idea! - Fedora Marketing Book Club
by Robyn Bergeron
Greg's blog post today
(http://gregdekspeaks.wordpress.com/2010/01/27/fedoras-goals/) has
rekindled (no amazon pun intended, i swear!) a thought I had a while
back on starting a marketing book club. Mchua and I had discussed it
a bit on irc sometime late last year, but I think we were focused on
something else at the time, and the idea was lost.
Until now! I would like to propose that we have a "book club" for
marketing-reading-material, but of course, not limited to marketing
team members.
The basics of what I'm thinking are:
* We start with a book in March. One book per month - at the end of
each month, we have an IRC discussion on what we've learned, and how
we can apply it to Fedora and what we're working on. Hopefully,
everyone will want to do things like blog about what they've read and
learned, or write about it to the fedora-mktg mailing list, or add a
review to the book club wiki.
* Everyone is welcome to join. Nobody is -required- to join.
* Books are on our own individual dime (books are good for you! better
than coffee!) - we should do our best to pick things that are likely
available at the library (ie: not just freshly released last week).
If budget for a book is a problem and it can't be found, we should try
to accommodate people so they can participate.
The goal here (yes, I bang that goal drum a lot!) is to increase our
collective knowledge about All Things Marketing, provide a forum for
discussing what we've learned, and provide us with some brainstorming
and inspiration on things we can do to improve Marketing.
Thoughts? Feedback? :) I've made a wiki page to get the ball rolling
- hopefully we can work out the minor details (things like, "I have no
clue how to run a book club discussion, do you?") between now and
March. This is meant to be fun / enriching - not MORE WORK! - so I
hope people are interested, and if anyone thinks that one book a month
is too much, please say so.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Book_Club
Cheers!
-robyn
13 years, 9 months
Re: Chinese marketing
by Gerard Braad
Hi Paul,
> Date: Sun, 25 Apr 2010 11:28:22 -0400 From: Paul Frields
> <stickster(a)gmail.com> Subject: Re: Chinese marketing Message-ID:
> <l2sef93afcf1004250828m73202e71v6c243f347c6422b0(a)mail.gmail.com>
Sorry for breaking the thread; issue with the tools, digest-mode and
Gmail's IMAP.
I recently got involved in the Chinese Fedora Community... and try to
assist them anyway possible by being the bridge between language and
culture.
With several ambassadors I set out a long term vision for the Chinese
community: "Growing the Chinese community into a self-organizing and
healthy community. The main goal is to enlarge the Chinese Fedora
Community and seeking new talents to contribute to the mainstream
development. We pursue a very good involvement with and from the Western
Fedora Community and having a yearly FAD"... and show China can be a
host for a FUDcon in the APAC area ;-).
In a document I set out several points to focus on: Mirroring
possibilities, Packaging and Development, Translation work, MIPS port of
Fedora, Organizing a Fedora event, Ambassadors and Mentoring, Creating a
better platform for the community and Marketing.
> For a start, Gerard, maybe you can identify some of the primary gaps
> we have. What questions to Chinese Fedora users and potential
> contributors have? In what areas can we improve information we offer
> to Chinese speaking people?
>
A solution to the gap and have the Chinese community more involved, was
to have the Chinese mailinglist hosted by Fedora. This is now done...
but still more can be done. As you pointed out in another email, having
the planet hosted in the same way would be great!
The biggest issue is that the Fedora brand is not very well known. That
is the reason why I want to focus on the marketing side of Fedora.
Distributions like Ubuntu and Gentoo have a large group of followers and
enthusiasts; IMO Fedora would be a perfect solution between these. But
for this there needs to be means to convey the message; who we focus on,
what we provide, the four foundations, etc. At the moment, this kind of
material is non-existent.
I would seldom talk about them, but the other issue is of course the
'cultural difference'. For example, most Chinese I spoke did not have
the sense of Summer Coding... as they saw this as Western-only
'competition'. After explaining them what it means and could provide
them, it opens them up more and they see it as a competitive
advantage... but until now, I have not seen any of them enter the FSC.
But we also have simple problems which can easily be addressed: the
Fedora Ambassadors have no shirts. I am planning to have these made in
China, according to the logo guidelines, so we can issue these. Goal:
the Ambassadors should be able to promote the brand during for instance
a local Software Freedom Day 2010 event! (and of course as a general
means to show their involvement).
> Another question in which I'm keenly interested is, where do Chinese
> users get Fedora? If they're using mirrors in China, are there enough
> of them? Can we find more administrators willing to distribute Fedora
> on mirrors?
>
This was the first thing I started to work when I approached Mel an
Kaio. By that time four active mirrors were available for all of China.
Mike McGrath told me that Chinese seldom approach them about mirroring
options; this is also not something in the nature of the Chinese. My
goal was to gain two new mirrors before the release of Fedora 13. After
a long haul we finally gained an extra mirror in Beijing. For the moment
I think we have a good foundation to cope with community and userbase
growth (a good start to focus on the brand and getting people involved) ;-).
As you can see, a lot has been started... but it is far from done.
kind regards,
Gerard - 吉拉德
Fedora Ambassador
Project-lead Fedora-MIPS
Member of Fedora 中文用户组
13 years, 10 months
GNOME Journal Article - Info Request
by Nelson Marques
Hey,
I am owning 1 article to the GNOME Journal. Since the theming for those
articles are mainly GNOME related, I would like to make an article
called: "GNOME Desktop in Fedora 13 Goddard".
This article would be based on Fedora 13's GNOME, highlighting some of
our feature profiles and bringing a new insight about Fedora and GNOME.
This could be interesting either for Fedora and also for GNOME.
Besides being published on the GNOME Journal, I would like also to make
it available on our wiki. I assume the licensing is compatible.
I would also like to know from you, marketing people, how we should
represent our bonds with GNOME and GNOME Foundation.
I really would like to push this forward, either as a form of
advertising Fedora, and of course, GNOME...
I don't know if we have our own publication, but in case we do, it
could be nice also to make it available for it.
I also would like to request a volunteer from this list to make me
corrections on English, grammar etc before submitting it into GNOME
Journal. I'm planning to submit it on behalf of myself and marketing
team.
As always, any comments, suggestions are to be considered.
Thanks all.
nelson
--
Nelson Marques
Evil Clown (http://redwing.hutman.net/~mreed/warriorshtm/evilclown.htm)
13 years, 10 months
Self-Introduction: Alexandros Karagiannakis
by Alexandros Karagiannakis
Hi, my name is Alexandros Karagiannakis and I live in Athens, Greece. My
Fedora Account System (FAS) username is alekaragiannakis, and my IRC nick is
also alekaragiannakis.
I learned about the Fedora Marketing team through the Greek Fedora
Ambassadors Pierros Papadeas and Konstantinos Antonakoglou and am interested
in joining because I'm studying Business Administration so i'm familiar with
the subject and i really want to start contributing to Fedora community.
Also I've been a Fedora user for years and i've been experienced of a few
open source events and conferences here in Greece.
This is the first FOSS and Marketing project I have worked on!
My skills, which I hope to utilize in Fedora Marketing, include:
Marketing Skills: My studies on Business Administration which include
Marketing, Management and Financial literacy.
Other Skills: Εase of socialization and social contacts in general, persuasion
and devotion, things I deem important for the promotion of the product and
the ideas of the fedora community.
I'd also like to learn through my involvement with the community, like
learning about areas that interest me and would like to work on, such as
programming, in which my knowledge is not developed.
When I'm not working on Fedora, I am studying at the Technological
Educational Institute of Larissa in Greece.
A couple of goals I have for the Fedora Project are to help promote Fedora
in Greece in cooperation with the Greek Fedora community, and also to help
develop the local community through educating the public about Fedora. I
would also like to see innovations and the expansion of marketing to happen
in Fedora.
I am wondering about new ways of promoting Fedora.
Please help me get started!
Alexandros Karagiannakis.
13 years, 10 months
Suggestions for the install process
by Sahar Arbab
Hello. Since Matt and I worked with the install process we thought that we
could suggets ways to help in areas we found problems...
For those who are computer challenged…..
-The first few screens should talk about Fedora (what it is and who it would
benefit), because the only time we really get an idea is at the end.
- Cheat Sheet or manual on the install process or even an overall one on the
operating system. We realize it may be hard to include all these ideas
throughout the install process so a cheat sheet could fill in here.
-Specify between the two types of available installs
-Specify the differences between i386 and x86_64 on
http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora-all
-Throughout the install process recommend certain routes people should take
with certain computers or for depending on how much they want to use fedora.
Hope these ideas may be able to help out a little,
Matt Bocchi and Sahar Arbab
13 years, 10 months
Allegheny teams: status update
by Mel Chua
As the grand experiment winds down (today was the last full working day
of class, I believe, thought the semester ends in early May and they
still have a release party to go), I've left some notes on the wiki wrt
the work I've been able to see the Allegheny teams do in helping us out
with various projects and deliverables.
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Allegheny_Activism:_Team_Assignments
My purpose in doing so is that I suspect there's a lot of work they have
done that we *haven't* seen yet, because we're not physically there in
Meadville to watch the conversations. So this is my attempt to call out
what's been visible from this side of the screen, so that hopefully
we'll be able to see all of it shortly.
Comments + additions welcome. Thanks for trying this out with us,
everyone. :) Post-semester/post-release discussion coming... at the end
of May, when everyone's recovered. (More or less.)
Cheers,
--Mel
13 years, 10 months
Experiment
by Nelson Marques
As I probably said before, I started working in a hack to the Equinox
Radiance theme that according to it's author will be/is a featured theme
in Ubuntu 10.4.
I've called it Blue Abomination:
Blue > Because I changed it's metal/orange colors to blue.
Abomination > Because I didnt reminded of something better and it seemed
a nice thing considering I dont quite see myself as an artist and the
results could be strange.
I've also used this to test some more packaging and get more comfortable
with the packaging system, also to process the huge amount of
information regarding Fedora packaging.
During this time, I've done specific updates on the packages and I make
them available on: http://fedora-art.org. This is interesting because
I've been toying around with the information I pass on to the audience
and specially with the screenshots. I've got very positive feedback,
also got offers from artists to create metacity icons for the metacity
border themes.
Strangely after yesterdays update, from 329 downloads, I got that number
almost doubled in a single day. The only thing I've changed from the
previous update was:
* Screenshots (where I changed them from application screenshots to
full desktop shots - removed gnome-panel though).
* Included a RPM and SRPM alongside with the TGZ. This apparently was a
win. I don't have stats on downloads, but the download is being
forwarded to my fedorapeople space. I wonder if there are any control on
hits we get there.
This to say, that eventually it seems to be a good idea to share outside
of our infra-structure.
I've also packaged the Equinox Engine for F13, which has always had a
higher number of downloads. I'm probably going to push this engine into
Fedora repositories in a nearby future.
For the rest if anyone wants to see my packaging (which probably isn't
complying with Fedora packaging), but this is a twisted experiment from
mine, they can find it here:
http://nmarques.fedorapeople.org/packages/
The Fedora Art links are here:
http://fedora-art.org/content/show.php/Equinox+Blue
+Abomination?content=123506
http://fedora-art.org/content/show.php/GTK+Equinox+Engine?content=123488
Though this email might be a bit off-topic... I running this as an
experiment in how we can inject contents and promote them in artistical
communities. I'm going to try something out using the DeviantArt
platform soon (http://www.deviantart.com).
I expect to use the data obtained from this experiments in the future to
promote our artwork and share with other distro's, and most important of
all, prepare to launch a challenge to artists to contribute for future
releases in this field and who knows, join our design teams. The problem
is that other distro's appear to lead the way on this field. I believe
that providing a bit more of eye candy could increase our user base in
the future, which might not be a Fedora objective, but I see it as a
personal thingie.
Anyway, sharing some thoughts.
--
Nelson Marques
Evil Clown (http://redwing.hutman.net/~mreed/warriorshtm/evilclown.htm)
13 years, 10 months
Test Day promotion help
by Adam Williamson
Hi, marketing folks!
We (QA) have the final two Fedora 13 cycle Test Days coming up at the
end of this week, and we've been struggling for attendance for all but
the X test days lately, so we'd appreciate any muscle / bright ideas
Marketing has to broaden the reach and get more people out testing :)
The events are:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2010-04-29_Preupgrade
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:XFCE_F13_20100430
that's the Preupgrade Test Day on Thursday, and an Xfce Test Day on
Friday. Preupgrade is the recommended method for upgrading between
Fedora releases, so there should be lots of people interested in that,
and Xfce is a popular alternative desktop.
Anything you can do to help promote these events would be hugely
appreciated!
I've written a blog post about these events:
http://www.happyassassin.net/2010/04/27/incoming-test-days-preupgrade-and...
please feel free to take information or wording from the post if you
find it useful, or ignore it completely and write your own stuff -
whatever you like! And if you have an idea to promote the event but
can't do it yourself please pass the idea on. Thanks everyone!
--
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net
13 years, 10 months