Re: Chinese marketing
A little belated reaction... have been very busy recently with
arranging stuff for my move to China.
On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 1:36 AM, Paul W. Frields <stickster(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Your goal statement is perfect, Gerard. The goal of building the
community should definitely be to give them the tools, and help them
become self-sustainable.
The statement is not perfect in my own opinion as I only geared it
towards the western community as being 'leading'. Recently I got in
touch with Rahul Sundaram and see how we facing similar challenges and
how we can cooperate. The same goes for the other Asian communities...
Fedora has always taken a hit in terms of brand recognition because
our sponsor did not invest in carpet-bombing the planet with discs.
Well, for the Asian area it is easier to do carpet-bombing of
LiveDVDs. These are generally easy to produce in China and also very
cheap. It might be possible to distribute them from here to other
places...
Another possibility is to create a more formal document using
Publican, and then use translation infrastructure to provide Chinese
contributors a way to translate it -- and at the same time, any other
locales as well. However, someone would need to pull together all the
content, and convert it into a Publican format (DocBook XML).
It does not sound like this is easy to do. A lot of time would be
wasted on preparing it, but maybe in the long-term this would allow to
better manage our marketing efforts in any language.
I think having someone present in China to bridge the divide is
going
to be a very important step for us, Gerard. I've had several email
conversations over the last year trying to find different ways to get
system administrators and other tech contacts to help us find people
in China who want to contribute to free software and Fedora. It's
been very difficult because the language barrier gets even higher over
email.
So your email clearly indicates our outreach needs to be very
proactive to make progress in the Chinese community.
It takes time, especially to win trust. I am luckily for having a
Chinese partner and understanding the culture... since knowing Chinese
language, even just a little, can win this more easily. But I also
want it to be their community. The focus should remain on it being a
Chinese effort, more than being Western. I would say, give them the
means to develop... provide them with a platform... deliver the
tools... but don't take direction away from them, just steer them.
What people,
places, or groups do you propose to visit or talk with as a start?
I currently have planned to meet up with some people in Beijing.
Mostly in different fields of the Open Source community and even
hardware and software. As soon as I am in China again I will focus on
commitment of the current ambassadors as I said before; shirts and get
events planned like participation in SFD 2010. In July I will also
give a presentation about Fedora at the BeijingLUG. I haven't settle
for a subject yet, but probably a general talk. Introduce Fedora an
the project and explain how people can involve. And related to it I
wanted to start a Fedora interest group for activities.
As you notice most activities currently deal with Beijing. Depending
on possible employment I can plan further activities for other cities.
Currently this is unknown. I am also trying to see what the other
ambassadors can do in e.g. Xi'an, Shanghai, HongKong, etc.
Let me first set foot in China as things will be a lot easier being in
the same timezone again.
Gerard - 吉拉德