[Ambassadors] During some of my review of the Fedora 12 "Constantine, " Fedora 12 Talking Points. :)

[Paul W. Frields]

On Fri, Dec 25, 2009 at 01:30:49AM +0100, Chitlesh GOORAH wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 24, 2009 at 9:21 AM, Rahul Sundaram <sundaram at redhat.com> wrote:
> > On 12/24/2009 12:07 PM, Chitlesh GOORAH wrote:
> >> On Thu, Dec 24, 2009 at 2:14 AM, Rahul Sundaram <sundaram at redhat.com> wrote:
> >>> The goal is to balance the content to the level that press and end users
> >>> won't be overwhelmed by a long list of features. It is for new features
> >>> in Fedora 12 that appeals to a *broad* audience.  FEL changes don't fit
> >>> into that.
> >>
> >> Tell me how the following appeals to a *broad* audience as you said
> >> # 2 For administrators
> >>     * 2.1 libguestfs
> >>     * 2.2 Virtualization improvements
> >> # 3 For developers
> >>     * 3.1 SystemTap Eclipse integration and tracing improvements
> >>     * 3.2 NetBeans 6.7.1
> >
> > It is easy to see that Virtualization and Developer tools have far more
> > users than in the Fedora space compare to electronics but I don't think
> > you are ever going to agree to a alternative viewpoint from yours and at
> > this point, we can agree to disagree. Good luck.
> 
> Why the user count matters for the "F12 talking points" wiki page ? It
> could be for "Fedora Talking Points" wiki page.
> 
> Mel points to "Fedora Desktop Spin".
> 
> Rahul points to "User count specific talking points".
> 
> Both are outside the scope of "Fedora 12 Talking points" wiki page.

Sorry I didn't see this thread earlier, Chitlesh, as I'm just getting
back from vacation.  There were two main reasons for removing this
paragraph, and neither was intended to mean that the FEL was somehow
unimportant to Fedora, because it's not.  Among other things, FEL is a
great example of how Fedora's remixability can make a software product
that's appropriate for a focused group of users.  (More on that
below.)

The first reason was that the talking points are essentially a
distillation of technical innovations that are part of the feature
process.  Those innovations appear in the Feature List.  Some of those
innovations are obviously desktop related.  But many come from other
areas that are important to large groups of users like system
administrators and developers.

Certainly we can't even come close to including everything that
happens in the Fedora distribution in the talking points.  We have to
pick a number of features that are (a) appealing to a large class of
end-users, (b) often created from scratch by Fedora contributors,
perhaps directly upstream, and (c) can be easily explained in simple
terms to the lay press, by everyone from the FPL (me) to any
Ambassador who's talking about Fedora in front of a group.

For maximum press impact, we need a short list, consistent from
interview to interview, and somewhat differentiating where possible.
That way, our talking points can be put in proper context by a
journalist who is likely very busy and may not understand the many
facets of the Fedora Project as intimately as we do.  People like Joe
Brockmeier (of openSUSE fame) has spoken eloquently on this subject,
as a current community manager and himself an experienced journalist
and writer.  The easier we make a journalist's job, the more effective
our coverage gets; the more esoteric the information we provide, the
harder we make their job, and thus the less effective our press
coverage becomes.

Now in the past, we *have* noted the emergence of new and exciting
spins during a release, as we did for FEL when it was created, for the
early inclusion of KDE 4 in the KDE spin, and for the applicance OS
spin when it debuted.  I also noted a coming-soon Moblin spin during
the Fedora 12 release during a couple interviews.  We'll continue to
do that in the foreseeable future.

While not every spin creation automatically becomes a talking point,
it makes a good example of the *global* talking point of Fedora's
remixability and redistributability.  Those Fedora features are
definitely of interest to people who want to seek out a different
direction from the default distribution.  Specific spins might not be
able to fit easily into the framework I describe above, but we can and
should continue to promote the remixability of Fedora globally in
every release.  After all, that aspect of the Fedora distribution is a
direct result of the foundation of Freedom which the project embraces.

And as was pointed out here, spins should avail themselves of the new
content areas on spins.fedoraproject.org to point out improvements and
changes.  The site was designed specifically to make it possible for
spin owners/SIGs to change content whenever necessary, such as for a
new release.  The Marketing team can make a point of promoting that
central site for people who are looking for something outside the
default spin (see below).

The second reason was that the talking points were set during a series
of Marketing meetings and email threads on that list in August (and
possibly September?).  They were left open for some time to
accommodate additions and then were eventually closed, so we would
have time to use the Talking Points to generate the variety of other
media that the Marketing team produces such as the one page release
notes, information for the press, and so on.  I removed other material
that was placed on the page late as well for this reason.

Hopefully this helps clear up some confusion on the talking points.
In the future, I think we could avoid some confusion by better
publicizing the process of building the talking points, and by putting
an admonition on the talking points page once it's finalized and
inviting questions on the fedora-marketing-list where we can resolve
them.  As I mentioned above, we should also think about adding an
"every release" bullet in the one-page release notes for each release,
noting that the spins.fp.o site makes other spins available.  I
welcome suggestions for how we can continue to keep the talking points
tightly focused and ensure that spin owners are also able to build
energy around the work they do in the Fedora Project.

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
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