Hi, After the success of our new GNOME 3 desktop I think is time of do some marketing of our new GNOME 3 plaform. Of course, we shouldn't quit of doing marketing for our shiny brand new desktop, but IMHO we should start doing some marketing for our plaform as well.
There are many reasons because and these ones come to my mind: - Promoting the platform is good because it can spread the use of our technologies. Nobody will use it if they don't know about them. In short: they won't love them if they don't know them. - More developers using our technologies increase the chances of getting more contributors, even if they aren't in the FOSS business. It also means more visibility for the project. - It could mean more business oportunities for the companies of the GNOME ecosystem. How I think this can be done: - Find out which technologies we want to promote - Define the key values of our technologies in general and find the differential factors from other technologies. For example, I think for example multilanguage support is one of them and introspection is one of the words for explaining this. - We need much better branding for our technologies. GTK+ is our most well known technology from our portfolio, it can be thought as our flag ship component, and even GTK+ is poorly "sold" to developers IMHO. Alberto Ruiz in 2008 GUADEC defined a simple plan to taking some good steps in the right direction. - Much better professional look. It doesn't matter the GNOME project doesn't sell these technogies or there isn't a company behind, like Qt and Trolltech/ Nokia. The information offered by GNOME about our technologies should look more professional and appealing, because our technologies have professional level and they are cool and competitive. - Learning and teaching materials. We have technical manuals, but we lack of introductory texts about our technologies. The 10-minutes tutorials is a good initiative in this direction. I know also of the existence of some teaching material paid by CENATIC, the Spanish government entity for promoting FLOSS, used to teach GNOME technologies. In summary: help people self-learning and help people to teach GNOME by providing a good quality material. - In the long term, certifications Who should care ? - People involved in GNOME, as always :-) - Support from the GNOME Foundation board - Companies which sell services related with the GNOME technologies. It is worth to add information in GNOME pages about these companies but they should help to improve the quality and marketing value of GNOME technologies pages. - I think it needs also some technical assessment from the project leaders in order to include the GNOME project point of view. -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list