Next year for mktg

[Jonathan Roberts]

Hey,

So I'm at FUDCon and the little session I pitched on plans for the
next year of Fedora Marketing wasn't as useful as I hoped. I'd still
like to try and make time to talk about this stuff, but maybe it would
be a good idea if we tried to arrange a time to take advantage of
Fedora VoiP stuff? A meeting outside of our normal meeting schedule
where we can figure out direction and grand plans etc, rather than
focusing on individual tasks that people are working on.

Jon

[Francesco Ugolini]

2008/9/7 Jonathan Roberts <jonrob(a)fedoraproject.org&gt;:
>  Hey,
>
>  So I'm at FUDCon and the little session I pitched on plans for the
>  next year of Fedora Marketing wasn't as useful as I hoped. 
Maybe it could be better, but BTW I feel it interest because I'm now
able to find a way to make Ambassadors and FAmSCo working in some open
marketing issues. (Call it collaboration, don't misunderstand me).

> I'd still
>  like to try and make time to talk about this stuff, but maybe it would
>  be a good idea if we tried to arrange a time to take advantage of
>  Fedora VoiP stuff? 
+1 It could be a new way to communicate. It could be nice to test this
fedora infrastructure future.

> A meeting outside of our normal meeting schedule
>  where we can figure out direction and grand plans etc, rather than
>  focusing on individual tasks that people are working on. 
Open to everyone? If yes, I completely agree.

Thank you

Francesco Ugolini

[Paul W. Frields]

On Mon, 2008-09-08 at 15:21 +0200, Francesco Ugolini wrote:
>  2008/9/7 Jonathan Roberts <jonrob(a)fedoraproject.org&gt;:
>  > Hey,
>  >
>  > So I'm at FUDCon and the little session I pitched on plans for the
>  > next year of Fedora Marketing wasn't as useful as I hoped.
>  
>  Maybe it could be better, but BTW I feel it interest because I'm now
>  able to find a way to make Ambassadors and FAmSCo working in some open
>  marketing issues. (Call it collaboration, don't misunderstand me).
>  
>  >I'd still
>  > like to try and make time to talk about this stuff, but maybe it would
>  > be a good idea if we tried to arrange a time to take advantage of
>  > Fedora VoiP stuff?
>  
>  +1 It could be a new way to communicate. It could be nice to test this
>  fedora infrastructure future.
>  
>  >A meeting outside of our normal meeting schedule
>  > where we can figure out direction and grand plans etc, rather than
>  > focusing on individual tasks that people are working on.
>  
>  Open to everyone? If yes, I completely agree. 
I encourage people to take advantage of the new VoIP capability.  It's
absolutely essential that someone be appointed at the very beginning of
the meeting to take notes.  Those notes should be posted publicly to the
list and the wiki (preferably where other Marketing meeting minutes
appear).

-- 
Paul W. Frields
  gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233  5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717
  http://paul.frields.org/   -  -   http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/
  irc.freenode.net: stickster @ #fedora-docs, #fedora-devel, #fredlug

[Jonathan Roberts]

>  I encourage people to take advantage of the new VoIP capability. 
> It's
>  absolutely essential that someone be appointed at the very beginning of
>  the meeting to take notes.  Those notes should be posted publicly to the
>  list and the wiki (preferably where other Marketing meeting minutes
>  appear). 
Ah... note taking! I guess this is the best approach, and I'd be happy
to take the notes if we try this out.

Jon

[Sandro "red" Mathys]

I'm not sure if this might be a bit off-topic. But as the topic was
raised, let me add a little 'IMHO' on discussions over VoIP.

While I agree, that the VoIP capability is a great thing, I see some
drawbacks in using it. Regarding that there's many folks out there, who're
not native speakers of the English language (some of them with better,
some with worse skills).

1) It's hard for them to follow the discussion. People might speak to fast
or not clear enough. There's no possibility to scroll back some lines and
re-read a bit. If you don't understand a word, you can't just ask a online
dictionary for it - because you often have no idea how the word's written.

2) It's hard for them to bring in their points into the discussion. On
IRC, you can type your sentence, search word in a dictionary because
you've got more time, you can rephrase everything, and so on. Things you
can't easily do if speaking (without confusing your audience completely,
again particularly other persons who're non-natives). For this reasons,
they'd have to make their sentences up before they start speaking - and
while they think about how they're going to say something, they miss quite
a bit of the discussion already (without the possiblity to just scroll
back).

3) It's hard to under stand them, too (particularly for other non-native
speakers). They mis-pronounce words, make mistakes in their grammar, and
so on. Again, that's be less a problem in IRC since you can re-read every
sentence and whole arguments several times, unless you figured out what
they're saying.

I hope, I made my points clear. Oh...this wasn't meant as an offense in
any way! Just trying to show all native speakers how we others sometime
feel (for some, it's hard enough to have a discussion on IRC or the
mailing lists already, isn't it?). "They" also includes me, of course.

Regards,
red

---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: Re: Next year for mktg
From:    "Paul W. Frields" <stickster(a)gmail.com&gt;
Date:    Mon, September 8, 2008 15:43
To:      "For discussions about marketing and expanding the Fedora user
base" <fedora-marketing-list(a)redhat.com&gt;
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

I encourage people to take advantage of the new VoIP capability.  It's
absolutely essential that someone be appointed at the very beginning of
the meeting to take notes.  Those notes should be posted publicly to the
list and the wiki (preferably where other Marketing meeting minutes
appear).

[Paul W. Frields]

On Mon, 2008-09-08 at 16:23 +0200, Sandro red Mathys wrote:
>  I'm not sure if this might be a bit off-topic. But as the topic
> was
>  raised, let me add a little 'IMHO' on discussions over VoIP. 
All of Sandro's points are very good ones.  It's very important to
remember this is a global project and that email discussions, being
asynchronous, may be slower but are always easier to manage for ESL
(English as a Second Language) speakers.

There's a pretty famous presentation that talks about ways to kill your
community, and one of them is to hold telephone meetings:

http://www.powerpostgresql.com/download/TFCKUpload/25.pdf 

A phone call that's open is an improvement, but *only* for those people
who actually can make it to the phone call.  If they can't, and you make
decisions on that call that affect them, you're not giving the community
a fair shot at participation.  Phone calls are not a good place to make
substantial decisions for community projects.

Phone calls are still good, however, for just talking about the status,
and saying, "Let's start a <TOPIC_XYZ> discussion on the mailing
list."
The community must know that they're not being sidelined in these
discussions, which is why the note-taking is important.  Remember that
we have an obligation to each other as community members to keep each
other informed and give each other the opportunity to participate,
influence, and make decisions.

I would urge anyone who's going to use the phone for these meetings to
consider the factors above.  Please keep in mind that I'm *not* saying
any of our fellow Fedorans would want to circumvent the community with
their phone call ideas.  Sometimes we don't foresee or intend all our
effects so it's worth thinking ahead!

-- 
Paul W. Frields
  gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233  5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717
  http://paul.frields.org/   -  -   http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/
  irc.freenode.net: stickster @ #fedora-docs, #fedora-devel, #fredlug

[Jonathan Roberts]

>  Maybe it could be better, but BTW I feel it interest because I'm
> now
>  able to find a way to make Ambassadors and FAmSCo working in some open
>  marketing issues. (Call it collaboration, don't misunderstand me). 
Yeah, I definitely enjoyed our talk :)

>  Open to everyone? If yes, I completely agree. 
This is something I didn't think of, I would love for it to be open to
everyone and maybe IRC would work better in that case, but I'd like to
try the VoiP stuff at some point :p