Self-Introduction: James Blake

[James Blake]

Hi everyone, my name is James Blake (but you can call me Jimmy) and I
live in Kent in the United Kingdom. My Fedora Account System (FAS)
username and IRC nick is jimmyblake.

I learned about the Fedora Marketing team through the Join Us page,
and I am interested in joining because I've long been a consumer of
FOSS and it is about time I gave something back to the community and
as I can't really code for toffie my marketing skills are probably of
more use!

This is the first FOSS project I have worked on but I have several
years worth of experience in product marketing and product management
within commercial environments.  My background has a definate
information security and business continuity slant and I currently
work as the Chief Security Officer for Mimecast, a global cloud
services vendor specialising in email management that utilises a lot
of Red Hat / Fedora / CentOS instances.

I am hoping that my experience in the articulating the value of
technical products and how they can be used, as well as the FOSS model
and its place in cloud computing, will prove a benefit to the Fedora
marketing team.  At work I spend a lot of my time assessing risk on
our combined Linux, Mac OS and Windows real estate, I am particularly
interested in how FOSS (including initiatives such as OWASP) can
produce more secure software than commercial models.

As I said, this is my first step in contibuting to a FOSS project, so
I don't really know my way around but I am keen.

Jimmy

[Robyn Bergeron]

Jimmy,

Welcome aboard!

We have a weekly IRC meeting on Tuesdays at 20:00 UTC - I'm not sure
if that time works out well for you, but it is a great way to see some
of the stuff we're working on currently, and there are always tasks
big and small for newcomers to work on.  (If you aren't familiar with
IRC, let us know on the list and we can help orient you - if you are,
the marketing folks usually hang out in #fedora-mktg on
irc.freenode.net, even during non-meeting time.)  IRC Meeting info is
on our wiki page.. and speaking of that....

I'd also recommend checking out our wiki page -
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing

If there are specific ideas or interests you have, let us know!

Thanks for joining - always great to have new people with us :)

Thanks,

Robyn



On Sun, Jun 20, 2010 at 4:14 PM, James Blake <jimmyblake(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:
>  Hi everyone, my name is James Blake (but you can call me Jimmy) and
> I
>  live in Kent in the United Kingdom. My Fedora Account System (FAS)
>  username and IRC nick is jimmyblake.
>
>  I learned about the Fedora Marketing team through the Join Us page,
>  and I am interested in joining because I've long been a consumer of
>  FOSS and it is about time I gave something back to the community and
>  as I can't really code for toffie my marketing skills are probably of
>  more use!
>
>  This is the first FOSS project I have worked on but I have several
>  years worth of experience in product marketing and product management
>  within commercial environments.  My background has a definate
>  information security and business continuity slant and I currently
>  work as the Chief Security Officer for Mimecast, a global cloud
>  services vendor specialising in email management that utilises a lot
>  of Red Hat / Fedora / CentOS instances.
>
>  I am hoping that my experience in the articulating the value of
>  technical products and how they can be used, as well as the FOSS model
>  and its place in cloud computing, will prove a benefit to the Fedora
>  marketing team.  At work I spend a lot of my time assessing risk on
>  our combined Linux, Mac OS and Windows real estate, I am particularly
>  interested in how FOSS (including initiatives such as OWASP) can
>  produce more secure software than commercial models.
>
>  As I said, this is my first step in contibuting to a FOSS project, so
>  I don't really know my way around but I am keen.
>
>  Jimmy
>  --
>  marketing mailing list
>  marketing(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
>  https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing
>

[Karsten Wade]

On Mon, Jun 21, 2010 at 12:14:05AM +0100, James Blake wrote:

Jimmy,

Greetings and welcome.  You reminded me of an idea ... 

>  I am hoping that my experience in the articulating the value of
>  technical products and how they can be used, as well as the FOSS model
>  and its place in cloud computing, will prove a benefit to the Fedora
>  marketing team.  At work I spend a lot of my time assessing risk on
>  our combined Linux, Mac OS and Windows real estate, I am particularly
>  interested in how FOSS (including initiatives such as OWASP) can
>  produce more secure software than commercial models. 
Last February I gave a keynote at SCALE 8x[1] and I talked about the
history of SELinux with regard to Red Hat, Fedora, and RHEL.  (If you
check out the video below, I think that story was mostly caught though
some might have been lost in that the video recording was accidentally
stopped for a few minutes mid-speech.)

I told the story of how SELinux was successfully brought in as
technology, touched lightly on it's value, but also dove in to the
negative side.  When I talk with people who were Red Hat and
Fedora users for a long time but left, one of the the breaking points
I hear most often is "Fedora Core {2,3} when SELinux came out."  There
were some hard lessons learned about how to interact with a community
around a seriously disruptive technology -- mistakes we still make,
though.  (Some feel this way about other technologies, PulseAudio,
etc.)

Today, if you look at Smolt statistics, you'll see that 33% of users
turn the default SELinux off.  That is quite a negative vote for a
technology that is rarely disruptive anymore, with exceptions.  A
certain portion of that 33% are people who were burned 10 releases ago
and still haven't forgiven us.

I told that story in my keynote, and someone in the audience observed,
"You have a marketing problem."

Darn right.

I'm wondering if there are two valuable things that could be done
here:

1. A Fedora Marketing campaign around SELinux - why to leave it
   running.  Dan Walsh is a highly responsive developer, and we can
   offer very fast turnaround time on bug reports, etc.  The tooling
   is superior.  People are just filled with FUD.

2. Extrapolate from that for a framework on how to market about new,
   disruptive technologies.  Then when the folks doing e.g. 'systemd'
   want to get the word out to get more testing, etc., they can turn
   to Fedora Marketing to run a campaign from that framework.

That just tumbled out of my brain when I saw your skillset, interests,
and background.  Let me know if anyone has interest in going somewhere
with this.  If you do, you'll enjoy working with Dan Walsh. :)

- Karsten
-- 
name:  Karsten 'quaid' Wade, Sr. Community Gardener
team:                Red Hat Community Architecture 
uri:               http://TheOpenSourceWay.org/wiki
gpg:                                       AD0E0C41

[Karsten Wade]

On Sun, Jun 20, 2010 at 06:40:15PM -0700, Karsten Wade wrote:
>  
>  Last February I gave a keynote at SCALE 8x[1] ... 
First forgotten link:

[1] http://iquaid.org/2010/02/24/first-keynote-crush-or-trash-at-scale8x/

>  Today, if you look at Smolt statistics, you'll see that 33% of
> users
>  turn the default SELinux off. 
Second forgotten link:

http://smolts.org/static/stats/stats.html

Click on the 'SELinux' tab.

cheers - Karsten
-- 
name:  Karsten 'quaid' Wade, Sr. Community Gardener
team:                Red Hat Community Architecture 
uri:               http://TheOpenSourceWay.org/wiki
gpg:                                       AD0E0C41