My apologies for not having this out sooner -- I postponed the email at some point and failed to get back to it.
As with previous releases, Kara Schiltz and I have been working on lining up internal support for the Fedora 12 launch. I wanted to indicate our schedule here for the sake of interlock. The dates for pre-release press blog entries are somewhat flexible:
Oct. 21 - In-depth feature #1 (SystemTap) Oct. 27 - Video spotlight #1 Oct. 26 - Nov. 8: Edit webcopy for http://redhat.com/Fedora Weeks of Nov. 3 and Nov. 9 - schedule and facilitate pre-briefs Nov. 3 - In-depth feature #2 (Desktop or Virt) <-- prefer Desktop here Nov. 5 - Finalize homepage promo and send to geos Nov. 9 - Finalize F12 launch video Nov. 10 - Video spotlight #2 Nov. 12 - Press release to int'l PR teams for translation Nov. 17 - F12 GA / Launch video / press release
As you can see, we're a smidge behind on a couple of the bits internal to Red Hat -- the video spotlights. But my expectation is that we'll have at least one pre-release, and be able to have another ready post-release. Kara is working on a press blog entry around the Desktop interview that Robyn just conducted. Mel is working on finalizing her interview text, and then it will get the same treatment. Everything else looks ready to go, so all in all I'd say we're in "B+ to A-" shape.
Oct. 21 - In-depth feature #1 (SystemTap) Oct. 27 - Video spotlight #1 Oct. 26 - Nov. 8: Edit webcopy for http://redhat.com/Fedora Weeks of Nov. 3 and Nov. 9 - schedule and facilitate pre-briefs Nov. 3 - In-depth feature #2 (Desktop or Virt)<-- prefer Desktop here Nov. 5 - Finalize homepage promo and send to geos Nov. 9 - Finalize F12 launch video Nov. 10 - Video spotlight #2 Nov. 12 - Press release to int'l PR teams for translation Nov. 17 - F12 GA / Launch video / press release
Thanks for the heads-up, Paul - ooh, video spotlights! I'm curious to see those.
As a side note, for the next release, we might want to try merging the F13 version of the calendar above and the F13 version of http://poelstra.fedorapeople.org/schedules/f-12/f-12-marketing-tasks.html (the marketing task timeline the Fedora Marketing team came up with at the start of the cycle), so we have all the F13 Marketing/PR dates on one page; I wonder if that will make it easier for Fedora Marketing and Red Hat PR/Marketing to help each other out on this.
We can figure whether this will work during F13 planning meetings, this is just a heads-up that it's something likely to hit the agenda at some point after the craziness from this cycle is over.
--Mel
marketing@lists.fedoraproject.org