Store SIG meeting reminder
The Store SIG will have its first meeting on Wednesday at 18:00 GMT in
#fedora-marketing. We are going to try to set some goals, and at the
end of the meeting I want us to have a target in mind of "what we want
to achieve by December 4th, which is 3 weeks away.
Here's a few things to get us thinking -- we can talk about them on the
list here, or in the meeting tomorrow.
(1) I'm glad that people took the contents of the What Should the Store
Sell thread and transferred it to the wiki. I would really like it if
one or two people could volunteer to be the maintainer of the Store
SIG's wiki space, and keep making sure that important things that are
discussed over email can get back on the wiki for everyone to see, like,
for example, getting tomorrow's IRC log up on the wiki, etc.
(2) Ambassador/Event kits. There are two parts to these -- one part is
having a way for actual hardware (computers, OLPCs, video cameras) to be
sent from event to event. That is a little bit outside the scope of
this this SIG right now, because it requires money UP FRONT. But from a
swag perspective, what we want is a way for an event organizer to see a
list of swag that is available, and buy a whole bunch of it in bulk
(therefore getting a cheaper price) and have it shipped to some
location.
(3) Quality. Lots of complaints about CafePress sucking. That's
fine... we don't have to use them. It was just an initial idea. But we
need to figure out a way that we can get the AUTOMATION that CafePress
offers some other way -- and in a way that can be global.
Here is the important thing to remember, as it is the underlying
question that we must ask at every step of this process:
IS WHAT WE ARE PROPOSING AUTOMATED? If the *entire* process cannot be
achieved via the internet, then we are DOING IT WRONG. All previous
attempts at swag distribution have failed because they required people
to go around mailing shirts and CDs all over the place. No one wants to
do that, and it doesn't scale.
The first thing that we have to identify is a vendor that can take our
designs and handle the actual physical production and shipment of the
goods, giving the profits to us and taking a cut for their trouble. We
need it to be automated, and high quality.
Maybe there are multiple vendors, and the "Fedora Store" just serves as
a clearing house that points people in the right direction.
spreadshirt.net to me looks like it's exactly the same stuff that
cafepress offers. Red Hat uses Brand Fuel, but my main complaint with
them is that there are too many middle-men between the designer and an
actual product being sold. It's not agile enough to serve the needs of
our community.
The second thing we have to ask ourselves is "what should the process
for creating a new product look like, from the designer's perspective?"
I want to make a product-creation process that is as easy as possible
for someone like Nicu or Mairin.