpleScan, Sound Juicer, for example) don't get a mention on the progects.g.o page at all. It'd be nice if we could help these projects with their SEO and get them more visibility as the headline GNOME applications - those we know make users happy and have great integration and a decent degree of functionality and maturity. On that score, I would exclude Dia and GNUCash because they haven't kept up with the platform, but the others are all excellent GNOME apps. Perhaps gnome.org/applcations is the place for us to promote these applications? How can we do so in a sustainable and SEO-friendly way? We already promote some GNOME applications there - including apps like Cheese which are included in the desktop but which benefit from people knowing what they are. Cheers, Dave. -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Annual Report, GNOME Journal Quarterly Reports
Christy: I just spoke to Karen, and she leaves for FOSDEM tomorrow. We're thinking next Wednesday or Thursday, 2/8 or 2/9 might be good timing. They are having a mini-marketing meeting at FOSDEM on Sunday, and can report to us on that. We are going to work on setting up a meeting time with a scheduler (doodle.com http://doodle.com?) that will make it easy for us to individually declare which times will work for us. We will keep in touch- Is it not possible to schedule an IRC meeting during the mini-marketing meeting at FOSDEM? It seems good if people not at FOSDEM can participate in some way. Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Annual Report, GNOME Journal Quarterly Reports
Emily GNOME Journal Folks: On 01/29/12 09:32 PM, Emily Chen wrote: Hi Brian and all, I am working on the GNOME quarterly report for about one year, this sounds like a good idea to combine the GNOME Journal and GNOME Quarterly report. I am happy to work with GNOME Journal team to make things forward. How does everyone think about this idea? This sounds like a great idea. Who is working on GNOME Journal these days? I suspect that those people who normally work on GNOME Journal are probably busy helping on the 2010-2011 Bi-Annual Report. This Bi-Annual Report is the 1st glossy product of the GNOME Marketing team since the GNOME 3.0 launch. So, it would not surprise me to hear that GNOME Journal and/or the Quarterly Reports might be on of lower priority until the Bi-Annual Report is completed. That said, it still does sound like there should be more discussion and coordination between the Quarterly Report, Annual Report, and GNOME Journal people. Perhaps this could be a topic of an upcoming Marketing team IRC meeting? Also, a few months ago the GNOME Marketing Team was discussing having a hackfest, but there has been no discussion recently. There sure does seem to be a lot of work that would justify getting key GNOME marketing people together to push forward on these and other activities. Brian 2012/1/5 Brian Cameron brian.came...@oracle.com mailto:brian.came...@oracle.com Emily: I very much agree that the GNOME Journal and Quarterly Reports should be combined. I think it would make sense for the combined thing to continue as GNOME Journal and just stop doing Quarterly Reports. The Quarterly Reports have been useful tools in helping to make the Annual Report, so perhaps GNOME Journal could be enhanced to cover these topics instead of having a separate Quarterly Report. Also, it would be nice if we had a periodical that was a bit more focused on being something to share with the GNOME User's Groups. I think adding the User Group Report to the latest Quarterly Reports was an effort at providing more periodic information about what is going on in the GNOME User Group community. However, I suspect we could do more to make the GNOME Journal something that focuses on GNOME User's Groups as an important topic and audience. Brian On 12/19/11 11:30 PM, Emily Gonyer wrote: Reading through the old 2010 quarterly reports, they honestly remind me more of journal articles than straight reports like the more recent 2011 reports have been. As a result, I can't help but to wonder if we could somehow combine the future Quarterly reports with the GNOME journal in some way, thereby giving them more publicity. Perhaps ask folks to write about what they/their project are doing for the GNOME Journal and then we could summarize that into the quarterly report along with more bare-bones facts for the board/donors/etc? Also, any status report on the movement of GNOME Journal to gnome.org http://gnome.org http://gnome.org servers? Emily -- Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. - Goethe Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind. - Dr.Seuss Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. - Albert Einstein -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org mailto:marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/__listinfo/marketing-list http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Annual Report, GNOME Journal Quarterly Reports
Emily: I very much agree that the GNOME Journal and Quarterly Reports should be combined. I think it would make sense for the combined thing to continue as GNOME Journal and just stop doing Quarterly Reports. The Quarterly Reports have been useful tools in helping to make the Annual Report, so perhaps GNOME Journal could be enhanced to cover these topics instead of having a separate Quarterly Report. Also, it would be nice if we had a periodical that was a bit more focused on being something to share with the GNOME User's Groups. I think adding the User Group Report to the latest Quarterly Reports was an effort at providing more periodic information about what is going on in the GNOME User Group community. However, I suspect we could do more to make the GNOME Journal something that focuses on GNOME User's Groups as an important topic and audience. Brian On 12/19/11 11:30 PM, Emily Gonyer wrote: Reading through the old 2010 quarterly reports, they honestly remind me more of journal articles than straight reports like the more recent 2011 reports have been. As a result, I can't help but to wonder if we could somehow combine the future Quarterly reports with the GNOME journal in some way, thereby giving them more publicity. Perhaps ask folks to write about what they/their project are doing for the GNOME Journal and then we could summarize that into the quarterly report along with more bare-bones facts for the board/donors/etc? Also, any status report on the movement of GNOME Journal to gnome.org http://gnome.org servers? Emily -- Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. - Goethe Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind. - Dr.Seuss Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. - Albert Einstein -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: speaker schedules for conference
Tammy: Thanks. I was more interested at first if you could hold a conference in the DC area and if not, where are some of the conferences nearby the DC area for the upcoming year of 2012? I would really like to attend one nearby even it is in Boston. Currently there are no events planned in the DC area. If the Columbus Day weekend event happens in Boston (or nearby) in 2012, then that would be a good choice I recommend subscribing to foundation-announce or foundation-list to keep abreast of when GNOME events are being planned: https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo Some GNOME Hackfests are not always well advertised on these mailing lists, so it is also good to keep an eye on this page for upcoming Hackfest events: https://live.gnome.org/Hackfests My other question is: If the conference is held in Boston, is it okay to blog about or video record and send to this list? Yes. The GNOME Foundation does encourage people to provide such videos or other media under a free license. Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: 2012 conferences...
Do we have GNOME 3 presentations available on the Wiki? I looked on the Presentations page, but the only GNOME 3 talk seems to be the one Paul Cutler wrote before GNOME 3 was released. I remember Vincent having a really nice GNOME 3 talk but am not sure where it might be archived. https://live.gnome.org/GnomeMarketing/MarketingMaterial/Presentations Sriram: What is your planned topic? Are you planning to discuss GNOME 3.4 improvements specifically? It might be nice to take a GNOME 3 talk and update it to discuss the progression of GNOME through 3.2 and 3.4 and updating the screenshots to better highlight some newer features. Brian On 12/22/11 09:15 PM, Sriram Ramkrishna wrote: I think we need to start scoping out conferences for the next year and figure out how we are going to talk about GNOME 3.4. There are a number of talks I'm thinking of presenting: 1) Open Source Bridge 2nd quarter 2012 2) Northwest Linuxfest 2nd quarte 2012 3) Linuxcon - wherever - 3rd quarter 2012 We should definitely talk about our marketing plans. sri -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: speaker schedules for conference
Tammy: On 12/24/11 04:51 AM, Tammy Miller wrote: That is a great idea. Is it possible to have a conference in the DC metro area? Do you mean a GNOME specific conference? The GNOME Foundation does have a yearly GNOME-specific event in the fall over Columbus Day weekend. This typically has been held in Boston, but was held in Toronto last year. http://live.gnome.org/BostonSummit There has been some discussion about where a U.S. GNOME conference should be held in 2012. People have proposed having it in Boston or Portland so far. The GNOME Foundation would seriously consider any city with a strong GNOME volunteer community excited to make a GNOME event happen. It is often easy to arrange for a GNOME presence at any regional FOSS (Free/Open Source Software) event in your area. The GNOME Foundation can make arrangements to send posters, stickers, GNOME DVD's, etc. to help promote GNOME at any local event. Just ask. Some events also put together their own GNOME event t-shirt (or other specific goodies), but this typically only happens when the local GNOME volunteers make arrangements to do the needed design work, etc. The GNOME Foundation does also organize GNOME specific events, which are often hackfests with 5-20 people hacking away on some specific GNOME project. Typically, the people working on such projects approach the GNOME Foundation with a proposal when they are ready to work together in this way. When hackfests require funding, the proposal typically includes an expected budget to explain expected travel costs, etc. Hopefully this gives you some perspective on how we organize events, and how you can participate if interested. If you have any questions please ask. Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Adding some of the social bits of 3.2 to the GNOME 3 page
Andreas: When GNOME 3.0 was released, the GNOME community told everyone that issues and usability kinks were going to be addressed in upcoming releases. It would be great if the release notes could highlight some of the ways that we listened to our users to polish the 3.2 release. Brian On 10/ 4/11 03:47 PM, Andreas Nilsson wrote: Hi! 3.2 brought us quite some nice stuff, most of them focused on social and collaboration. I'm thinking of GNOME Contacts, GNOME Online Accounts and GNOME Documents (where you can see documents others are sharing with you). I think it would be neat to add a section to http://www.gnome.org/gnome-3/ about this below or above the Control Center item. I suck at writing catchy and good text, so this is something I need a volunteer for, but I'm happy to help with screenshots. - Andreas -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: On joining the GNOME web team...
Peter: Also, there should be some information about how the reader could consider becoming a sponsor, or to encourage their organization(s) to sponsor. Perhaps to also mention benefits of sponsoring. Perhaps some examples of how we've managed sponsorships in the past. We have many examples of good a11y work done via sponsorship, for example. Likewise the Women's Outreach Program is a good example. Perhaps some of these examples should just go in the Thank you! section. Perhaps we might also provide things to organizations that sponsor significant amounts. Things that probably are more aimed at organizational sponsors than framed prints, tshirts, or mugs. Perhaps we could provide things to organizations like free passes to a GNOME event we would normally charge entrance fees to, to include their logos in the GUADEC event materials/GNOME Journal or other logo placement, or other ways to add value to sponsorship and to make sure we recognize sponsors well. I now see that you already cover this in the Become a Corporate Sponsor section, so ignore this comment. I just think we should be more clever about how we present the logos. It would be nice if we could better highlight particular sponsors more than others. For example, if a sponsor gives us a large a11y sponsorship, we want people to notice. It also gives people a more clear picture of what we do with sponsorships and donations. Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: On joining the GNOME web team...
Karen: I like the idea of finding ways to bring value to our big sponsors, but I worry a little too - we can't seem to be selling things like conference attendance to our sponsors and calling it a donation. Perhaps we need to think a little outside of the box here - I think we need to make it attractive for companies to sponsor us but we also want to avoid anything that could make the foundation look like it's just a shell for corporations. Logo placement is something I do think we should explore, and it's a classic trapping for nonprofit support. Sure, it would be inappropriate if we were selling conference attendance. The gift of free passes could, like the t-shirt, be of considerably less value than the donation. If someone donates $5,000 and gets 2 passes worth $50 each, I think that is more clearly a gift. Though, as you say, I think we need to consider the options and try to find some gifts that are more appropriate for organizational sponsors. Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Brand Guidelines Update
Allan: We typically have our lawyers review official documents that relate to legal issues such as trademark before we make changes to them. Is this because the Wiki version of our Guidelines is not yet official? Most official GNOME legal documents should probably be in http://foundation.gnome.org/licensing. The Wiki makes more sense for draft documents. I am not trying to pick on you Allan since I know The GNOME Foundation has not been so good about keeping our fgo website up-to-date. (e.g. bugzilla bugs #629334, #644932 for two examples of issues with just the licensing page). At any rate, can you also ask the legal-l...@gnome.org mailing list to encourage our legal experts to also review these changes? My personal thoughts are that I think it is good for the Brand Guidelines to highlight GNOME 3, to discuss any particular guidelines that relate to using the GNOME brand with GNOME 3, differences in how the brand should be used with GNOME 3 versus earlier versions of GNOME, etc. However, I think statements like The principle product that is produced by the GNOME Project is GNOME 3 and GNOME is a word in and of itself. It primarily refers to the GNOME Project, designating the organization which produces GNOME 3, GNOME Applications and GNOME Developer Technologies. may need some rewording (e.g. principle or primarily only associated with version 3 of GNOME). Why do we want to use language that may even give the appearance of limiting how the GNOME community can reasonably use its own brand? Brian I spent some time elaborating our brand guidelines [1] today. The sections that I added are marked as draft status. Feedback would be welcome. To date, the guidelines only addressed the GNOME logo and its usage. My aim with the update is to expand them to cover terminology and additional visual design patterns, such as font usage and colour palette. The updates I have added roughly correspond to the approach that was developed for the new gnome.org website. They also attempt to reflect the recent moduleset reorganisation. Some of the terminology guidelines are a departure from previous practice, particularly in the use of 'GNOME 3' instead of 'The GNOME Desktop'. Likewise, the inclusion of a GNOME Project tag line - 'We make great software available to all' - is a major step. So, give me your thoughts! Best, Allan [1] http://live.gnome.org/BrandGuidelines -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Brand Guidelines Update
Allan: On 04/28/11 08:32 AM, Allan Day wrote: Brian Cameron wrote: Allan: We typically have our lawyers review official documents that relate to legal issues such as trademark before we make changes to them. Is this because the Wiki version of our Guidelines is not yet official? Most official GNOME legal documents should probably be in http://foundation.gnome.org/licensing. The Wiki makes more sense for draft documents. I am not trying to pick on you Allan since I know The GNOME Foundation has not been so good about keeping our fgo website up-to-date. (e.g. bugzilla bugs #629334, #644932 for two examples of issues with just the licensing page). I wasn't aware that the brand guidelines are official or legal documents. They are referenced, for example, in the GNOME Foundation Users Group trademark license that the GNOME Foundation lawyers wrote up for us last year: http://live.gnome.org/Trademark#Trademark_Agreement_for_User_Groups Refer to section 1.a.iii, which requires GNOME Users Groups to follow these Brand Guidelines. Since we provide such direction in a document that GNOME Users Groups sign, I would consider it legal. They are guidelines. Maybe the foundation should bless them with officialdom... I'm not sure what that would achieve though. I think The GNOME Foundation has treated them as official even though they are on the Wiki. However, if we are going to keep an official document like this on the Wiki, we perhaps need better access control and/or review process. It does not make sense for Guidelines referenced in legal documents to change without a clear review process. At any rate, can you also ask the legal-l...@gnome.org mailing list to encourage our legal experts to also review these changes? I'll certainly check with our legal advisors. That said, I don't think I've made any changes that will have gone against our trademarks. I haven't touched the sections on the logo, for instance. I am not a lawyer, and I will happily defer to whatever language our lawyers think makes sense. My personal thoughts are that I think it is good for the Brand Guidelines to highlight GNOME 3, to discuss any particular guidelines that relate to using the GNOME brand with GNOME 3, differences in how the brand should be used with GNOME 3 versus earlier versions of GNOME, etc. However, I think statements like The principle product that is produced by the GNOME Project is GNOME 3 and GNOME is a word in and of itself. It primarily refers to the GNOME Project, designating the organization which produces GNOME 3, GNOME Applications and GNOME Developer Technologies. may need some rewording (e.g. principle or primarily only associated with version 3 of GNOME). I could add 'GNOME 2' as a term, but wouldn't that be rather backwards looking? Listing out all possible past and future versions seems awkward. Why can't this document highlight that GNOME 3 is an exciting GNOME branded product without using limiting language? I would think that there should be a number of GNOME 3 specific brand guidelines that could help highlight this. I'm not sure how much sense it makes to build a brand around what we've done in the past. It's what we're doing and where we're going that count. We should hear what the lawyers have to say, I think. I think most organizations try to make effective use of their brands regardless of what the organization is currently focusing on. For example, I would bet Timex would get upset if you tried to sell a computer called a Sinclair even though I would imagine Timex is probably focusing on other things besides home computers now. Why do we want to use language that may even give the appearance of limiting how the GNOME community can reasonably use its own brand? The consistent use of terminology and visual imagery is a vital part of building a brand. The guidelines are intended to encourage people to promote the GNOME brand in the same way as the HIG is supposed to help people design usable interfaces. I do not disagree that the Brand Guidelines page should discuss and promote GNOME 3. But I think these guidelines need to be clear and useful for all reasonable and fair usages of the brand. Saying things that might suggest to people that the GNOME brand only applies to GNOME 3 seems, at the very least, to be confusing. But, I think that's why we normally ask the lawyers to review this sort of stuff. Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Brand Guidelines Update
Allan: On 04/28/11 10:12 AM, Allan Day wrote: On Thu, 2011-04-28 at 08:59 -0500, Brian Cameron wrote: Refer to section 1.a.iii, which requires GNOME Users Groups to follow these Brand Guidelines. Since we provide such direction in a document that GNOME Users Groups sign, I would consider it legal. To date, the brand guidelines have largely been concerned with the trade mark. Now we're expanding their scope, it might be worth moving the trade mark material elsewhere, or at least clarifying the difference between our trade marks and our brand guidelines. Agreed. It sounds like we need two sets of guidelines. One for brand trademarking and one for brand marketing. But, I think that's why we normally ask the lawyers to review this sort of stuff. I get the feeling we're not talking about the same thing here. Sure. I can appreciate that GNOME needs marketing brand guidelines. But, historically the Wiki page you modified has been more specifically about trademark guidelines. I am not opposed to moving the trademark brand guidelines to a new place if that makes the most sense. I already suggested that the trademark guidelines probably belong more on foundation.gnome.org anyway. But, if we move them, we just need to coordinate to ensure the documents that reference these guidelines are updated. To me, the GNOME brand isn't synonymous with the GNOME trademarks: it is something that we have to work to generate in peoples' minds. Branding isn't about just applying the word 'GNOME' to things. A brand is the recognition enjoyed by our organisation and our products, and it is the semantic associations people have with those things. The GNOME trademarks are simply pieces of intellectual property that we own and that we used as a tool in generating the GNOME brand (albeit a very important tool). Some people do use the terms brand in a trademark sense. It is a very general term. So, it can be confusing. The branding guidelines are intended as a way to help people promote and generate the GNOME brand by encouraging consistent language and graphics which will in turn generate brand awareness. Before you modified the Wiki page, that really was not the intention. As you say above, I think the issue is that we are really talking about two different kinds of brand guidelines. From a trademark perspective you need to know how to draw the logo. From a marketing perspective you need to know how to do the things you highlight with the brand. Not mentioning GNOME 2 in the brand guidelines does not mean that the name 'GNOME' or the GNOME logo cannot or should not be used in relation to GNOME 2, therefore. It merely means that people should talk about GNOME 3 as GNOME's primary product, and not 'the GNOME desktop' or the 'GNU Network Object Model Environment'. I do not really know. If it is necessary to modify the page where the trademark guidelines are described, then I would just feel more comfortable after the lawyers review this. I wouldn't think the lawyers would need to review anything, though, if we just move pages around. If there is confusion about the difference between our trademarks and our brand, that difference should (and can) be made clear. Likewise, the legal definition of our trademarks should be clearly delineated. I agree. Putting both kinds of guidelines on the same page is probably not the best way to make this clear. Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Call for hosts for GUADEC 2012
Jon: On 04/27/11 09:56 AM, William Jon McCann wrote: What does this call (and its deadline) mean with regard to a potential co-hosting with aKademy in 2012 again (Desktop Summit)? The GNOME Foundation board and the aKademy board has already decided that the Desktop Summit will be a bi-annual event for the time being. Oh, that is unfortunate. I assume that a newly elected board will be able to reverse this decision. Is that correct? Yes, I thought that should have been clear by my saying for the time being. Since there are questions, I will try to be more clear. I think that GNOME and aKademy have only really agreed to have a co-hosted event in 2011 and to not have a co-hosted event in 2012. Beyond that, I do not think there is a real clear plan beyond a recognition that having a co-hosted event bi-annually seems to be a forming pattern. Decisions are very much being made year-by-year. But, correct, these decisions will be made by future elected boards and I would imagine that they would base their decisions on input from The GNOME Foundation community and how well things go in Berlin. Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: ROUGH draft of GNOME 3.0 press release (request for comments)
Sumana: On 03/28/11 07:24 PM, Sumana Harihareswara wrote: Groton, MA, April 6 2011: Today the GNOME Desktop project releases GNOME 3.0, its first major release in nine years. A revolutionary new user interface, new features for developers, and a stronger accessibility foundation make this a historic moment for the Linux desktop. GNOME works on many operating systems that are not Linux, such as FreeBSD and Solaris. Could we please use a more general term? I think more simply saying make this a historic moment for the free and open source desktop would be more inclusive and avoid this issue. The GNOME 3 platform consists of the GNOME Shell and the GNOME 3 development foundation. The GNOME Shell reimagines the user interface for the next generation of the Free Open Source desktop. The innovative GNOME Shell allows users to focus on tasks while minimizing distractions such as notifications, extra workspaces, and background windows. Jon McCann, one of GNOME Shell's designers, describes it as ineffable...We've taken a pretty different approach in the GNOME 3 design that focuses on the desired experience and lets the interface design follow from that With any luck you will feel more focused, aware, effective, capable, respected, delighted, and at ease. I like the above quote, though I am not sure that With any luck is the best wording. If Jon is agreeable, perhaps this could be slightly reworded to be a bit more assertive that GNOME will provide benefits without needing luck. GNOME Shell aims to [h]elp us cope with modern life in a busy world. Help us connect, stay on track, feel at ease and in control. [To help us be] informed without being disrupted. Jon's quote seems to contain a lot of ... and [] editing. A press release would look nicer if we could get Jon's permission to reword the quote to avoid needing such editorial corrections. The GNOME 3 development foundation includes improvements in the display backend, a new API, and improvements in search, user messaging, system settings, and streamlined libraries. The word and appears twice in this sentence, which seems awkward. GNOME 2 applications will continue to work in the GNOME 3 environment without modification, allowing developers to move to the GNOME 3 environment at their own pace. The GNOME 3 release notes include further details. Matt Zimmerman, Ubuntu CTO at Canonical, praises GNOME 3: In the face of constant change, both in software technology itself and in people's attitudes toward it, long-term software projects need to reinvent themselves in order to stay relevant. I'm encouraged to see the GNOME community taking up this challenge, responding to the evolving needs of users and questioning the status quo. In addition to improvements in user experience and the application development framework, this release marks GNOME making its accessibility framework available to other desktop environments. GNOME has always been a leader in accessibility, making GNOME 3 a usable and productive Could we say free software accessibility? environment for everyone. The new release enables applications developed for other desktop environments to be just as accessible as native GNOME applications on GNOME 3. GNOME strengthens its legendary accessibility foundation, and accelerates the pace of innovation across the Linux desktop. I would say accelerates the pace of innovation on the desktop.. There is really no need to specify a particular kernel when making this point. GNOME 3 is the cumulative work of five years of planning and design by the GNOME community. McCann notes: Perhaps the most notable part of the design process is that everything has been done in the open. We've had full transparency for every decision (good and bad) and every change we've made. We strongly believe in this model. It is not only right in principle it is just the best way in the long run to build great software sustainably in a large community. In partnership with Novell, Red Hat, other Linux distributors, schools and governments, and user groups, GNOME 3 will reach millions of users around the world. Over 3500 people have contributed changes to the project's code repositories, including the employees of 106 companies. GNOME 3 includes innumberable code changes since the 2.0 release 9 years ago. You misspell innumerable. Users and fans of GNOME have planned more than a hundred launch parties around the world. Users can download GNOME 3 from gnome3.org immediately, or wait for Linux distributions to carry it over the coming months. GNOME 3 continues to push new frontiers in user interaction. I think the term Linux is unnecessary in the above sentence and could be removed. The GNOME Project was started in 1997 by two then-university students, Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena. Their aim: to produce a free (as in freedom) desktop environment. Since then, GNOME has grown into a hugely successful enterprise. Used by millions of people across
Re: Q4 Update
Paul: Would you like me to add the board report to the Wiki page, or does it make sense to just add it to the foundation.gnome.org Q4 report? What do I need to do to fix this? Or does my overlooking the instructions to put the report on the wiki mean that this Q4 report will not have the board report now? Brian On 03/26/11 01:12 PM, Paul Cutler wrote: I didn't see it on the wiki page[1] per the original call for updates. Paul [1] http://live.gnome.org/GnomeMarketing/QuarterlyReports/2010/Q4 On Thu, Mar 24, 2011 at 3:54 PM, Brian Cameronbrian.came...@oracle.com wrote: Paul: On 03/21/11 03:14 PM, Paul Cutler wrote: Better late than never, I've finished the Q4 update. If anyone has time to proof it for any big spelling or grammar mistakes, I'd appreciate the help. http://foundation.gnome.org/reports/gnome-report-2010-Q4.html I wrote a Q4 board report, but do not see it on the above website. See here for what I wrote: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/marketing-list/2011-January/msg00124.html Any reason this was not included, or did it just get overlooked? Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Fallback / Classic Mode
Allan: Note that if sysadmins feel that we are going to give up on them, they may start looking into alternatives. We need to be clear that we want them to stick to 2.x/classic for now and that we are going to think about them in future releases. Sysadmins in general, or sysadmins in the contexts that Brian wrote about? I'm unaware of plans to tackle either of these... This issue only affects sysadmins who might want users to use Fallback or Classic mode. Such environments are likely only a small percentage of GNOME users. While definitely a minority, these users are important since they tend to be businesses, educational facilities, government institutions, important customers of distros that ship GNOME, etc. These are the sorts of users who tend to do things like run multi-user servers. Important users, but not the sorts of users who are going to be rushing to run bleeding edge software anyway. These users instead tend to run stable and supported releases. My understanding was that GNOME 3.0 was simply not targeting these users, and that the expectation was that Fallback/Classic mode would be ready for such users in a forthcoming release. To me, it makes sense for GNOME to first focus on the more common-case GNOME users for the GNOME 3.0 release (e.g. desktop/laptop/notebook users). By the time GNOME 3.x starts being released in a supported fashion by major distros, I am sure the Fallback/Classic mode issues will be resolved. I would not think it should be so controversial to just make this clear to users, make sure we set expectations honestly, and avoid confusion. Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Q4 Update
Paul: On 03/21/11 03:14 PM, Paul Cutler wrote: Better late than never, I've finished the Q4 update. If anyone has time to proof it for any big spelling or grammar mistakes, I'd appreciate the help. http://foundation.gnome.org/reports/gnome-report-2010-Q4.html I wrote a Q4 board report, but do not see it on the above website. See here for what I wrote: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/marketing-list/2011-January/msg00124.html Any reason this was not included, or did it just get overlooked? Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Any Shared Slides - New Features for GNOME 3.0
Emily: I am writing to ask is there any public shared slides to talk about What's new in GNOME 3.0. Since we are going to have 120+ Launch parties in April, a slides like this can be reused and shared with some launch parties. There are some side fragments you can use here: http://live.gnome.org/GnomeMarketing/MarketingMaterial/Presentations I'm sure they could be improved. There is a History of GNOME fragment, though it might need to be updated with some of the latest GNOME 3.0 History (e.g. to discuss GNOME 3 in the past instead of the future tense). Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Fwd: FreeWear.org - Royalty Report (2011/01).
Dave: Zazzle does a good job of selling in multiple currencies, but some users prefer other, sometimes local, options. The Board works with other companies who also pay us a royalty and we don't have issues with multiple stores, as long as they sign our trademark agreements and we have a workable business relationship, which we do with Freewear. Sure - my only point is that it doesn't really make sense to promote more than one merchandising store on our front page. I disagree. I think that it would be good to promote all organizations that have agreements with the GNOME Foundation to sell GNOME branded merchandise. I would prefer to provide people with more choice. I do think we want to avoid creating a confusing clutter of options, but I do not think that is a real concern at this point considering the small number of merchants who have arrangements to sell GNOME branded merchandise. This could become more of a concern if the number of merchants grows significantly, but it does not seem a serious issue at the moment to me. I am not sure if it makes sense to promote merchants on the GNOME front page, but I think we should promote all merchants somewhere on the GNOME website. Perhaps a website like http://store.gnome.org/ could contain a link to each merchant. Then we could link to this website from sensible places, like the FoG website and perhaps the GNOME front-door. Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: contract marketing position
Stephen: On 02/ 7/11 11:34 AM, Stephen Zablotny wrote: I have been reviewing the various threads on the marketing list and website with regards to applying for the marketing materials production contract and I have a few questions. 1. who would be the contact person/s for the project info and final approval of the new materials The GNOME Foundation board of directors. Also, I am sure that the GNOME Marketing team will be involved with reviewing work done. 2. is there an anticipated list of deliverables or will that evolve as part of the project scope There are a number of tasks that need to be done. You can refer to the GNOME 3.0 Marketing Roadmap here: http://live.gnome.org/ThreePointZero/MarketingRoadmap You can see that there are many tasks that do not even yet have an owner. This contract will likely not be able to address all of these issues, so during the interview process we will need to work to find the candidate who can best step in and get needed things done. 3. is the a strategic overall marketing plan in place with specific goals or is that another aspect of the project definition Does the above roadmap help? Also refer here: http://live.gnome.org/GnomeMarketing/ThreePointZero A. the emphasis for this project, I assume, would be the launch of gnome3 Right. 4. is there a source file or asset management system for text, images, graphics that have used/approved for marketing efforts I believe most materials are referenced here on the Wiki: http://live.gnome.org/GnomeMarketing/MarketingMaterial Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
GNOME Foundation Seeking Marketing Help - Deadline for Submission
Last December 21st, Paul Cutler announced that the GNOME Foundation is seeking a marketing expert to do short-term contract work to help improve GNOME 3 and GNOME 3 marketing materials. The GNOME Foundation has $5,000 (UDS) allocated to pay a contractor for the creation of marketing materials supporting GNOME. Interested parties should email board-list gnome org with a resume detailing related work or volunteer experience. Please include a cover letter that explains your interest and level of familiarity with marketing as it relates to GNOME and free software. Please include references. The deadline for submission is Tuesday, February 8th. Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Marketing Help for GNOME 3
Marketing Team: You probably noticed that I just emailed the marketing list about the fact that the GNOME Foundation is seeking consulting help for GNOME 3 and that the deadline for resume submission is next Tuesday the 8th. The GNOME Foundation would appreciate it if the marketing team could provide some input about this process. I know the Marketing Team has a fairly well developed roadmap, and many entries seem to be without owners. There seems no shortage of work to do... http://live.gnome.org/ThreePointZero/MarketingRoadmap So, I am curious to hear what people from the marketing team think about this and to help with prioritizing and planning. If The GNOME Foundation were to hire someone to help with marketing, what do you think would be best way to focus their energies? Or how do you think such help could best assist the GNOME Marketing team? For example, do we need someone to help with putting together content, project management help, or something else? Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: GNOME Corporate Sponsor Brainstorming
Jason: On 01/29/11 12:22 PM, Jason D. Clinton wrote: +1 to most of the ideas thrown out here but the above back-and-forth got me thinking about how we could articulate (or narrate) to a donor what it is that they are doing with their money. It's great to say you get X, Y and Z for your contribution, and another to say that you get X, Y and Z for your contribution because of what you help us create. I'm thinking specifically of companies that have donated their office space for our hackfests. True, some of these have been Advisory Board members but even when they've already given us money, they went an extra step and allowed us to interfere with their company's day-to-day operations in a material way. Why? I think many organizations, including ones that are GNOME Advisory Board members, help out The GNOME Foundation in many ways. I think we do a a good job to recognize such organizations in blog posts and hackfest Wiki pages, etc. However, I do think that we could probably generate more help in this way if we did a better job recognizing organizations who help. Perhaps if such organizations could be recognized in some way on the FoG website, it might be an additional way to thank such organizations and to open involvement so new organizations may consider contributing in this way. I think many Advisory Board members are often eager to contribute office space because it is a real benefit to them to have GNOME hackers come visit them. Having access to these GNOME experts can be helpful to them in ways that go beyond the focus of the hackfest. The only over-arching idea that I guess is a better seat at the table which is, ostensibly, what the Advisory Board and the proposed one-on-one with the ED get them. But I'm thinking that if we agree that this is some kind of unifying donor pathos, then we can start to ask questions like, Should donors be encouraged to participate in/table at hack-fests? I think we do want to encourage more types of organizations to consider cooperating with The GNOME Foundation to make hackfests happen. The could be real value in finding out what types of GNOME related hackfests might be of interest or value to potential donors and to try and organize them with the understanding that the funding is available. However, in terms of planning hackfests, I think this will always be handled in a bit of a case-by-case basis. The GNOME Foundation is likely only interested in participating in hackfests that do have some reasonable relation to GNOME, for example. Also, if the organization wanted to contribute by sending experts to participate in the hackfest, then discussion about extending invitations would likely be necessary. However, I would see little problem in making it easier for additional organizations or people to be aware of and consider contributing funds to already planned hackfests. So, there could be a real benefit in Friends of GNOME allowing people or organizations to earmark funds for funds to be spent on making an upcoming hackfest possible, or larger in scope. To contribute in other ways (such as making resources like office space available or wanting to send experts to a hackfest), it would be good if the FoG website made it clear that people should to contact the board to discuss and make plans. Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: GNOME Corporate Sponsor Brainstorming
Paul: Thanks for bringing this up. The sooner we figure out what we are doing, the sooner we can stop turning away people wanting to give us money. ;) The board has been talking for a while, and companies have asked for, other ways to sponsor GNOME outside of the Advisory Board. Diego kicked off a discussion on the marketing list about a year ago, but I wasn't able to quickly find the email. I think you mean this one: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/marketing-list/2010-June/msg1.html Diego had some good ideas brewing. First, some background: the GNOME Advisory Board[1] is made up of partners and sponsors who help sponsor GNOME financially. * Companies with more than 50 employees: $20,000 / year * Companies with less than 50 employees: $10,000 / year * Non-profits: $0 I wonder if it might be good to expand the definition of Non-profits a bit. The term Non-profit means different things in different countries. Perhaps we could expand this to more clearly include charities and other types of organizations focused on providing services to people in a charitable manner. We would like to expand corporate sponsorships but we don't want to lessen the benefits for the Advisory Board partners. The major benefits to being on the Advisory Board are monthly Advisory Board calls with other members and the Foundation's board of directors and an annual meeting at GUADEC. (I'm not sure if the ED does anything above and beyond other than normal and expected communication). We've also had feedback from potential partners asking for smaller ways to give. I'd like to get the community's feedback on two additional potential levels: Level 1: $1000 / year Benefits: Logo added to foundation.gnome.org - This will be available to companies to show they sponsor GNOME financially - some companies like the validation to help show potential clients. I think this is a good start, but I think it would be better to do more. A logo exchange on fdo alone seems a bit anemic to me. It seems that companies and other organizations are interested in giving us money for logo placement. I think we could offer more visibility for their logos based on how much money they provide: - On foundation.gnome.org - On Friends of GNOME - On gnome.org - Their logo placed somewhere at a certain # of events, or at a particular event. - Their logo placed in a way that associates them with a particular sub-group, such as a11y or Womens Outreach. - Logo placement in a regular publication, perhaps GNOME Journal could have a sponsors page. - Perhaps association with a particular GNOME release. And it seems we could require higher donations for more or better visibility. It would be nice to see more options like this. It seems little work on our part if we can figure out how to organize the website to accommodate pages with logos for organizations that we acknowledge as sponsors. It might be tricky to manage how to best promote or endorse organizations in this sort of way. I can imagine RMS having issues with promoting Open Source related organizations if done at the expense of promoting free software, for example. But, I'd think we could address these concerns by setting up the program properly so we make sure that it is clear that we are not necessarily endorsing organizations who we acknowledge are providing donations. Level 2: $5000 / year Benefits: Logo added to foundation.gnome.org and quarterly one on one call with the Executive Director. Same as above and an opportunity to share feedback with GNOME's CEO. I think it is valuable to have an option like this, but I'd expect that most organizations would fall into category #1 above, and not really want this sort of access to the foundation. I think a third category is also really needed. It would be nice if there were a small donation fee (perhaps $200) that individual GNOME consultants or small consulting firms could pay in order to get themselves advertised on the GNOME website as being consulting contacts. I think this would appeal to many coders for hire out there, and would be a way for them to increase their relationship with GNOME directly. While the benefits may not seem like much to some, it's a way for companies to give and show they are a part of the community. We'd have to come up with naming conventions for the other levels. Why can't we do something similar like how FoG already works, but with different benefits for each level. The terms Associate, Sponsor and Philanthropist seem fine. We could just have Individual Associate/Sponsor/Philanthropist and Organization Associate/Sponsor/Philanthropist. No? Lastly, as part of this, I'd like to revamp the foundation.gnome.org website for both these kind of corporate sponsors as well as those who have donated hardware to the Foundation, such as a potential offer for a new event box, Red Hat and Canonical for hosting our servers in their data centers and other things that are in the works.
Re: Official announcement and invitation to GNOME 3.0 Hackfest and GNOME.Asia Summit 2011
Vinicius: I would really like to go, but at the moment I am worried about how much it would cost for me to go from Brazil to India. Kayak.com tells me it is a 27 hours flight with prices from about USD 1800. Considering that with this amount of money I can almost attend to two European events, I would rather prefer to meet you guys later in some closer venue. If travel cost is the only concern, please consider submitting an application for travel subsidy. http://live.gnome.org/Travel Remember that applications that do a good job of explaining the things you expect to do and get done at the hackfest tend to be taken most seriously. Having a good plan is a more important selection criteria than the cost of travel. Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: GNOME Hackfest and GNOME.Asia Summit announcements
Looks good to me. On 01/19/11 07:35 PM, Pockey Lam wrote: I think the announcements look excellent, thanks Fred for drafting it! If there is no grammatical mistake or other comment, I would like to put the content on the front page of gnome.asia website today. And who can help to put this announcements up on gnome.org? File a bug at bugzilla.gnome.org under infrastructure-website. Brian On 01/19/2011 12:12 PM, Frederic Muller wrote: Dear all, Here is a draft announcement of the 2 major upcoming events that will happen right before the GNOME 3.0 release. I hereby submit the text for your review and comments, and once we're all ok with the content, grammar and web links (I think there should be more and they should probably point to gnome.asia once it's launched - 1/2 more days). These 2 announcements should appear on gnome.org upcoming event section and on gnome.asia website. announcement start - *GNOME 3.0 Bangalore Hackfest 2011* /March 28 - April 1 2011, Bangalore, India/ We are hosting a 5 days hackfest (March 28 - April 1) for the release, documentation and marketing teams focusing on GNOME 3.0 release. This will ensure some heavy testing of the code during the last week before the official release of GNOME 3.0, as well as preparing the release to happen in an optimal way. And at the same time, it will help the marketing team to clarify messaging when needed and finalize the launch details. It is not primarily aimed at users or new contributors but we may organize some training and hands on sessions during the last 3 days of the hackfest (March 30 to April 1). Apart from that any contributor involved in the release process is strongly encourage to join. Please let us know you are coming by registering on the Bangalore Hackfest 2011 page http://live.gnome.org/Hackfests/GNOME.Asia2011. *GNOME.Asia Summit 2011* /April 2 2011, Bangalore, India/ Right after the GNOME 3.0 Bangalore Hackfest, we will jump on the opportunity of having a lot of the GNOME developers already on site to aim for the greatest GNOME.Asia Summit of all time. Now in its forth year, GNOME.Asia Summit will have the pleasure to continue to bring GNOME to users and developers in Asia and more specifically India this year, but also to celebrate the release of GNOME 3.0 with the people who actually write the software! The event will bring the light on the GNOME desktop both from a applications and a development platform point of view, as well as strengthen the GNOME community across borders. Visitors should expect great insights into how GNOME 3.0 will transform their desktop experience, the changes and improvements under the hood and how to make the best out of this new desktop environment both from a developer and user perspective. The call for papers is already out at http://live.gnome.org/GnomeAsia/CallForPaper and we hope to receive a lot of submissions from the Hackfest participants. We are also finalizing our call for sponsors and, depending on the momentum, planning for an extra conference day to cover all the topics (based on available budget and paper submissions). So stay tuned and visit Gnome.asia for the latest information! announcement end - Thanks a lot. Fred ___ asia-summit-list mailing list asia-summit-l...@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/asia-summit-list -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Q4 Updates Due
Updated to reflect comments. How's this look? --- Board Report By: Brian Cameron First of all, the GNOME Foundation board of directors would like to express a huge thank you to all you volunteers who help to make the GNOME community possible. To all those who use the GNOME desktop and understand the value of free software on the desktop, it is you that makes the GNOME community both rich and rewarding. Thank you also to our advisory board members and sponsors for providing much valued direction for the community. The GNOME 3.0 release is planned for April 6, 2010. Find a release party near you to attend! There are GNOME 3 Launch events being planned aroudn the world. Emily Chen and the GNOME.Asia team are organizing providing GNOME t-shirts and other goodies to those who can organize launch events in their area. The GNOME Launch event in Bangalore will also be GNOME.Asia 2011. http://live.gnome.org/ThreePointZero/LaunchParty http://gnome.asia/press/2011/Bangalore/ The GNOME Foundation is seeking to hire an Executive Director and is currently reviewing applicants. Refer here: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2010-November/msg00019.html Last November, Stormy Peters stepped down from her position as Executive Director of The GNOME Foundation. The board would like to thank Stormy for all of her great work helping to make The GNOME Foundation a more effective and better resourced organization. We all wish her the best with her future endeavors! As you can imagine, the board has been busy keeping up with the work with Stormy leaving, and the most following important work continued to be the most pressing over the past quarter. * Released the Annual Report. Thanks to Paul and Daniel Galleguillos. http://foundation.gnome.org/reports/gnome-annual-report-2009.pdf Is it not awesome? The GNOME Marketing team needs more help putting together things like this. * GNOME T-Shirt contest: * http://www.gnome.org/contest/ * Womens Outreach Program proving successful! http://www.gnome.org/press/releases/2010-11-women-outreach-interns.html * Germán Póo-Caamaño, doing a great job as GNOME Foundation treasurer, released our planned 2011 budget for GNOME Foundation community review. http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2010-December/msg00057.html * The GNOME Foundation is now selling GNOME branded merchandise through FreeWear. Check it out: http://www.freewear.org/?org=GNOMEFoundation * The Friends of GNOME revamp is making good progress, though is behind schedule. Og Maciel, Paul Cutler, Andreas Nilsson and the GNOME marketing team have been working on this. Any feedback on the following alpha would be helpful. http://www.andreasn.se/diverse/temp/friends-of-gnome-2.0/ * The bidding process for the MeeGo GTK+ work closed and the applications have been reviewed. The chosen bid will soon be announced. Thanks to Bastien Nocera for doing much of the organizing. * GNOME a11y project received significant funding: http://www.gnome.org/press/releases/2010-10-accessibility-grant.html * The GNOME Foundation is making arrangements to use the Egencia Business Travel service affiliated with expedia.com to make it easier to handle the volume of travel subsidies handled by the Foundation. * Announced an interest to hire contract work to assist with GNOME 3 marketing efforts, with a current budget of $5,000 allocated. Made a call for project ideas and resumes on the GNOME Marketing list. Those are just some highlights, so lots of good work is getting done. Please help GNOME 3 be a success. Get involved, join us at a GNOME 3 launch event or at one of the hackfests currently being organized. Events: * The Boston Summit was held over November 6-8 and proved to be a great opportunity for collaboration. The GNOME Marketing team made good progress on video projects and a great deal of work was focused on the upcoming GNOME 3.0 release and accessibility. Thanks J5! * The GNOME Foundation and KDE e.V. board of directors announce the Desktop Summit 2011: http://www.gnome.org/press/releases/2010-10-desktop-summit-2011-berlin.html Thanks to Andreas Nilsson, Dave Neary and Ekaterina Gerasimova for all the help! Would be good to get more local GNOME volunteers involved. Organizers are planning a face-to-face meeting at FOSDEM, probably on Saturday during lunch. * Organized the following GNOME hackfests in the past quarter: - Accessibility at AEGIS conference in Seville (Spain), October, 2010. - GTK+ Hackfest in A Coruña (Galicia, Spain), October 18-22, 2010. - Snowy aka Tomboy Online Hackfest held during The Boston Summit. - Development Documentation and Tools Hackfest in Berlin (Germany), December 2-5, 2010. - WebKitGTK+ Hackfest in A Coruña (Galicia, Spain), December 5-12, 2010. * Python Bindings Hackfest in Prague, CZ, (January 17
Re: Q4 Updates Due
Latest update to reflect Fred's comments. --- Board Report By: Brian Cameron First of all, the GNOME Foundation board of directors would like to express a huge thank you to all you volunteers who help to make the GNOME community possible. To all those who use the GNOME desktop and understand the value of free software on the desktop, it is you that makes the GNOME community both rich and rewarding. Thank you also to our advisory board members and sponsors for providing much valued direction for the community. The GNOME 3.0 release is planned for April 6, 2010. Find a release party near you to attend! There are GNOME 3 Launch events being planned aroudn the world. Emily Chen and the GNOME.Asia team are organizing providing GNOME t-shirts and other goodies to those who can organize launch events in their area. The GNOME Launch event in Bangalore will also be GNOME.Asia 2011. http://live.gnome.org/ThreePointZero/LaunchParty http://gnome.asia/press/2011/Bangalore/ The GNOME Foundation is seeking to hire an Executive Director and is currently reviewing applicants. Refer here: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2010-November/msg00019.html Last November, Stormy Peters stepped down from her position as Executive Director of The GNOME Foundation. The board would like to thank Stormy for all of her great work helping to make The GNOME Foundation a more effective and better resourced organization. We all wish her the best with her future endeavors! As you can imagine, the board has been busy keeping up with the work with Stormy leaving, and the most following important work continued to be the most pressing over the past quarter. * Released the Annual Report. Thanks to Paul and Daniel Galleguillos. http://foundation.gnome.org/reports/gnome-annual-report-2009.pdf Is it not awesome? The GNOME Marketing team needs more help putting together things like this. * GNOME T-Shirt contest: * http://www.gnome.org/contest/ * Womens Outreach Program proving successful! http://www.gnome.org/press/releases/2010-11-women-outreach-interns.html * Germán Póo-Caamaño, doing a great job as GNOME Foundation treasurer, released our planned 2011 budget for GNOME Foundation community review. http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2010-December/msg00057.html * The GNOME Foundation is now selling GNOME branded merchandise through FreeWear. Check it out: http://www.freewear.org/?org=GNOMEFoundation * The Friends of GNOME revamp is making good progress, though is behind schedule. Og Maciel, Paul Cutler, Andreas Nilsson and the GNOME marketing team have been working on this. Any feedback on the following alpha would be helpful. http://www.andreasn.se/diverse/temp/friends-of-gnome-2.0/ * The bidding process for the MeeGo GTK+ work closed and the applications have been reviewed. The chosen bid will soon be announced. Thanks to Bastien Nocera for doing much of the organizing. * GNOME a11y project received significant funding: http://www.gnome.org/press/releases/2010-10-accessibility-grant.html * The GNOME Foundation is making arrangements to use the Egencia Business Travel service affiliated with expedia.com to make it easier to handle the volume of travel subsidies handled by the Foundation. * Announced an interest to hire contract work to assist with GNOME 3 marketing efforts, with a current budget of $5,000 allocated. Made a call for project ideas and resumes on the GNOME Marketing list. Those are just some highlights, so lots of good work is getting done. Please help GNOME 3 be a success. Get involved, join us at a GNOME 3 launch event or at one of the hackfests currently being organized. Events: * The Boston Summit was held over November 6-8 and proved to be a great opportunity for collaboration. The GNOME Marketing team made good progress on video projects and a great deal of work was focused on the upcoming GNOME 3.0 release and accessibility. Thanks J5! * The GNOME Foundation and KDE e.V. board of directors announce the Desktop Summit 2011: http://www.gnome.org/press/releases/2010-10-desktop-summit-2011-berlin.html Thanks to Andreas Nilsson, Dave Neary and Ekaterina Gerasimova for all the help! Would be good to get more local GNOME volunteers involved. Organizers are planning a face-to-face meeting at FOSDEM, probably on Saturday during lunch. * Organized the following GNOME hackfests in the past quarter: - Accessibility at AEGIS conference in Seville (Spain), October, 2010. - GTK+ Hackfest in A Coruña (Galicia, Spain), October 18-22, 2010. - Snowy aka Tomboy Online Hackfest held during The Boston Summit. - Development Documentation and Tools Hackfest in Berlin (Germany), December 2-5, 2010. - WebKitGTK+ Hackfest in A Coruña (Galicia, Spain), December 5-12, 2010. * Planning the following hackfests: - Python Bindings
Re: Q4 Updates Due
I wrote the attached for the board update. No comments since I sent it to the other board members for review yesterday. Brian On 01/ 5/11 08:05 AM, Paul Cutler wrote: Hi Marketing team! The Q4 team updates are due and we had a bunch of activity over the last 3 months, with Friends of GNOME, GCI, etc. Would anyone like to try their hand at writing the update? You can see an example of the Q2 update[1] and I'm working to get the GNOME Q3 update up later today. We need to have the Q4 report written in a week by Jan 12th. Thanks for the help! Paul [1] http://foundation.gnome.org/reports/gnome-report-2010-Q2.html ---BeginMessage--- Board: Here is my proposal for the Board of Directors Q4 Report. I am just sending this to the board so you can review it before I make it more public. Any comments are very much appreciated. Should we drum up GNOME 3 more? Any videos or anything interesting we should include? Is it too long and stuff should be cut out? I guess this is due by the end of the week, is that right Paul? Thanks, Brian --- Board Report By: Brian Cameron First of all, the GNOME Foundation board of directors would like to express a huge thank you to all you volunteers who help to make the GNOME community possible. To all those who use the GNOME desktop and understand the value of free software on the desktop, it is you that makes the GNOME community both rich and rewarding. Thank you also to our advisory board members and sponsors for providing much valued direction for the community. The GNOME 3.0 release is planned for April 6, 2010. Find a release party near you to attend! There are GNOME 3 Launch events being planned aroudn the world. Emily Chen and the GNOME.Asia team are organizing providing GNOME t-shirts and other goodies to those who can organize launch events in their area. The GNOME Launch event in Bangalore will also be GNOME.Asia 2011. http://live.gnome.org/ThreePointZero/LaunchParty http://gnome.asia/press/2011/Bangalore/ In the past quarter, Stormy Peters stepped down from her position as Executive Director of The GNOME Foundation. The board would like to thank Stormy for all of her great work helping to make The GNOME Foundation a more effective and better resourced organization. We all wish her the best with her future endeavors! The board has been busy trying to keep up with the work with Stormy leaving, and the most following important work continued to be the most pressing. * Released the Annual Report. Thanks to Paul and Daniel Galleguillos. http://foundation.gnome.org/reports/gnome-annual-report-2009.pdf Is it not awesome? The GNOME Marketing team needs more help putting together things like this. * Announced an interest to hire a new Executive Director and are currently reviewing applicants. http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2010-November/msg00019.html * GNOME T-Shirt contest: * http://www.gnome.org/contest/ * The Boston Summit was held over November 6-8 and proved to be a great opportunity for collaboration. The GNOME Marketing team made good progress on video projects and a great deal of work was focused on the upcoming GNOME 3.0 release and accessibility. Thanks J5! * The GNOME Foundation and KDE e.V. board of directors annoucne the Desktop Summit 2011: http://www.gnome.org/press/releases/2010-10-desktop-summit-2011-berlin.html Thanks to Andreas Nilsson, Dave Neary and Ekaterina Gerasimova for all the help! Would be good to get more local GNOME volunteers involved. Organizers are planning a face-to-face meeting at FOSDEM, probably on Saturday during lunch. * Organized the following GNOME hackfests in the past quarter: - Accessibility at AEGIS conference in Seville (Spain), October, 2010. - GTK+ Hackfest in A Coruña (Galicia, Spain), October 18-22, 2010. - Snowy aka Tomboy Online Hackfest held during The Boston Summit. - Development Documentation and Tools Hackfest in Berlin (Germany), December 2-5, 2010. - WebKitGTK+ Hackfest in A Coruña (Galicia, Spain), December 5-12, 2010. * Germán Póo-Caamaño, doing a great job as GNOME Foundation treasurer, released our planned 2011 budget for GNOME Foundation community review. http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2010-December/msg00057.html * The Friends of GNOME revamp is making good progress, though is behind schedule. Og Maciel, Paul Cutler, Andreas Nilsson and the GNOME marketing team have been working on this. Any feedback on the following alpha would be helpful. http://www.andreasn.se/diverse/temp/friends-of-gnome-2.0/ * The bidding process for the MeeGo GTK+ work closed and the applications have been reviewed. The chosen bid will soon be announced. Thanks to Bastien Nocera for doing much of the organizing. * The GNOME Foundation is now selling GNOME branded merchandise through FreeWear. Check it out: http://www.freewear.org
Re: New face to Friends of GNOME
Andreas: - Currently the Corporate Sponsorship only includes being an Advisory Board member. I'm not sure I like the term Corporate since Advisory Board members can be other non-for-profits, Foundations, or other non-Corporate organizations. It would be nice to include information about Advisory Board fees. But if they are a non-profit, we don't currently charge them. We should mention more about how non-profits work in terms of fees, agreed. But I was just trying to highlight that sponsors and Advisory Board members are not necessarily Corporate entities, so I think it would be best to avoid the term Corporate. For example, I could imagine a School for the Blind being on the advisory board if they made use of GNOME technologies and were in a good position to provide The GNOME Foundation with advisory input. Such an organization may not be a corporate one. It would also be nice to provide options for organizations that wish to donate but not be on the Advisory Board (or not donate as much as the fee). Perhaps we could provide a page where we put logos/links to organizations who donate in this way. Or perhaps we could include logos for organizations who donate a certain amount at events we organize. Perhaps we could offer a menu of choices where organizations could be recognized in different ways based on the amount donated. That needs a bunch of work on it's own, but I agree with the idea in general. We also need to figure out how to word it and where to put it. Sure. - Will it be possible to earmark donations for certain projects (such as Women's Outreach or a11y)? If so, the page should highlight how to do this. This makes the forms and other stuff more detailed as well, and it could be a slippery slope regarding what teams we list there. I would rather see this as aimed donation campaigns instead. Anybody else have any thoughts about what we should do here? Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: New face to Friends of GNOME
Patrick: * Finally, I think that the FoG program is a bit US centric right now. There might be a lot of potential that we miss here. We might want to translate the page into multiple languages. We might want to check, if we can find charitable organizations in other jurisdictions that would be willing to take donations on our behalf and then spend it on Gnome love (think of Wau Holland Foundation as an example, who does this for Wikileaks ;). That way, a FoG donation would be tax-deductible in more jurisdictions or we could offer some other kinds of money transfer that is more common in a jurisdiction. Also, it should be technically possible to detect where our friends are coming from and convert the amount into their currency. Maybe just provide a box to choose the currency. For some friends, it may not be obvious that Paypal will convert to their native currency or they just wont take the hassle to convert it themselves beforehand to check if it is a feasible amount for them to spend. Didn't we make arrangements to accept donations in boletos in Brazil? I remember Jonh Wendell was working on this. If so, we should explain how to give such donations on the page. Does anybody have a pointer to instructions? Brian cc:ing Jonh -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: New face to Friends of GNOME
Andreas: The new design looks nice. A few comments: - Currently the Corporate Sponsorship only includes being an Advisory Board member. I'm not sure I like the term Corporate since Advisory Board members can be other non-for-profits, Foundations, or other non-Corporate organizations. It would be nice to include information about Advisory Board fees. It would also be nice to provide options for organizations that wish to donate but not be on the Advisory Board (or not donate as much as the fee). Perhaps we could provide a page where we put logos/links to organizations who donate in this way. Or perhaps we could include logos for organizations who donate a certain amount at events we organize. Perhaps we could offer a menu of choices where organizations could be recognized in different ways based on the amount donated. - The List of Previous Donors would be more cool if it allowed people to provide links to their personal page if they wish (perhaps their live.gnome.org page if they have one, for example). I don't know how to improve this page, but just a long list of names doesn't seem to be the best way to honor those who help us. - There are a number of places you can buy official GNOME branded merchandise. Shouldn't we highlight those here? - In the Thanks to donations, in 2010 we were able to: section it says Hold a women outreach. This seems oddly worded or an incomplete sentence. Perhaps Organize a Women's Outreach Program might be more clear. - Also, I liked how the old FoG page highlighted that the GNOME project benefits humanitarian projects like OLPC and a11y. Would be nice to be able to continue to highlight a more humanitarian message. I would think this would encourage donations. - Will it be possible to earmark donations for certain projects (such as Women's Outreach or a11y)? If so, the page should highlight how to do this. Brian On 01/ 4/11 08:10 AM, Andreas Nilsson wrote: Wanted to do some modifications to the Friends of GNOME website as the design me and Kalle did hasn't scaled well with the content added over time and with the new website [1] coming around the corner, needs a facelift anyway. The current site is getting a bit cluttered and I wanted make the process of donating as simple as possible. Some darlings might have gone lost in the process. :) http://www.andreasn.se/diverse/temp/friends-of-gnome-2.0/ This can be considered alpha state as I think the forms are a bit broken here and there and not all sub pages are finished. If you find something broken, fix it here: http://gitorious.org/gnome-design/gnome-design/trees/master/www/friends-of-gnome-2.0 1. http://wptest.gnome.org/ - Andreas -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: FoG pending Tasks
It's great that FoG is moving forward. However, we have had plans to make it possible for organizations to donate money to the GNOME Foundation in exchange for recognition, link exchange, being said to sponsor GNOME events/activities, etc. I'd think this would relate to the FoG program, so could be a part of the plan. We already have a pretty good proposal put together. I think at this point we mostly need someone to do the website work to do things like create a place for putting logos of donors, sponsors. In general, improving the way we acknowledge those who provide us with donations. So, we might, for example, make this a combined effort to improve the way FoG contributors are recognized. Perhaps we could make it easier to auto-link names to live.gnome.org or other personal pages, if the person donating wants a social link like this. Brian On 12/ 1/10 07:38 AM, Og Maciel wrote: Hi folks, Just wanted to touch basis with everyone involved in the FoG tasks we discussed at the Boston Summit last month and see if we can officially launch the program as we're already late. See below the tasks, their owners, and status (feel free to correct any item): * Text for ruler (Paul) (DONE) * Clean up Friends of GNOME landing page (Og) (DONE) * Fix subscriptions (DONE) * One time (DONE) * Ask for location (Pending discussion about generating map, etc) (NEEDED) * Annual subscription (Og) (DONE) * Merchandise * New t-shirt (Joey) * Community assistance for distribution (Vincent) * Collectible doodad with year on it, 300 qty (Joey) (DONE) * Membership cards with member number (Og) (NEEDED) * Map mash-up of contributors (NEEDS OWNER) * Getting the word out * Design 2 ads (Joey) (DONE???) * Social networking (Og) (Pending announcement) * Radio jingle (Joey) * Google * LWN (Stormy) * Email current subscribers (Paul) (DONE) * Videos of developers talking about hack-fest funding via Friends of GNOME (Jason/Joey) Dates: * Launch new Friends of GNOME site - Nov. 16th * Annual item per year (doodad) - Nov. 18th * Map mash-up - Nov. 21st * Launch promotional avenues - Nov 22nd * Membership cards - Nov 22nd * T-Shirts - Dec. 31st I feel that we should make the new FoG launch right now and add new items as we go, as we should take advantage of the end of the year and see if we can attract more/new contributos! Things marked as NEEDED can be punted and worked on later imho. Thanks in advance, -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Task for Google CodeIn (Ref: - Andre Klapper)
Jayneil: I had the following task in my mind for Google Code In 2010 about Gnome and would love to mentor for the same. I have broken down the task into points:- Task name: - Gnome Cognizance Details: - 1)The participant has to create a 2min video about Gnome. Explain its advantages and why one should use it. I think that this proposal would be much stronger if there were a more clear plan to work with the GNOME marketing team and other key players to develop the content of the video. It would be better if a part of the plan were to involve the community in some decision making. Perhaps by conducting a survey and using the results to influence content decisions might be a practical approach. Also, I would like to see a bit more detail about the audience you are planning to reach with your video, or whether you would expect that these sorts of things would also be decided through community discussion. Another important question relates to licensing. Since GNOME is a free software organization, what licensing would you release the video under? It would also be useful to know your thoughts behind the decision. In short, I think the proposal looks really good, but should contain more detail. 2)Upload the video on you-tube and also on his/her facebook account. Many public access television stations will play commercials or videos for non-profit charities at no charge. Since The GNOME Foundation is a non-profit, it might be interesting and not much additional work to make arrangements for more video airtime, including on television. Some research may be needed to find out what format requirements might exist. 3)Make a small report on Gnome siting its advantages,usage etc and upload it on www.scribd.com http://www.scribd.com/ Well the task is of moderate difficulty and it would help to create a lot of publicity as YouTube, scribd and facebook are very powerful tools for publicity. Also the task is fun - filled and won't feel like a burden to the participant. I had talked to Andre Klapper regarding the same and he asked me to get your approval first. So do let me know if I can be the mentor for the above task. I think you will find that people on the gnome-marketing mailing list are pretty helpful in general, though it would be good for someone to be a more formal mentor. Jason Clinton is currently working on GNOME 3 videos, so he might have some input regardless of whether he could act as a mentor. Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Marketing hackfest next year
Jason: We need to have another marketing hackfest in preparation for the GNOME 3.0 launch. This will be entirely work-oriented. The date ranges available for this are the two weeks immediately following the UI freeze: February 26th - March 13th. Please reply to this email with your availability: where can you travel and what dates are you available? The GNOME.Asia community was been planning to host a hackfest that coincides with the GNOME 3.0 release. The point of their hackfest was to get people together to work on tasks that need to get done in association with the launch. Would it make sense to plan to do such marketing hackfest work at the GNOME.Asia 3.0 launch hackfest? http://live.gnome.org/GnomeAsia/2011Summit Their current plans have been to have their event a bit later (early April), but it seems worth discussing with them. I imagine they would consider moving their event earlier if that would better fit in with the needs of relevant groups such as the Marketing team. At any rate, some discussion with them to determine how marketing hackfest plans should be coordinated seems appropriate. There may be opportunities to do some different marketing things at both events if we decide to keep them separate events, for example. Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Add GNOME to eBay nonprofits?
+1 Brian On 09/24/10 10:37, Stormy Peters wrote: When you sell an item on eBay, you can select to donate some of your profits to a nonprofit[1]. The list of eligible nonprofits is managed by MissionFish[2]. I would like to add GNOME to the list of eligible nonprofits. It costs nothing to sign up, only takes a few minutes and maybe there are GNOME fans out there that sell things on eBay and would be willing to support the project that way. I wanted to get a couple of quick +1s or -1s before I do this just to make sure the community also agrees this is a good idea. Best, Stormy [1] http://givingworks.ebay.com/ [2] www.missionfish.org http://www.missionfish.org [3] This was prompted by this article I read this morning: http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/23/paypal-makes-it-easy-to-give/ -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Software Freedom Day
How does this tie in to the Franklin Street Statement? It might be worthwhile to make some mention how we are supportive of the Franklin Street Statement as we launch a web service. It would tie in well with Software Freedom Day also if we could give some indication that we thought about it. I'm cc:ing Luis Villa since he has been involved with thinking about how we might say something pertinent. Brian On 09/13/10 02:34 PM, Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier wrote: On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 2:28 PM, Stormy Peterssto...@gnome.org wrote: On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 1:26 PM, Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeierj...@zonker.net wrote: Hey Stormy, I think the online alpha is way more newsworthy than saying some GNOME developers are taking part in this larger thing. We can tie it into SFD by saying GNOME is looking ahead to the next generations of services for software freedom, and then mention the other. Sounds good to me. What do you need from me or the Tomboy Online team? Just the relevant details for the launch, how to sign up, etc. Best, Z -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Fwd: Software Freedom Day
On Mon, 2010-09-13 at 14:48 -0600, Stormy Peters wrote: * Develop software that can replace centralized services and data storage with distributed software and data deployment, giving control back to users. Check. Users can install their own Snowy instance if they don't want to use Tomboy Online, which is GNOME's centralized service. As Snowy isn't really a social networking site, and the main point is to put your existing local data on the web, decentralization is less applicable (compared to online services where your data is locked into their servers). Is it possible for users to export their data in some simple standard format (such as comma-separated-value) so that it can be easily exported into other programs (such as a spreadsheet program)? Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Packets for Local User Groups
Stormy: A GNOME event box for the group. So like you say, they don't have to return it. Sounds like a good idea, but what work is involved? If the materials are the same as what we include in the event box, then perhaps we just need to add some text to the User's Group Wiki page so people know where to get the materials. http://live.gnome.org/UserGroups Or are there any materials we should create that are specific to User's Groups. Perhaps by helping to make them more interesting/fun/active? Though, I'd think that we should work more to revive gugmeisters, and this would probably be a good topic to discuss there instead of here. Doing some work to make sure that people who do work relating to GNOME User's Groups or who are active members subscribe to the list would be a good idea. Brian On Thu, Aug 26, 2010 at 3:55 AM, Emily Chen emilychen...@gmail.com mailto:emilychen...@gmail.com wrote: Yes, that's a good idea. A GNOME packet sounds like a GNOME event box ? In Taiwan's case, we can send a GNOME packet for the next COSCUP 2011, the local taiwan users group can host a booth in the conference. After the conference, the packet can be managed by the local users group for future events and activities. -Emily 2010/8/25 Stormy Peters sto...@gnome.org mailto:sto...@gnome.org In case you aren't on the marketing list. I thought with new local user groups in the Asia region, this might be an interesting idea. -- Forwarded message -- From: *Stormy Peters* sto...@gnome.org mailto:sto...@gnome.org Date: Tue, Aug 24, 2010 at 12:35 PM Subject: Packets for Local User Groups To: GNOME Marketing List marketing-list@gnome.org mailto:marketing-list@gnome.org Ubuntu has packets now that they send to new local user groups. I thought it was an idea we might want to copy for GNOME. http://www.lczajkowski.com/?p=877 Stormy ___ asia-summit-list mailing list asia-summit-l...@gnome.org mailto:asia-summit-l...@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/asia-summit-list -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: It's Release Notes time!
Last 2.x release, but not last 2.32.y release? I'd assume accumulated bugfixes would just warrant another few micro releases, as they always have done. However we want to handle it, I think we should be clear in the release notes that we have a plan in place for managing releasing ongoing support for GNOME 2.x, at least for a reasonable period of time. People reading our release notes should be assured that if their distro ends up providing only GNOME 2.x for a while, that we will continue to support them. We want to avoid distros patching GNOME 2.32 and not providing those patch fixes upstream, for example. If we give the impression that there will be no more releases, distros might not let us know about bugs or fixes they have. Also, it's hard to predict the future, so making proclamations about the last release only beg contradiction later on. Perhaps we could word it in a way that highlights that we do not have any future planned releases, but avoid proclaiming that we will never do something. Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Free Agent t-shirt final mock-ups
GNOME Marketing: After working for a few months with Dongyun and Diki, I have some hopefully final mock-ups of the Free Agent tshirt with the updated text we agreed to on this list.[1] You can download the final mock-up images here: http://dongyunlee.com/download/tshirts.zip (18.6MB) Personally, I like the image as blue on a white t-shirt, the image as blue on a gray tshirt, or the image as black on a yellow tshirt. What do others think? Once we agree on the color scheme, I think I can start the process of getting approval to have some printed. Brian [1] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/marketing-list/2010-May/msg00110.html Original Message Subject: Re: Adam - GNOME and OLPC Marketing Opportunities Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2010 19:55:02 -0400 From: Adam Holt h...@laptop.org To: Brian Cameron brian.came...@oracle.com Brian, Here are Dongyun Lee's revised tshirts illustrations and sample colors: http://dongyunlee.com/download/tshirts.zip (18.6MB) Unzip the file you'll get 5 files: - olpc_shirts_revised.psd back.psd ; revised illustration Dongyun prefers, hand written! But you don't have to use this. If you like previous design better, go with it. The illustration is all made by hand drawing ink lines, so Dongyun just wanted to go with ink hand writing. Up to you. :) - gngt-olpc-blue.jpg, samples1.jpg samples2.jpg ; Those are color samples. Dongyun likes simple black graphic on white or yellow tshirts best... Let me know if this hopefully satisfactory / close enough / or needing a final revision :) --A! Brian Cameron wrote: Adam: Just to reconfirm Brian: Monocolor is the final choice, to keep costs down etc, yes? Yes, monocolor is probably the most sensible approach. It would be good to hear Dongyun's thoughts about what the color of the image should be, and what color he recommends for the t-shirt. Perhaps a blue image on a bright (perhaps yellow) t-shirt might look good, for example. Though we might consider a full-color t-shirt. If Dongyun could also provide a full-color image, then that would give us some flexibility when we talk to the printers and find out what the cost differences are. Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Updated Ambassador Brochures
Bharat: 4. What do I do about: - Immendio? - OpenedHand? - Sun? since they got acquired - what logos to use? Sun Microsystems was acquired by Oracle. You can use the same Oracle logo used in the Linux Foundation website. http://www.linuxfoundation.org/sites/main/files/u17/plat_oracle.jpg Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: GNOME Free Agent T-shirt Proposal
Okay, no more votes. However, the folks at Sugar Labs made a small request that the text be changed a bit. GNOME, Sugar Labs, and OLPC empower previously marginalized children throughout the developing world to learn, achieve, and transform their communities. That seems reasonable to me. Does this sound good to people? Brian On 05/21/10 02:04 PM, Brian Cameron wrote: Out of the discussion so far I like 3 choices: #1) The original text GNOME technologies power SugarLabs and OLPC to help previously marginalized children throughout the developing world learn, achieve and begin to transform their communities. #2) Shorter version GNOME powers SugarLabs and OLPC Globally providing children with tools to learn, achieve, and transform their world. #3) Really short version GNOME powers SugarLabs and OLPC Enabling children to transform their world. Let's vote. I pick #2. I know Dave Paul picked #1. Brian On 05/19/10 09:27 PM, Paul Cutler wrote: On Wed, 2010-05-19 at 22:12 +0200, Dave Neary wrote: Hi, Bryen M. Yunashko wrote: I like this revision much better. If we're still looking to shorten it, how about Globally providing instead of A global effort providing? I really liked the long flowing wordy version - a great message, great conversation starter, and the text was part of the design. I would love to wear the t-shirt with the initial design. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org After (finally!) catching up on this thread just now (great to see all the activity on the marketing list!) I agree with Dave. Reading through some of the text / copy suggestions and putting my documentation hat, I think to Brian's point of educating what GNOME is powering / member of an ecosystem I'd leave it as it is in the first design. I like how it flows as well on the shirt itself. Paul -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: GNOME Free Agent T-shirt Proposal
No votes since last Friday. I will wait until the 27th for more votes. If there are not any more votes, then choice #1 will win with 2 votes. Brian On 05/21/10 02:04 PM, Brian Cameron wrote: Out of the discussion so far I like 3 choices: #1) The original text GNOME technologies power SugarLabs and OLPC to help previously marginalized children throughout the developing world learn, achieve and begin to transform their communities. #2) Shorter version GNOME powers SugarLabs and OLPC Globally providing children with tools to learn, achieve, and transform their world. #3) Really short version GNOME powers SugarLabs and OLPC Enabling children to transform their world. Let's vote. I pick #2. I know Dave Paul picked #1. Brian On 05/19/10 09:27 PM, Paul Cutler wrote: On Wed, 2010-05-19 at 22:12 +0200, Dave Neary wrote: Hi, Bryen M. Yunashko wrote: I like this revision much better. If we're still looking to shorten it, how about Globally providing instead of A global effort providing? I really liked the long flowing wordy version - a great message, great conversation starter, and the text was part of the design. I would love to wear the t-shirt with the initial design. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org After (finally!) catching up on this thread just now (great to see all the activity on the marketing list!) I agree with Dave. Reading through some of the text / copy suggestions and putting my documentation hat, I think to Brian's point of educating what GNOME is powering / member of an ecosystem I'd leave it as it is in the first design. I like how it flows as well on the shirt itself. Paul -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: GNOME Free Agent T-shirt Proposal
Out of the discussion so far I like 3 choices: #1) The original text GNOME technologies power SugarLabs and OLPC to help previously marginalized children throughout the developing world learn, achieve and begin to transform their communities. #2) Shorter version GNOME powers SugarLabs and OLPC Globally providing children with tools to learn, achieve, and transform their world. #3) Really short version GNOME powers SugarLabs and OLPC Enabling children to transform their world. Let's vote. I pick #2. I know Dave Paul picked #1. Brian On 05/19/10 09:27 PM, Paul Cutler wrote: On Wed, 2010-05-19 at 22:12 +0200, Dave Neary wrote: Hi, Bryen M. Yunashko wrote: I like this revision much better. If we're still looking to shorten it, how about Globally providing instead of A global effort providing? I really liked the long flowing wordy version - a great message, great conversation starter, and the text was part of the design. I would love to wear the t-shirt with the initial design. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org After (finally!) catching up on this thread just now (great to see all the activity on the marketing list!) I agree with Dave. Reading through some of the text / copy suggestions and putting my documentation hat, I think to Brian's point of educating what GNOME is powering / member of an ecosystem I'd leave it as it is in the first design. I like how it flows as well on the shirt itself. Paul -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Announcing the GNOME Developing World List
GNOME Community: I have the pleasure of announcing the GNOME Developing World list. One of the GNOME Foundation's high level goals is to work harder to increase the visibility, promotion and usage of GNOME in the developing world. This mailing list will provide a forum for people with an interest in developing a stronger GNOME presence in the developing world. Topics will likely include ways to reach out and promote GNOME in regions with limited access to technology, solving particular needs in the developing world, and promoting more humanitarian efforts within the GNOME community. If you have an interest in participating, please subscribe and join the discussions! Refer here for more information: http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/developing-world-list Thanks, Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Announcing the GNOME Developing World List
GNOME Community: I have the pleasure of announcing the GNOME Developing World list. One of the GNOME Foundation's high level goals is to work harder to increase the visibility, promotion and usage of GNOME in the developing world. This mailing list will provide a forum for people with an interest in developing a stronger GNOME presence in the developing world. Topics will likely include ways to reach out and promote GNOME in regions with limited access to technology, solving particular needs in the developing world, and promoting more humanitarian efforts within the GNOME community. If you have an interest in participating, please subscribe and join the discussions! Refer here for more information: http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/developing-world-list Thanks, Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: GNOME Free Agent T-shirt Proposal
Bryen: I think the wording is a bit much and can be simplified and made more powerful. Perhaps something like: GNOME - SugarLabs - OLPC Education - Community Empowering children the world over I agree that the existing text can be improved. While I agree that your suggestion is more powerful, I think it fails to inform. A goal of this t-shirt is to help educate people about GNOME, SugarLabs and the OLPC project and how these projects work together to provide a humanitarian solution. Most people who will see someone wearing the tshirt will probably have no idea what GNOME, SugarLabs, or OLPC is, so the message becomes meaningless if the tshirt does not do a good job of informing. I would appreciate further suggestions, but I think the text needs to make sure that the reader understands that GNOME is a part of an ecospehere that benefits a humanitarian cause. Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: GNOME Free Agent T-shirt Proposal
Bryen: On another thought, could the mono-color design be reversed as a second option? Or would that drive costs up? Personally, I'm not much of a white t-shirt kind of guy, and I'm more likely to purchase a dark t-shirt. Which would also make the shirt a11y as we're supposed to wear dark clothes around visually-impaired people. ;-) I agree with you. I think a brighter, more cheerful color might be better suited for this tshirt. Perhaps yellow or orange? Though, blue might be a good color for the graphic on a yellow t-shirt. Thoughts? Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: GNOME Free Agent T-shirt Proposal
Stormy: I like it. I could even imagine you could use that concept with other organizations too. +1. It's nice to make t-shirts to highlight our positive relationships with various organizations. What's the plan for distributing it? I'd like to get this done before GUADEC so that the tshirt could be made available for sale at the event. I would like to give tshirts away to GNOME volunteers who are not employed to work on GNOME, and sell it to those GNOME folks who have a job working on GNOME. This would be a nice reward for GNOME volunteers, and those with jobs can subsidize the costs. So I think the t-shirt will be a little expensive, with the understanding that the proceeds are going to promote a good cause (e.g. promoting GNOME volunteers who dedicate their time energy to GNOME without having a job providing income for doing the work). Brian On Tue, May 18, 2010 at 7:59 PM, Brian Cameron brian.came...@oracle.com mailto:brian.came...@oracle.com wrote: GNOME Marketing Team: On April 6th, I proposed a GNOME Free Agent t-shirt which would highlight the humanitarian aspects of being a GNOME volunteer. I have been working with Mike (Dongyun) Lee and Diki Niwatori to put together the attached t-shirt mock-up. After discussion, we decided to make the image mono-color. While a bit less exciting than the full-color version, it is less busy and will be easier and less expensive to print. Does this look good to people? Does anyone have any comments about the design or how to improve things further? Thoughts? Brian On 04/06/10 15:08, Brian Cameron wrote: GNOME Marketing Team Over the past several months, I have been trading emails with the OLPC and SugarLabs folks about an opportunity to create a t-shirt to promote that GNOME free software benefits humanitarian projects like OLPC and Sugar Labs, and to provide a nice reward for volunteers within the GNOME community. Based on my rough textual design ideas I have gotten permission from both OLPC and SugarLabs to go ahead with using their logos in this way, though they obviously want to review a final mock-up of what the t-shirt will look like before giving a formal go-ahead. So, I have been thinking of creating a GNOME Free Agent t-shirt. I like this name since Free Agent is a fun play on words and can be interpreted in different ways including being an independent GNOME volunteer. Dongyun Lee (http://dongyunlee.com/) does artwork for OLPC and has volunteered to provide artwork to use on the t-shirt for no charge (though he does want 2 free t-shirts for himself and his wife which seems reasonable). Rather than a photograph of children using OLPC units (photographs are hard to make look nice on tshirts), he suggested using some of his OLPC line art. For example, you can see some work he did for OLPC here: http://www.sugarlabs.org/index.php?template=pagepage=learners http://www.sugarlabs.org/index.php?template=pagepage=learners Both Dongyun and myself think this particular image would work nicely on a t-shirt: http://dongyunlee.com/imgsrc/il/il24_11.jpg Dongyun has volunteered to create some custom artwork for this t-shirt if we can provide direction. Some people I have shown this image to think it is a bit too busy, so perhaps something a bit toned down would be better. Thoughts? With the photo would appear the following text: [GNOME Logo] Free Software - Powering [OLPC logo] [Sugar Labs logo] Perhaps some additional text under the photograph or under the logo would be nice like Helping previously marginalized children throughout the developing world learn, achieve and begin to transform their communities I was thinking that we could make two versions of the t-shirt. One version to sell for $20 that has nothing on the back. A second version will have the following text on the back and would be given away for no-charge to volunteers who work on GNOME but do not work for a company that works on GNOME. People who work on GNOME for a company would pay $25 for the second version of the tshirt with this text on the back: Free Agent GNOME Free Software Volunteer I am hoping that people on the marketing-list can help with: 1) What do people think of this proposal? Any ideas on how to further improve it? 2) As I mention above, Dongyun is agreeable to creating an image that is more focused on the relationship between GNOME, SugarLabs, and OLPC. Any ideas
Re: GNOME Free Agent T-shirt Proposal
Bryen: Well, we can certainly fix it up more to encompass what you are suggesting. And that suggested text was just a first thought. But I would think that whether it stays in the original text or some modified text, the reader would still be more inclined to stop and ask what thats about. And thus engage in a conversation with the wearer. So, if anything, whatever the text is, it should encourage that conversation to happen. Ideally the t-shirt should not rely on a viewer needing to engage in a discussion, though. It would be ideal if the t-shirt could also spark enough interest in a viewer to notice the brands and investigate them further even when there is no opportunity for a conversation. So, I would appreciate any further thoughts or suggestions on how to best craft some text to get the right message across. Though, if we are going to have a tshirt ready for GUADEC, we probably should figure this out a bit quickly. I'll give people a deadline of the end of the week to make suggestions. I think the existing text is not bad, and I think it is only worth changing if there is real interest in discussing this. Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: GNOME Free Agent T-shirt Proposal
Diego: How much expensive? OTOH a single color is also good and we can always have non white t-shirts with a good matching color. I don't know. I plan to ask Dongyun for a color version of the image just so we can have it handy if we want to do full-color. The message might be a bit too long, probably a line too long. Also I'd try with other words, for example: GNOME powers SugarLabs and OLPC's efforts to give marginalized children [around the world?] a new chance [better?] to learn, achieve and transform their worlds I think just children is best. How about: GNOME powers SugarLabs and OLPC A global effort providing children with tools to learn, achieve, and transform their world. I fear that too much text might make people lose interest in the t-shirt and potential question+conversation and developing world [children] is an euphemism I'd rather avoid. Good point. Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: GNOME Free Agent T-shirt Proposal
GNOME Marketing Team: On April 6th, I proposed a GNOME Free Agent t-shirt which would highlight the humanitarian aspects of being a GNOME volunteer. I have been working with Mike (Dongyun) Lee and Diki Niwatori to put together a t-shirt mock-up. Refer here: http://www.sheepfiends.com/gngt-olpc.png After discussion, we decided to make the image mono-color. While a bit less exciting than the full-color version, it is less busy and will be easier and less expensive to print. Does this look good to people? Does anyone have any comments about the design or how to improve things further? Thoughts? Brian On 04/06/10 15:08, Brian Cameron wrote: GNOME Marketing Team Over the past several months, I have been trading emails with the OLPC and SugarLabs folks about an opportunity to create a t-shirt to promote that GNOME free software benefits humanitarian projects like OLPC and Sugar Labs, and to provide a nice reward for volunteers within the GNOME community. Based on my rough textual design ideas I have gotten permission from both OLPC and SugarLabs to go ahead with using their logos in this way, though they obviously want to review a final mock-up of what the t-shirt will look like before giving a formal go-ahead. So, I have been thinking of creating a GNOME Free Agent t-shirt. I like this name since Free Agent is a fun play on words and can be interpreted in different ways including being an independent GNOME volunteer. Dongyun Lee (http://dongyunlee.com/) does artwork for OLPC and has volunteered to provide artwork to use on the t-shirt for no charge (though he does want 2 free t-shirts for himself and his wife which seems reasonable). Rather than a photograph of children using OLPC units (photographs are hard to make look nice on tshirts), he suggested using some of his OLPC line art. For example, you can see some work he did for OLPC here: http://www.sugarlabs.org/index.php?template=pagepage=learners Both Dongyun and myself think this particular image would work nicely on a t-shirt: http://dongyunlee.com/imgsrc/il/il24_11.jpg Dongyun has volunteered to create some custom artwork for this t-shirt if we can provide direction. Some people I have shown this image to think it is a bit too busy, so perhaps something a bit toned down would be better. Thoughts? With the photo would appear the following text: [GNOME Logo] Free Software - Powering [OLPC logo] [Sugar Labs logo] Perhaps some additional text under the photograph or under the logo would be nice like Helping previously marginalized children throughout the developing world learn, achieve and begin to transform their communities I was thinking that we could make two versions of the t-shirt. One version to sell for $20 that has nothing on the back. A second version will have the following text on the back and would be given away for no-charge to volunteers who work on GNOME but do not work for a company that works on GNOME. People who work on GNOME for a company would pay $25 for the second version of the tshirt with this text on the back: Free Agent GNOME Free Software Volunteer I am hoping that people on the marketing-list can help with: 1) What do people think of this proposal? Any ideas on how to further improve it? 2) As I mention above, Dongyun is agreeable to creating an image that is more focused on the relationship between GNOME, SugarLabs, and OLPC. Any ideas or direction that we could give to Dongyun would be helpful. 3) Perhaps the proposed image above is a bit too busy. Do people have suggestions on whether the image created for this t-shirt should be changed? Should less colors be used for an image intended for a t-shirt, for example? 4) I need someone with graphic design skills to put together a mock up image of the t-shirt to help facilitate moving this forward. Can anyone help? Thanks, Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Mobile Funding - Update
Bharat: Perhaps to encourage people to donate via Mobile, we could give away some special thing to people who donate. Perhaps people who donate via mobile is given a special URL where they can download a GNOME background that looks nice and advertises that the person supports GNOME in a special way, or something. If we provide something nice, but free, in exchange for donating via mobile that might encourage people to donate in this way. Brian On 05/12/10 08:40 AM, Bharat Kapoor wrote: Dear All A gentle reminder - please comment on the Project Plan or provide your approval for me to move ahead. Once I have a go decision - I will work on conferences between end of May till the next 3 months and coordinate the mobile process. Regards Bharat On Tue, May 4, 2010 at 6:45 PM, Bharat Kapoor 3.kap...@gmail.com mailto:3.kap...@gmail.com wrote: Dear All I have updated the Project plan for the Pilot, which I feel comfortable that we can achieve in the next 3 months. If successful will make a it a permanent feature and also investigate Europe and other high open source concentrations areas next? Please take a look at the Project Plan section towards the end @: http://live.gnome.org/GnomeFundRaising Feedback requested: 1. Is this good enough to go? or do we need more planning or need to explore additional channels? 2. Have we picked the right conferences - is there any conference that we missed between May end through Aug end? 3. Should we list ourselves on: Qnation Wecaretoo? 4. Do we have a booth the the conferences listed, if not does anyone have a contact at these conferences, if not I shall contact them. Best Regards Bharat -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Mobile Funding Plan - Please comment
Bharat: The mobile funding plan is posted at: http://live.gnome.org/Gnome Fund Raising Please comment either in mail or embed your comments in the wiki itself. Also please sign up for what you can help with. While I agree that handing out cards at events and encouraging people to donate is a good way to advertise, I would like to see more ways of advertising the various mobile campaigns. Shouldn't we have banner ads on popular GNOME websites (like planet, the GNOME Amazon/Google websites, etc.), send emails to various GNOME users groups, and reach out to people who might not be attending conferences? Since the GNOME Foundation is a not-for-profit charity, I would think that we would be able to find lots of ways to advertise for free or inexpensively. There are many opportunities for non-for-profits to get free advertising. For example: http://techcrunch.com/2009/03/27/special-youtube-ads-earn-nonprofit-1-in-a-single-day/ http://www.wecaretoo.com/ http://qnation.com/index.php?contentID=778 http://www.fallsradio.com/Free_Advertising_Policy.html And many many more... I would think a mobile campaign would be more successful if we did more to get the word out. Just telling people at conference is preaching to the converted. Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: GNOME Free Agent T-shirt Proposal
Thanks for the positive responses, but I really need someone with graphic design skills to help make this happen. I am hoping that we can get this done in time to make the t-shirts available at GUADEC and Dongyun is awaiting a mock-up before he does additional work putting together the graphics. Are there any graphic designers out there who could help with this? Brian On 04/ 6/10 03:08 PM, Brian Cameron wrote: GNOME Marketing Team Over the past several months, I have been trading emails with the OLPC and SugarLabs folks about an opportunity to create a t-shirt to promote that GNOME free software benefits humanitarian projects like OLPC and Sugar Labs, and to provide a nice reward for volunteers within the GNOME community. Based on my rough textual design ideas I have gotten permission from both OLPC and SugarLabs to go ahead with using their logos in this way, though they obviously want to review a final mock-up of what the t-shirt will look like before giving a formal go-ahead. So, I have been thinking of creating a GNOME Free Agent t-shirt. I like this name since Free Agent is a fun play on words and can be interpreted in different ways including being an independent GNOME volunteer. Dongyun Lee (http://dongyunlee.com/) does artwork for OLPC and has volunteered to provide artwork to use on the t-shirt for no charge (though he does want 2 free t-shirts for himself and his wife which seems reasonable). Rather than a photograph of children using OLPC units (photographs are hard to make look nice on tshirts), he suggested using some of his OLPC line art. For example, you can see some work he did for OLPC here: http://www.sugarlabs.org/index.php?template=pagepage=learners Both Dongyun and myself think this particular image would work nicely on a t-shirt: http://dongyunlee.com/imgsrc/il/il24_11.jpg Dongyun has volunteered to create some custom artwork for this t-shirt if we can provide direction. Some people I have shown this image to think it is a bit too busy, so perhaps something a bit toned down would be better. Thoughts? With the photo would appear the following text: [GNOME Logo] Free Software - Powering [OLPC logo] [Sugar Labs logo] Perhaps some additional text under the photograph or under the logo would be nice like Helping previously marginalized children throughout the developing world learn, achieve and begin to transform their communities I was thinking that we could make two versions of the t-shirt. One version to sell for $20 that has nothing on the back. A second version will have the following text on the back and would be given away for no-charge to volunteers who work on GNOME but do not work for a company that works on GNOME. People who work on GNOME for a company would pay $25 for the second version of the tshirt with this text on the back: Free Agent GNOME Free Software Volunteer I am hoping that people on the marketing-list can help with: 1) What do people think of this proposal? Any ideas on how to further improve it? 2) As I mention above, Dongyun is agreeable to creating an image that is more focused on the relationship between GNOME, SugarLabs, and OLPC. Any ideas or direction that we could give to Dongyun would be helpful. 3) Perhaps the proposed image above is a bit too busy. Do people have suggestions on whether the image created for this t-shirt should be changed? Should less colors be used for an image intended for a t-shirt, for example? 4) I need someone with graphic design skills to put together a mock up image of the t-shirt to help facilitate moving this forward. Can anyone help? Thanks, Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
GNOME Free Agent T-shirt Proposal
GNOME Marketing Team Over the past several months, I have been trading emails with the OLPC and SugarLabs folks about an opportunity to create a t-shirt to promote that GNOME free software benefits humanitarian projects like OLPC and Sugar Labs, and to provide a nice reward for volunteers within the GNOME community. Based on my rough textual design ideas I have gotten permission from both OLPC and SugarLabs to go ahead with using their logos in this way, though they obviously want to review a final mock-up of what the t-shirt will look like before giving a formal go-ahead. So, I have been thinking of creating a GNOME Free Agent t-shirt. I like this name since Free Agent is a fun play on words and can be interpreted in different ways including being an independent GNOME volunteer. Dongyun Lee (http://dongyunlee.com/) does artwork for OLPC and has volunteered to provide artwork to use on the t-shirt for no charge (though he does want 2 free t-shirts for himself and his wife which seems reasonable). Rather than a photograph of children using OLPC units (photographs are hard to make look nice on tshirts), he suggested using some of his OLPC line art. For example, you can see some work he did for OLPC here: http://www.sugarlabs.org/index.php?template=pagepage=learners Both Dongyun and myself think this particular image would work nicely on a t-shirt: http://dongyunlee.com/imgsrc/il/il24_11.jpg Dongyun has volunteered to create some custom artwork for this t-shirt if we can provide direction. Some people I have shown this image to think it is a bit too busy, so perhaps something a bit toned down would be better. Thoughts? With the photo would appear the following text: [GNOME Logo] Free Software - Powering [OLPC logo] [Sugar Labs logo] Perhaps some additional text under the photograph or under the logo would be nice like Helping previously marginalized children throughout the developing world learn, achieve and begin to transform their communities I was thinking that we could make two versions of the t-shirt. One version to sell for $20 that has nothing on the back. A second version will have the following text on the back and would be given away for no-charge to volunteers who work on GNOME but do not work for a company that works on GNOME. People who work on GNOME for a company would pay $25 for the second version of the tshirt with this text on the back: Free Agent GNOME Free Software Volunteer I am hoping that people on the marketing-list can help with: 1) What do people think of this proposal? Any ideas on how to further improve it? 2) As I mention above, Dongyun is agreeable to creating an image that is more focused on the relationship between GNOME, SugarLabs, and OLPC. Any ideas or direction that we could give to Dongyun would be helpful. 3) Perhaps the proposed image above is a bit too busy. Do people have suggestions on whether the image created for this t-shirt should be changed? Should less colors be used for an image intended for a t-shirt, for example? 4) I need someone with graphic design skills to put together a mock up image of the t-shirt to help facilitate moving this forward. Can anyone help? Thanks, Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Guadec and Dutch government plans for OSS and desktop
Sanne: We've had contact briefly about usabillity. I agree with you that this is something that would be of interest for any government, and I want to have a talk about this in the pre-conference. Can you help me getting the GNOME people who are knowledgable about this to prepare something for the pre-conference? That would be really great. I've also had contact with your Colleague Willie Walker (who pointed me to Javier Martinez) about this. I'm hoping I can get someone from ONCE to talk about this as well. Although I do promote accessibility, I am probably not well enough informed to help put together much for such a formal presentation. I would think that having this discussion on the gnome-accessibility-l...@gnome.org mailing list would be a better place to seek such help than on the GNOME marketing-list. Peter Korn (peter.k...@oracle.com) has done some significant work with the AEGIS project in Europe, so he has experience dealing with a11y and European governments. But I know that Willie has already given you that pointer. Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Mobile Giving Foundation
Paul: I think we should do this and use the $300 to try taking donations via text message. The board also thought this was a good opportunity. However, in order for such a mobile campaign to work well, there needs to be some plan to make the public aware that they can donate via this mechanism. I can imagine that social networking tools such as Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn could be used to get the message out. Also, making use of things like our Amazon Store. But, I could imagine that we could do more than even this (press releases, ads, etc.). While $300 is not a lot to spend, it does seem that if the GNOME marketing team plans to make use of this sort of tool that we need some sort of plan in place about how we will get the word out. Shouldn't the GNOME marketing team put together at least a skeleton of a plan together before we spend the money? Otherwise, I worry we will just spend the $300 and it will just go unused. Brian Combined with your message about the declining Friends of GNOME donations (taking out the one time donation we had last month) this might help kickstart it again. In a perfect world, I'd like us to to wrap up the Sysadmin banner and get that launched and do this at the same time. I know Lucas had volunteered to try and finish that, but with the birth of his child, I'm assuming he'll be away for a bit. (I'll send a separate email on this to try and get this finished). Paul On Tue, Mar 2, 2010 at 11:46 AM, Stormy Peters sto...@gnome.org mailto:sto...@gnome.org wrote: Marketing list folks, How should I interpret the absolute silence in response to this proposal? a) We don't want $300. b) Let's use the $300 to try taking donations via text message for 3 months. c) I'd rather we spent the $300 on __. Stormy On Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 2:26 PM, Stormy Peters sto...@gnome.org mailto:sto...@gnome.org wrote: We discussed this in the GNOME board meeting. The board thinks it's a good idea to explore new opportunities like this and there's $300 the marketing team can use for this. (Or any other activities that are appropriate.) They did bring up the issue that we should have a plan for how we plan to get out the word. I agree with that. How are we going to advertise the fact that people can donate via text? So it's up to us, the marketing team, to decide if we want to do this and if so, how. Stormy On Wed, Feb 17, 2010 at 11:04 AM, Stormy Peters sto...@gnome.org mailto:sto...@gnome.org wrote: On Wed, Feb 17, 2010 at 10:14 AM, Bharat Kapoor 3.kap...@gmail.com mailto:3.kap...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Stormy I will respond to this question in two steps. Part 1 Breakeven - we need around 11 people giving 10 bucks for the 1st 3 months to breakeven. Part 2 I think we should treat this as a pilot as we dont even know how our members will respond there will be an acceptance period and we should take the 300 bucks we pay them over 3 months as Capital Expense. At the end of 3 month we should be in a position to decide further if this works or not - my assumption is that if we have around 20 folks giving we should be in good shape and since this is Tax free donation - we should send them receipts so technically it willo cost them between $7 and $7.50 to make a donation of $10 to Gnome. +1 to investing $300 to see if it works. We'll have to make sure everyone is ready to advertise it on Planet/Identica/Twitter/Facebook, etc. What do others think? Stormy -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org mailto:marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Campaign Proposal
Nelson: I also agree that a humanitarian theme is a something that appeals to me. However, picking the names of endangered species may not be the message that we want to communicate. This may create the undesirable association that GNOME itself is an endangered species. This could create bad press and ammo for critics. It would be damaging to have people start making jokes about GNOME 3.0 being the Dodo Release, for example. I would prefer to associate GNOME with a humanitarian cause that also communicates growth rather than being dangerously close to extinction. For example, why not name GNOME after a species that has recovered from being extinct, or with something like solar energy. This communicates a more upbeat and positive message about the brand, avoids such negative associations, and still promotes humanitarian issues. Brian I appreciate that it's a nice idea to adopt humanitarian causes as a way of having some of the good feelings people have for them to rub off on us. But I really don't like the whole endangered species angle. Let me explain why: I have some more suggestions for names: Lucid Lynx, Intrepid Ibex, Jaunty Jackalope, Hardy Heron... I don't mean to put a kybosh on the idea altogether, but the animal name thing isn't really original, given Ubuntu. I couldn't care less. Point me some originality in Ubuntu, and I can consider my position. And the iLynx suggestion in the original proposal seems a but Applish, no? In addition to the iSomething convention, Apple has used Cheetah, Puma, Jaguar, Panther, Tiger, Leopard and Snow Leopard as OS X release codenames, so choosing a big cat doesn't seem like a good idea. I've supplied alternatives. I've choosen the Iberian Lynx as a form to translate my thoughts because he lives in Portugal and Spain and he is my neighbor. Didn't felt like loosing time searching for other species. I did flavoured a national cause (Portugal and Spain), because I am Portuguese. One other negative remark - do we really want to have GNOME associated with extinct or almost extinct animals? While the Siberian Tiger, the Iberian Lynx, the Javan Rhino and the Mountain Gorilla make for nice icons, there are almost none left, and their population is in decline. Is that the association we want people to make when they think of GNOME? Anyway - sorry to be the party pooper. Well, it's better than associating it with Genghis Kahn (aka Temujin) the Impaler. Do I see some sense here? And from another point of view: http://www.unep.ch/ It is a subject being supported by the United Nations. And even further: http://www.unep.org/awards/ Do we have a GNOME Logo there? If such thing happened, what were the benefits GNOME would take from it? My 2 cents, PS: I've offered alternatives, such as the Spider Monkeys and the Red Wolfs during this thread. Spider Monkeys means fighting against the de-florestation of the Amazonian Rain Forest, and Red Wolfs is a US national cause. In case we aint going for the cats. nelson Cheers, Dave. -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Campaign Proposal
Nelson: Coming up with a good campaign requires a lot of discussion, and takes time to develop properly. It is tricky to get the associations right on. I do think that there is general agreement that associating GNOME with a positive and humanitarian cause is a good idea. Also, who does not like fuzzy animals. As I suggested before, why don't we pick animals that have recovered from being extinct, such as the bald eagle, the grizzly bear, the gray wolf, the green sea turtle, or the Florida panther? This brings attention to the humanitarian issue and the danger of animals becoming extinct, but focuses on growth, solution, and the positive. This could hopefully create the association that likewise GNOME is a positive solution to a problem (like freedom becoming extinct). Brian On Tue, 2010-02-23 at 08:51 -0700, Stormy Peters wrote: So I really don't think that naming releases after endangered species will make us look like an endangered species. And I think being associated with cute animals is almost always a good thing. Thanks for the support, but I don't believe we should continue this. Brian's concerns are valid. We might become an endangered species. Like most Portuguese of my age, I've served in the military (Air Force Police), my former unit was RESCOM (Rescue Combat), we were trained in incursion and extraction of personnel behind enemy lines. Our badge was an Iberian Lynx over a dagger, this was how I knew the Iberian Lynx. That unit had been disbanded in 2004. So, it's a fine example of Brian's statement, it ended up by disappearing, and he is right also as we might be handing free ammunition to all the GNOME haters outside. Sort out a theme that doesn't offend no one, I'm willing to place work on such campaign. But I do like the idea of picking a humanitarian cause more related to us. Is there something in the developing world or technology related that we can link to? Could we pick animals in areas we'd like to help? Stormy On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 4:34 AM, Brian Cameronbrian.came...@sun.com wrote: Nelson: I also agree that a humanitarian theme is a something that appeals to me. However, picking the names of endangered species may not be the message that we want to communicate. This may create the undesirable association that GNOME itself is an endangered species. This could create bad press and ammo for critics. It would be damaging to have people start making jokes about GNOME 3.0 being the Dodo Release, for example. I would prefer to associate GNOME with a humanitarian cause that also communicates growth rather than being dangerously close to extinction. For example, why not name GNOME after a species that has recovered from being extinct, or with something like solar energy. This communicates a more upbeat and positive message about the brand, avoids such negative associations, and still promotes humanitarian issues. Brian I appreciate that it's a nice idea to adopt humanitarian causes as a way of having some of the good feelings people have for them to rub off on us. But I really don't like the whole endangered species angle. Let me explain why: I have some more suggestions for names: Lucid Lynx, Intrepid Ibex, Jaunty Jackalope, Hardy Heron... I don't mean to put a kybosh on the idea altogether, but the animal name thing isn't really original, given Ubuntu. I couldn't care less. Point me some originality in Ubuntu, and I can consider my position. And the iLynx suggestion in the original proposal seems a but Applish, no? In addition to the iSomething convention, Apple has used Cheetah, Puma, Jaguar, Panther, Tiger, Leopard and Snow Leopard as OS X release codenames, so choosing a big cat doesn't seem like a good idea. I've supplied alternatives. I've choosen the Iberian Lynx as a form to translate my thoughts because he lives in Portugal and Spain and he is my neighbor. Didn't felt like loosing time searching for other species. I did flavoured a national cause (Portugal and Spain), because I am
Re: Campaign Proposal
Nelson: As I suggested before, why don't we pick animals that have recovered from being extinct, such as the bald eagle, the grizzly bear, the gray wolf, the green sea turtle, or the Florida panther? Did we had a role in that recovery? That option doesn't provide it. While we can act on a positive way, actually doing something, we should turn out backs to it and go for the easier way? That's a fine a example we give to our free contributors. Messes with my ethical senses. I do like victory knots on my belt, but only if I contributed for them. Why should we advertise other people's work? Do we benefit anything from it? Many people will likely not understand the connection between the image of an animal with the cause unless it is explained to them. For example, I wasn't aware that most of the animals mentioned were particular in danger until they were mentioned in this discussion. So, I imagined that the campaign would include information to accompany the release which would explain the connection, to provide people with links to promote the cause, and to encourage people to donate. I think the message could work regardless of whether the image is of a particular animal that is currently endangered with instructions on how to help, or if the image is of a saved animal with instructions on how to help save other endangered animals. As long as the information provided to the users is honest and works to promote a good cause, I would think people would be empathetic. I wanted to raise my concerns about using the image of an endangered animal for people to think about. But, I would just ignore my concerns since it seems that others don't feel that this is a real issue to worry about. That doesn't sound like a cause to me, just some plain cheap obtained interest. We should show commitment (as our developers show to us), and not trying to cut some slack on other peoples work. I don't think anyone is suggesting that we take advantage of other people's work in any bad or malicious way. Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Guadec and Dutch government plans for OSS and desktop
Sanne: One thing that I notice is that your document makes no mention of accessibility. Many governments are interested in supporting workers, citizens and students who are disabled. GNOME provides, at no cost, a wide range of accessibility support for users who are blind, have vision problems, and have mobility impairments. No other free desktop yet provides the support that GNOME provides at no cost. Note that proprietary solutions for the disabled can be very expensive. To make a computer using a proprietary operating system support the same degree of accessibility support that is provided at no charge with GNOME, it is often necessary to spend thousands of dollars purchasing additional software needed to provide this sort of functionality. I would think this would be of interest to any government. Brian I've made a post before where I addressed the Dutch' government plans for OSS in their desktop. As Guadec will be in holland this year, the organisation is aiming to have one or a view sessions about OSS in public intstitutions. The government just released a consultation asking for feedback about their plans. The document and interaction with government could provide several opportunities: -It could give vital information about preconditions to target government markets. -Gnome could give an official reaction to them (before the end of march) or later in a technical magazine or webzine to praise the merits of the plans and criticize weaknesses, and showing themselves as a serious contender. -Could provide an opportunity for exposure as a lot of magazines might be interested in Gnome's thoughts about this. -resulting in Buzz, exposure, increased opportunities for Guadec fundraising, etc. etc. You decide, here it is. It's in dutch. If you think this could be interesting, let me know, so we might have someone translate it. http://wiki.noiv.nl/xwiki/bin/download/OpenDWR/WebHome/RealisatielijnOpenDWRv0.93februari.pdf regards, Sanne -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Friends of GNOME Ruler
Stormy: Perhaps we could also preannounce another campaign at the same time. Do we have any ideas for our next campaign? 2. Add a bit more text in Friends of GNOME front page about the goal. Maybe elaborate a bit more on the benefits of hiring a sysadmin? Volunteers? Maybe we could reuse the text from the original announcement mail? With some wordsmithing ... Paul Cutler put the following job description together, which seems like it contains pretty good content: http://live.gnome.org/Sysadmin/AdvisoryMeeting/JobDescription Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Introductions
Hello, my name is Brian Cameron and there is some information about me here: http://live.gnome.org/BrianCameron I have worked for Sun Microsystems (now becoming Oracle) for over 10 years, over 8 of those years on the GNOME project. I am on the GNOME Foundation board of directors and acting as the secretary. I am really more of a developer than a marketing person, but I have been involved with marketing-related discussions for the past few years, and attended the last Marketing hackfest in Chicago. Any board member often deals with marketing topics and opportunities, and one of the reasons I participate is because I think the GNOME marketing-list is one of the more important GNOME forums for board members to be involved with. I also tend to work closely with the GNOME legal team, and I tend to get involved with marketing issues that involve working with the legal team. For example, one marketing related task I am currently working on with the legal team is to put together more comprehensive trademark agreements so that GNOME is better prepared to license the GNOME brand to organizations who want to sell GNOME branded merchandise. Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Relations with other organizations
I'm Gil Forcada, member of guifi.net[1] [2], a free, open an neutral network that started on Catalonia nearly 6 years ago. Gil, thanks for starting this discussion. We want to spread the word about our project as much as we want (the same as GNOME and all projects) so we thought that it would be cool if the GNOME foundation and the guifi.net foundation could make an official endorsement somehow: I'm thinking in a press release, banner exchanges, keep a line of contact to let the other know projects that maybe interests it, giving support ... So I sent an e-mail to Stormy who then add Brian and finally Diego but they resolved that it would be better to talk in this mailing list. With the guifi.net foundation board member hat on I'm here to ask what I wrote above, but since I'm also involved on GNOME I'm also here help the GNOME foundation to establish a policy about relations with other organizations which are loosely tied with GNOME but that they still want to be somewhat related. Right, the difficulty is that the GNOME Foundation does not currently have any sort of program to allow interested organizations like guifi.net to establish a closer relationship with the GNOME community. Currently the GNOME Foundation does have relationship with the Advisory Board, but has nothing to offer organizations that are not a good fit for that forum. Gil mentions that such a relationship could include press releases, banner exchanges, and opportunities to promote each other. This seems reasonable, but it seems that it would make more sense to define a general program that we could use going forward for any organization interested in developing this sort of relationship. It does not seem to make sense to try and treat each request like this as a special case. The board was hoping to get some feedback from the marketing list about how the GNOME community should go about setting up something like this. Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Communicating to users what GNOME 3.0 is
Paul: The accessibility changes are big - and as it's a core component of GNOME (accessible to all) there's probably a lot more we could be doing around it. (I'm not an expert on accessibility in any way, shape or form). While the planned a11y changes are big, I do not think that they have much immediate end-user facing impact. For example, I do not believe there are any exciting new a11y use-cases that are planned to be supported in GNOME 3.0, or any new significant accessibility tools. Switching from bonobo to D-Bus does mean two exciting things: - GNOME can finally deprecate ORBit2 and bonobo, something that has been desired for a long time. - Switching to D-Bus will help the GNOME and KDE community work more closely together moving forward to develop a common a11y infrastructure. Over time, this could lead to some exciting innovation, but this will probably happen gradually with end users noticing the benefits much later than the initial GNOME 3.0 release. From an end-user perspective, these changes probably will not be very visible. If anything, the switch to GNOME 3.0 will probably be seen as a step backwards for many a11y users for the following reasons: - It took many years to tweak the use of ORBit2 and bonobo so that a11y features run as fast as they do today. Switching to D-Bus will likely introduce some new performance issues that will likely, again, take time to resolve. - GNOME Shell, other OpenGL/clutter components, and WebKit seem slow about addressing a11y issues. So, there is a real risk that the GNOME 3.0 release will have some serious a11y regressions. I imagine that these issues will be addressed over time, but may not be working well until a follow-up GNOME 3.x release. Remember that the GNOME 2.0 release was held up for a very long time due (in part) to a11y, and even so it was not until about GNOME 2.10 that a11y in GNOME really started being usable. Obviously we will need to wait an see, perhaps GNOME 3.0 and a11y will come together more elegantly than I suggest above. However, if not, then it might be hard to promote a11y as being an exciting new feature of GNOME 3.0. We may only be able to claim that GNOME 3.0 provides some exciting new non-user-facing a11y infrastructure, which is probably not very exciting if the end-user experience is actually worse for users with a11y needs. Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Braille printing for conferences
Willie/Dave: It might also be nice to highlight the humanitarian aspects of accessibility a bit more. For example, I think it would be nice to highlight something about the GNOME accessibility community. Perhaps something about the fact that a number of people with disabilities participate in development and in user forums. I think the promise of joining a community of people working to address accessibility usability issues is attractive to highlight. If that wouldn't make it too long, and you agree. Brian Thanks Dave! Something about the specialised hardware to interact with applications portion seems odd to me. In GNOME, we have a core value that people with disabilities have free compelling access to the graphical desktop and web. GNOME accomplishes this with full keyboard access, theming, and an industry leading accessibility infrastructure that is used by built-in assistive technologies including a screen reader, magnifier, and on screen keyboard. With a model of built in versus bolted on, GNOME not only has free compelling accessibility today, but it also provides a rich and stable base for future accessibility work. or... (I just took my first stab at this and added by people with disabilities to the first sentence): In GNOME, accessibility by people with disabilities is a core value that touches all aspects of the system. With a model of built in versus bolted on, the GNOME Accessibility project has helped lead the industry in accessible design. From the infrastructure, to the graphical toolkit, to the applications, to the assistive technologies, accessibility has been a central consideration from the very early days. As a result, GNOME not only has compelling accessibility today, but it also provides a rich and stable base for future accessibility work. Will On Dec 8, 2009, at 5:27 PM, Dave Neary wrote: Hi, Shorter would be better, I think. How about this (pure edit, no additions): In GNOME, making sure that people with disabilities can use our software is a core value. From infrastructure allowing our built-in screen reader or specialised hardware to interact with applications to utilities to make it easier for people with motor problems to interact with a computer, accessibility in GNOME is built-in, not bolted on. As a result GNOME not only has compelling accessibility today, it also provides a rich foundation for the future. How does that read? Covers all the bases, I think - a11y is a core value, what does accessibility mean, and how do we make things easier for people with disabilities. Maybe needs a quick fact check on the second sentence (it is at-spi that lets Orca do its thang, isn't it?) Cheers, Dave. Willie Walker wrote: Here's a bunch of run-ons... :-) In GNOME, accessibility by people with disabilities is a core value that touches all aspects of the system. With a model of built in versus bolted on, the GNOME Accessibility project has helped lead the industry in accessible design. From the accessibility infrastructure, to the graphical toolkit, to the applications, to the assistive technologies, accessibility has been a central consideration from the very early days of GNOME. As a result, GNOME not only has compelling accessibility today, but it also provides a rich and stable base for future accessibility work. Today, users have built-in keyboard navigation, highly customizable fonts/colors/icons, keyboard enhancements such as StickyKeys, the MouseTweaks tool that provides mouse clicking features by dwelling, the GOK on screen keyboard that can be driven via dwell clicking and switches, the Dasher predictive text entry tool, and the Orca screen reader and magnifier. Developers also have the glade-3 tool that helps encourage accessible user interface design and the accerciser tool that helps developers analyze how their application is exposed to the built-in accessibility infrastructure. For tomorrow, the GNOME project is busily working on enhancing the on screen keyboard and magnifier, developing ways to use web cameras to move the mouse based upon head/body position, and making the solution much more friendly to resource constrained devices such as netbooks and the OLPC. Will On Dec 8, 2009, at 1:08 PM, Stormy Peters wrote: Looks good. Can we add a sentence or two about what accessibility is or give some examples of the technology? Stormy On Tue, Dec 8, 2009 at 11:07 AM, Willie Walker william.wal...@sun.com wrote: Here's a quick snippet I might propose: In GNOME, accessibility is a core value that touches all aspects of the system. With a model of built in versus bolted on, the GNOME Accessibility project has helped lead the industry in accessible design. From the infrastructure, to the graphical toolkit, to the applications, to the assistive technologies, accessibility has been a central consideration from the very early days. As a result, GNOME not only has compelling accessibility today, but it also
Re: Friends of GNOME Merchandise Queen or King needed (Was: GNOME US Event Box)
Behdad: Before making it too enticing, this is a US-only position, right? Should make it clear. If the compensation is travel to an event, then why would it need to be a US-only position? Are the tax implications of giving a gift or reward very complicated? Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Suggestion that GNOME should better acknowledge sponsors
I was recently asked by someone in Sun to provide a list of ways that Sun has been involved with the GNOME community. I looked on the GNOME Wiki for any information about this, but did not really find anything. This got me to thinking that we could do more to acknowledge the ways that people and organizations help the GNOME Foundation and community. Would it make sense to have a Wiki page where we could keep track of who sponsored various events, hackfests, and activities? And perhaps put logos of all organizations that have played a significant role in GNOME's history. This seems like it would be a nice way to acknowledge the organizations and people who support GNOME via sponsorships. Thoughts? Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Help define new partnership roles with GNOME Foundation
Diego: currently GNOME offers other groups, companies or projects to join the Foundation as Advisory Board members. This -as you know- implies benefits and responsibilities for both sides: a fee to be payed, a seat in the advisory board calls, etc. Right. The Advisory Board is a useful forum for larger organizations that have a big stake in GNOME, for organizations whose input is particularly important to the GNOME community, etc. It is not well suited for smaller organizations who may simply want to show support towards GNOME or build a closer relationship. So, we -the Board- are asking for your feedback to brainstorm and try to define a role or model that would allow new organizations to partner with GNOME Foundation in a more consistent way. I think it would be appropriate for the GNOME community to provide a menu of options for consideration. I think the GNOME Foundation could improve community relationships and increase donations if we made it easier for people and organizations to participate and show their support in a variety of ways. Friends of GNOME is good, but it seems it should be a piece of a larger puzzle. Below you highlight two very different kinds of organizations: - Affiliation with like-minded organizations. I would think that if the GNOME community has a strong ethical, philosophical, or moral connection with another organization, that we would want to support each other without requiring significant fees or donations. - Organizations who want to show their support of GNOME by providing a donation. The GNOME community could provide some services or other benefits in return for a donation. As you suggest below, link exchanges, promotional opportunities, sponsorship of certain events, etc. seem like good incentives to encourage organizations to donate. I would think that this type of sponsorship would appeal to small businesses like consulting firms that do work with GNOME-related technologies. It would be a way for them to show support of the GNOME community and for the GNOME community to help promote them as well. So, I would think we probably need two different types of programs for these two very different kinds of organizations. Here are some ideas to discuss: - Organizations doing humanitarian work: we definitely want to work with organizations that do work in the developing world. How best could we help them? What can we offer, can we really help them? Can they help us? - For non profits or non business companies: should we have a one-size-fits-all donation fee for joining? should we judge case by case? Earlier I suggest that it would be good to a menu of options. However, such a menu could develop over time. It is hard to predict what a menu should look like when we do not yet know who would consider participating. It probably makes sense to develop a more simple program to start and enhance it over time. It will be more clear how to improve such a program once we know what sorts of organizations will participate, what their needs might be, and how we can improve the program to meet particular needs. - AdBoard relationship: if we were to have a group of non AB organizations, should we have 'open' AB meetings where they can participate? I suspect that most organizations who would participate would not have a real interest in sitting in on advisory board meetings. If there were such an interest, it would probably make sense to consider it on a case-by-case basis. However, there might be value in having 1-2 special (non-advisory board) meetings per year where we would invite all organizations that show their support to the GNOME community. Topics more focused on community building would probably be more interesting to such an audience than the usual advisory board topics. - Some companies that use GNOME technology might be happy to support us with a logo exchange: how can we engage them and what can we offer and request concretely? I would say companies that use or support GNOME technology. I would think that this sort of program would be particularly interesting to contractors who support GNOME, for example. In the same fashion, here are some ideas about what we could offer: - Recognition as a GNOME supporter - A press release - Presence in our website as supporters - Promotion space in our website (as content, not ads) I do not see why we need to limit promotion to the web at this stage in discussions. Perhaps there could be some space in forums like GNOME Journal or other things we publish for such promotion? - Consider them sponsors or supporters of certain events I think the main reason that the board has wanted to raise this issue with the marketing team is twofold: - To help brainstorm how to put together an attractive program. What sorts of things can we realistically offer to make such a program a success. - Such a program will obviously create more work. Much of the additional
Re: Marketing Team IRC Meetings
Paul: I'd like to ask the question if people on the list would be interested in having a monthly team meeting on IRC, similar to what other teams do, such as Docs, Accessibility and Bug Squad. I think it is a great idea. We could always just plan to try it a time or two and see how it goes. If people attend and the meeting are productive, then this would encourage doing this on a more ongoing basis. Any feedback is good - if yes, you'd like to see them, please respond back with a Yes, and potential days of the week and times that might work. From there, I'd probably recommend using Doodle (http://www.doodle.com/) to help find a time that works for the majority. As long as it isn't in the middle of the night U.S. time, I could attend. noon-2pm Tuesdays, 10am-1pm Wednesdays, and noon-1pm Thursdays (Central US time) are unavailable times for me. I think doodle would be a good way to coordinate a good time. Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Chicago GNOME Marketing Hackfest Linux Users Group Meeting
Since the GNOME Marketing Hackfest is on November 10-11, I wanted to let people know that the Chicago GNU/Linux meeting is a few days later on November 14th. Not sure if people are staying long enough to attend, but something to think about. https://www.chicagolug.org/ Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Marketing Hackfest Details
John/Paul: Is there any possibility of either web-casting or video-conferencing this event? Or at the very least recording it for later consumption? I (and I presume others in the world) would love to attend and contribute, but I have no hope of being there physically. I appreciate that this could be expensive and/or a hassle, so I expect the answer no. But perhaps the GNOME powers-that-be could investigate setting up infrastructure for this purpose in future events? I would think that Google, being the tech-savvy company that they are probably does have some videoconferencing facilities. Would be good to check out what they might be able to offer us. Though, their videoconferencing services might only work between various Google offices, so it might depend on whether or not interested people have a nearby Google office that they could visit. This might work well for people in the bay area, for example. Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Q3 report for review
Stormy: I'm still missing a few updates, but here is the Q3 report so far. I'd appreciate any comments. Looks really good to me. I still think we could promote the GNOME Women's Outreach program a bit more, but aside from that I don't have any other comments. Brian GNOME Quarterly Report *GNOME Foundation* Providing a Free Desktop for the World July, August, September 2009 Hi GNOME Foundation members and fans, Q3 is always a big quarter for the GNOME Foundation and this one was bigger and better than usual. During Q3 we had our annual GUADEC, GNOME Users and Developers Conference, which we held jointly with Akademy in the first ever Gran Canaria Desktop Summit! The co-located event was a huge success with lots of good sessions in both the Akademy tracks as well as the GUADEC tracks and lots of good cross desktop talks and conversations that will lead to more collaboration throughout the year. We hope to co-locate again in the future! GNOME 2.28 was released in September. Quite a few products had significant updates in preparation for GNOME 3.0 - including a release of GNOME Shell! - and a couple of changes were made to improve usability such as a different default toolbar and turning off menu and button icons by default. During Q4 the release team will decide if GNOME 3.0 will be in March or November of 2010! There were a few structural changes in how things work in the GNOME project. For example, we created a new press team, a subproject under the marketing team focused on press relationships and press releases, as well as things like monthly meetings by the Bugsquad team. The GNOME Accessibility team has been hard at work preparing for GNOME 3.0 by working on accessibility in projects like GNOME Shell, Clutter and Banshee as well as working on new tools like an onscreen keyboard. GNOME Mobile had an awesome quarter with great attendance at OSiM Mobile by GNOME Mobile member companies and the release of products that use GNOME Mobile technologies like Moblin 2.0 and the Nokia N900. In addition, LiMO announced that they will soon release phones that use GNOME technologies! Our marketing team has been hard at work. Friends of GNOME can now make monthly contributions in any amount they'd like and we've raised $23,415 so far this year! Their good work will continue and get an extra boost with a marketing hackfest in November sponsored by Novell and Google. Speaking of hackfests, next quarter will be a busy one with lots of good work being done in preparation for GNOME 3.0. We are planning hackfests around the Boston Summit, one for marketing, Zeitgeist and WebKitGTK+ plus more in the beginning of next year in areas like accessiblity and video. Read on to hear what GNOME teams have accomplished in Q3 and what they are planning for Q4! Best wishes and happy hacking! Enjoy your GNOME desktop! *Stormy Peters* /Executive Director, GNOME Foundation/ Release Team Vincent Untz For the release team, the third quarter started with the last 2.26 release, which went out on July 1st. The focus then quickly became the 2.27 development cycle that would lead to GNOME 2.28. Five GNOME 2.27 releases were published during those three months, and the usual freezes (API/ABI, feature, user interface, string) were applied to help the community focus on getting a high quality release. In July, a meeting was held where one of the main topics was the new modules that would be included in GNOME 2.28. This release contains a good balance between integration of pre-existing applications (gnome-bluetooth), great new tools (gnome-disk-utility), and new external dependencies that will allow developers to provide even more great features (seed, webkit, DeviceKit-disks, libchamplain, libgdata). GNOME 2.28.0 went out as scheduled on September 23rd. In parallel of all those releases, we monitored the progress of GNOME on a few goals like, for example, the cleanup of modules to stop using deprecated libraries and APIs. We also modified the release schedule to move the module proposal period and the decision on module proposals earlier in the cycle, in response to feedback from some maintainers and also to help evaluate earlier what GNOME 3.0 would consist of. Looking ahead, the release team already has a good amount of work planned for the next quarter: there will of course be a first update to GNOME 2.28, with 2.28.1 which will be released at the end of October, and also the first versions of the 2.29 releases. A good number of new modules were proposed for inclusion during the 2.29 development cycle, and discussion around those proposals will help the release team decide what will be going in during a meeting at the beginning of November. Another meeting in November will be dedicated to GNOME 3.0: we will evaluate if 3.0 can be ready for March 2010 or if waiting
Re: Marketing Hackfest
Paul: I live in Chicago, and would like to attend if possible. If you need any help with organizing things in Chicago, then I am happy to help. Note that there is a gnome-chicago-l...@gnome.org. It might be a good idea to send an email to that list, and see if there is an interest in having a dinner or something with the wider group of Chicago GNOME'ies, or to see if anybody who happens to be in the Chicago area might also be interested in participating. Brian On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 7:45 AM, Paul Cutler pcut...@gnome.org mailto:pcut...@gnome.org wrote: Good morning Marketing team! We are finalizing plans for a Marketing hackfest in Chicago, IL USA on November 10th and 11th (Tues and Wed). Google has been gracious to host us (and provide lunch!) and Novell has donated money to help fund the hackfest. If you're interested in attending please let us know as soon as possible. We don't have a formal agenda (yet) but are hoping to work on conference and presentation materials such as the Event box email thread from over the weekend, the website, GNOME 3.0 marketing campaign, the GNOME website, case studies and more. Paul -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org mailto:marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: GNOME 2.28 Press Release
Paul: * Cheese, the GNOME webcam application, features an all new wide mode for users with netbooks. * GNOME's web browser, Epiphany, fixed a number of long-standing bugs with the switch to Webkit as its engine. * The Evince document viewer is now available for both Linux and Microsoft Windows® platforms. Evince has always been available for Linux, and other operating systems like OpenSolaris and BSD. I think the news is that it has now been ported to Windows. Perhaps we should just mention that it is now available for Windows rather than call out all platforms that it works with. Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: FSF, terminology, and marketing
I'm looking askance at this. I find the arguments in favor of GNU/Linux to be specious: if you examine the makeup of early Linux distros, following the FSF's reasoning would obligate one to call it X/GNU/Linux, at least. Further, I'm troubled at the idea that we'd attempt to conform to FSF ideas on terms like intellectual property and open source. I do not think I, or anyone, have been suggesting that the GNOME community will conform to any particular FSF idea on terminology. Instead, I am interested to get clarity about to what degree of conformity makes sense, and to understand to what degree we already conform. If there are areas where we choose to diverge, it is useful to know what those areas are and understand why. Few distros refer to themselves as GNU/Linux, and the mainstream media never uses the term. It's unclear to me, with the numerous other things we could be usefully doing, why we'd choose to spend energy on a, frankly quixotic, terminology crusade. Those reasons have already been raised as rationale for not following the GNU/Linux terminology. At this point in time, we are only discussing the topic, and not engaging on any sort of terminology crusade. What the marketing team thinks, in general, about if and when FSF recommended terminology should be used is valuable input to be considered in figuring out what terminology is best used and in what contexts. Shall we advise folks to avoid buying Harry Potter books as well? Probably not, but if there are people who want to talk about that, then they probably will. Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: FSF, terminology, and marketing
Paul: Claus, thanks for the email, and your quotes from Miguel are helpful. I think you bring up a good point as we are mostly, with the exception of Stormy and Rosanna, a volunteer staff. True. Perhaps, the GNOME community can recommend terminology for volunteers and/or help explain the reasoning behind the word choices so we make sure that volunteers are educated and can decide for themselves. However, it may be inappropriate to try and dictate which term any volunteer should use. A more thorny issue is what language should be used by the Foundation board of directors and those employees of the Foundation. Those people represent the GNOME community and we really need help from the community to ensure that we use the language that the community would prefer that we use. Since many of the documents that board members and employees contribute to are marketing-related, it is also useful to get the perspective of the marketing team. While many of the responses have been rather ambivalent and leaning against the term GNU/Linux, I think we also need to consider whether there are any contexts where using the FSF recommended terminology is appropriate. For example, if we do a press release about something directly related to the FSF, then perhaps it does make sense to make more of an effort to use the terminology they recommend. Or do we feel so strongly against using their terminology that we think that is a bad idea to use GNU/Linux in any context? Brian - do we have a list of terminology the FSF would prefer us to use other than free software and GNU/Linux? That is a really good question. As we all know, terms like free software and open software are confusing since words like free and open have many meanings. The FSF does feel that language is very important and that it is important to be careful to use the best words. Here is an essay that Richard Stallman wrote to provide guidance on this topic: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html I would think it would make good sense for anybody involved with free software, and especially those on the marketing team, to be (at the very least) aware and familiar with this information. If the GNOME community uses terminology that the FSF finds disagreeable, we should probably not do so out of ignorance. Taking a step back and thinking about this, if we were creating a style guide for our volunteers, what would some of that terminology be? I don't think this email thread needs to turn into style guide requirements, but it might be helpful to understand what the FSF is asking for. I am not sure that we need a style guide, but it would perhaps be useful to know if the GNOME community endorses these sorts of FSF recommendations, and to what degree. Then, at least, we know what we agree and disagree about. Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Theme for Summit 2009, need everyone's feedback
Emily: How about Discover Accessing Freedom With GNOME - Your Desktop Just joking. Brian 1. Discover GNOME 3.0 2. Discover GNOME 3. Discover GNOME - Your Accessible Desktop 4. Discover GNOME - The Accessible Desktop 5. Discover GNOME - Access Your Desktop 6. Access Your Desktop - Discover GNOME 7. Discover your desktop with GNOME 8. Access your desktop with GNOME 9. GNOME your desktop 10.Freedom with GNOME more ... Thanks, Emily -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
FSF, terminology, and marketing
Marketing Team: The Free Software Foundation (FSF) encourages the usage of the term GNU/Linux instead of the term Linux, and also discourages referring to free software and licenses as open source. Their argument, which I think is valid, is that doing so helps to highlight free software and bring positive attention towards the free software community. A few people have recently complained to the board that the GNOME community sometimes does not always follow these recommendations. I imagine that some of these issues are caused by people just not being thoughtful about the terminology that they use, but I also do not believe that the GNOME community has an official stance on what language we should be using. At any rate, we should probably be consistent with the language we use in more official GNOME Foundation communications. So, I think it is good to discuss and find out what the overall GNOME community thinks about this before making any sort of decision or encouraging people to use one term or another. On one hand, since we are a GNU project and since one of the long-standing objectives of the GNOME community has been to promote free software, there is a good argument for following these recommendations and making it a more official policy that we try to use the terminology recommended by the FSF. On the other hand, I know that some people in our community feel that it makes more sense to use the terms Linux and open source since they have more traction in the business world, and are more familiar. We often have trouble explaining what GNOME is to people, and it perhaps makes it harder when we use terms that are unfamiliar or that do not have traction. So, there may be situations or types of communication where going against the FSF recommendations makes sense. However, if we feel that we should go against the recommendations of the FSF, we probably should have some solid reasoning for doing so. Also, I think the GNOME Foundation needs to be sensitive to those partners with which we have close working relationships. For example, we need to be sensitive to what opinions those on the advisory board might have to say about the terminology we use. So, I have suggested to Stormy that we raise this topic at an upcoming advisory board meeting and find out what they think about this. Whether or not they care would likely be an important input to consider in making any decision. Perhaps it makes sense to use different terms when talking to different audiences. Perhaps we should make more of an effort to use the terms recommended by the FSF when communicating with some audiences, and use other terms in other situations. If so, perhaps we need to think about when it makes sense to use which terms and make this more clear so people have some guidance about what terms to use and when. So, I am interested to hear what the GNOME marketing community thinks about this. Since many of the documents where we use these terms are in public-facing documents such as marketing materials, PR, press releases, etc. I think whatever terms we use should be something that the marketing team thinks about and has input on any decisions made. Thoughts? Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: FSF, terminology, and marketing
Shane: Well I dont think many people outside of FSF care. Its harder to say GNU/Linux and more people simply call it just linux. We should respect the FSF but its not a big deal in my opinion. Its just politics. It may be politics, but within the context of the GNOME marketing-list, there should be some sensitivity to politics. The GNOME Foundation does have relationships with various governments and does try to encourage them to use free and open source solutions, for example. So, our messaging should be consistent, and I think we should not discount something in this forum for being just politics. Having a good relationship with the FSF is important. At the moment, we are doing a joint Women's Outreach program with them. The GNOME Foundation also has certain benefits, like the fact that we are able to use the Software Freedom Law Center due to our free software status. By working with the FSF, and following their recommendations, we may find that more doors open, and we may find more opportunities to do interesting and positive things with them and other free software organizations. Aside from the fact that promoting free software with the terminology we use may be just a good thing for any free software community to do. If we choose not to follow their recommendations we may be like that uncle who always says inappropriate things and never gets invited to certain parties. However, as I said before, we do need to consider how the terminology we use affects our other partners, such as our advisory board members. Improving our relationship with the FSF at the expense of our relationship with others, or with the public at large, might not be a good idea. However, I do not think we can make a decision without first talking about it amongst ourselves and with our advisory board members. So, I think it is a good idea to do both before making any sort of decision. Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: FSF, terminology, and marketing
Paul: * The most important thing we can do as marketers is know our audience. While I respect Brian's comment we should be sensitive to politics, it's really dependent on document we're writing and whom it is for. Agreed. * Most of our marketing is at end users - and for that reason, I prefer Linux as that is the common word used by journalists both in the open source press and the mainstream press. I can understand that position. As I suggested before, there may be certain audiences or situations where using different terminology makes more sense. For example, if we are doing a press release about something that we are doing with the Free Software Foundation, then perhaps it would probably be more appropriate to use the terminology they recommend, for example. * I don't know if I agree that having a good relationship with the FSF is that important. The anecdotal feedback I have on their recent campaigns, including Windows 7 Sins and Bad Vista is that it does more harm than good. While I have great respect for the work done in the past on multiple fronts, including the GNU utilities, the GPL licenses and more, GNOME needs to be relevant now and respectful of our current and potential future users. Still, there is no real value in creating friction where it is not necessary. So, even if there is value in using the term Linux in some communications, it seems good to clarify if and when there are any situations where following the FSF recommendations are recommended. While we may choose to not use the term GNU/Linux, perhaps we could make an active effort to highlight GNU or the free software community in other ways? * Brian, I was curious about an earlier statement you made: since we are a GNU project - are we? What does that mean? Looking at the gnu.org http://gnu.org website and fsf.org http://fsf.org GNOME is not mentioned once. Searching on gnu.org http://gnu.org, the first search result that mentions GNOME is a 10 year old press release around GNOME 1.0. What is our formal relationship with the FSF and GNU? The G in GNOME stands for GNU. So, the people who created GNOME felt it was important to be under the GNU Umbrella of projects and that our project would be a shining example of a free software project. :) http://directory.fsf.org/project/gnome/ http://www.gnome.org/about/ Quoting from the last link: GNOME is... Free GNOME is Free Software and part of the GNU project, dedicated to giving users and developers the ultimate level of control over their desktops, their software, and their data. Find out more about the GNU project and Free Software at gnu.org. In fact, I believe one of the reasons why GNOME replaced KDE as the most popular software desktop on free/open operating systems is because of its free licensing. So, the current popularity that we enjoy is due, in part, to our relationship with the free software community and the FSF. So, perhaps we should honor that it some ways. Those are my long answers. My short answer - I agree with Andre, and I prefer reality. I look forward to hearing the Advisory Board's recommendation as well. Yes, I think this is an issue that a lot of people have already made strong opinions about, which probably makes it hard to think things through very well. So, I think we need to be a bit careful as we consider this topic to not jump to any quick conclusions. But, the fact that the lead of GNOME Marketing is not aware that GNOME is a GNU project is probably a symptom of a larger problem - that we do not do a very good job of promoting the free software aspects of our overall ethic. And regardless of what terminology we use for Linux or GNU/Linux, we probably should work to improve that. Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: FSF, terminology, and marketing
Baris: There was a big discussion about GNU/Linux terminology usage in documentation years ago. Here is the starting thread about that discussion: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-doc-list/2006-July/msg00200.html I didn't re-read whole discussion but I remember there wasn't any terminology enforcement done by GNOME Doc Team about this. I've also checked some marketing materials. GNOME 2.26 Release notes does not have any mention of term Linux, and in Quarterly Report only places where Linux is used are either Trademarks or valid usage of Linux as an operating system. And at homepage of gnome.org we already use GNU/Linux. In my honest opinion, as GNOME, our relationship with Linux is similar to our relationship with BSD or Solaris kernels. If we won't call GNU/Solaris, calling GNU/Linux everywhere wouldn't be a consistent approach. As you say, perhaps if there is not a real need to refer to Linux in our writing, then we should more actively avoid using a controversial term. I often notice that when it is used, it is often used to mean any distribution which uses GNOME, which is, as you highlight, an incorrect usage anyway. Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: FSF, terminology, and marketing
Paul: My point is that we are being asked (or recommended) that we following their naming guidelines. My point is how does the FSF respect GNOME - I am wiling to bet $100 a normal user couldn't find the http://directory.fsf.org/project/gnome/ link - you have to go their searchable database from a very small Resources link in the middle bottom of their page and manually put in GNOME. Our desktop environment is arguably the 3rd most popular in the world after Windows and Mac OS X (thanks Ubuntu!) yet that's not mentioned anywhere on websites run by the FSF. Unfortunately, irony in my original email doesn't communicate well. A fair point. If this is a concern, though, have we made any efforts to ask (or recommend) that the FSF do something to address this? I would be happy to bring this up with the FSF if we are interested in seeing what can be done to make GNOME more visible on their website. I understand our history, and am even presenting on it next week. Let me re-phrase the question: What exactly is a GNU Project? What implications does that tie GNOME to the FSF, I am not sure I am the best person to answer that question, really. Having said that, I would say that the FSF defines GNU licensing, which is the licensing we primarily use in our software. So, as you probably know, there is some connection. who, in my opinion, despite everything they have done over the last 25 years, are earning themselves a negative reputation with poorly conceived campaigns like Windows 7 Sins? As someone mentioned to me earlier today, we can have free licensing and free software without having to be a part of the FSF. Of course, we have the freedom to disagree with the FSF and to choose to not follow certain recommendations, or to not support FSF projects that we feel are damaging. I was never trying to suggest otherwise. In bringing up this topic, I am not trying to suggest that we do not already do a lot to promote those values we share with the FSF. For example, we are responsible for distributing a tremendously successful GNU licensed desktop which, as you highlight, is very successful - the 3rd most popular in the world. This, in and of itself, is probably the most significant thing that we already do to promote those values. We also do things like promote Software Freedom Day, do things like the Women's Outreach Program, and many other things. Perhaps what we do already is enough, and we need do no more. While I am jealous of their ability to market campaigns and the funding they have available, especially being a member of the GNOME marketing team, my recommendation would be to distance ourselves from the FSF rather than get closer. I do not think this is a black and white issue. While there may be certain aspects of the FSF that we may choose to distance ourselves from, there are also many shared values that do connect us. I wish I could remember the blog post, article, or talk that was given that pointed out that GNOME may have been an acronym 10 years ago when founded, but it's not applicable today. John Palmieri in his talk at GUADEC and recent GNOME Journal article argues the same thing that the N for Network doesn't apply either I am more than aware of what the acronym is, thank you very much. I apologize, I did not mean for my jibe to be taken badly, much the same way you did not mean for your irony to go unnoticed. I think you are doing a great job with GNOME marketing, and the improvements since you have been involved have been simply tremendous. As I stated above, and I'll re-phrase, is there a perceived connotation of being part of the FSF by having the word GNU in GNOME? I would not say that GNOME is a part of the FSF - they are a separate organization. Though we do obviously have a relationship. Without knowing what doors might be opened by tightening our relationship with the FSF, I believe that the risks do not outweigh the benefits of being associated with the FSF and I do not have a strong urge to use their naming conventions in GNOME materials. Personally, I would prefer to focus on those values that we share and work towards improving relationship in those areas, rather than focus on those areas where we disagree. I was just trying to ask a question about what terminology the marketing team recommends. I have not talked with the FSF about what opportunities might exist if we were to work towards improving our relationship with them. Without having such a discussion with them, it seems hard to know. Though if we think we should distance ourselves from them, then we may not be in a constructive place to have any such discussion. But, just to clarify, are you saying that you recommend that the GNOME community not use the term GNU/Linux in all contexts or just in marketing materials? Are you suggesting that using the term GNU/Linux is damaging like the examples you give of the Windows 7 Sins and should be avoided? Do
Re: Promoting the GNOME amazon store
Jaap: Sofar we made this month the following in the GNOME amazon store http://www.gnome.org/friends/amazon/ $5 in the US 1.4 euro in Germany 618 yen in Japan and nothing in Canada and the UK We need some more marketing such that people in the community that buy at amazon will use the store or install the search plugin. Maybe some more people should blog about it Any other ideas what we can do? Why doesn't http://library.gnome.org/ and other relevant sites on the GNOME web point to the Amazon store? Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Suggestion about providing more value to Foundation members
Stormy: What if we had a thank you GNOME mailing list or page. People could send in their thanks for specific features or work and we could match it up with the right person. Yes, I think the GNOME community really needs more forums for making sure that people get recognition for the work that they do. Mailing lists and Wiki's seem obvious choices. Also, highlighting people who go above-and-beyond in periodic forums that we publish, such as GNOME Journal is a good idea. The recommendations on LinkedIn or profile pages could then come from me or the board (or anyone from this list that would like some practice at writing recommendations or who is already good at it.) Yes, I think it would be good if there were a few people in the GNOME Community who made an extra effort to make sure that Recommendations get written. It would make sense for people on the board to be expected to do this sort of thing, for example. Having a thank you mailing list would be a good forum for people who have an interest in writing recommendations to keep track of people that they should consider writing up. For example, we get three people writing in to say the new bugzilla is awesome and it saves them 30 minutes a day finding bugs to work on, so the board writes a recommendation on Max/Olav/sys admin team member page saying Mike's work on bugzilla was extremely helpful to GNOME users. Several users wrote into say that they save 30 minutes at a time during their work day because of the improvements that Mike made. Mike's work exemplifies the GNOME mission of making computing accessible and easy for everyone. It might be cool to have a Thank You Wiki on live.gnome.org where we archive these sorts of recommendations or thank yous. Aside from making our community more friendly and personal, it would have other benefits too. This way people who are written up as being great community members can refer to the GNOME Wiki as a testament of their work in addition to whatever recommendations they may get on social networking sites. Most people in the GNOME community have their own private live.gnome.org Wiki page, so the Thank You Wiki could have links to each person's personal page. If people make sure to include a link to their favorite social networking sites on their private live.gnome.org Wiki page, then people can use those links to recommend them. The Thank You Wiki itself could encourage people to add links to such networking sites for this purpose. Then we could also refer to this Thank You Wiki page in various communication (weekly status reports, GNOME Journal, etc.) to encourage people to go there and read about those people who have done the most for the community. I think having a process like this would help to encourage people to actually consider writing more recommendations. Especially if we also encourage people to do the same in various forums. I think a process like this would help to encourage people to get better recognition and to encourage the community to be more thoughtful about writing up recommendations for people on social networking sites without making people feel uncomfortable (like they are fishing for people to write recommendations for them or whatever). Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
