Coordinating on media responses

[Jeff Spaleta]

On 1/16/06, Rahul Sundaram <sundaram at redhat.com> wrote:
> Hi
>
> If you see any reviews that you will like to respond on the behalf of
> the Fedora Marketing team, please let me know first. If you get any
> requests for quotes or interviews as a Fedora Ambassadors approach the
> Fedora Ambassadors Steering committee members.

Oops, I fired off a personal response to
http://www.madpenguin.org/cms/?m=show&id=5971
before reading this thread in my gmail backlog. Sorry about that.

-jef

Here's the text of my email response:
Good Morning,

I have a request, if in the future you write reviews concerning fedora
test releases can you please add information concerning how people are
to get involved in the ongoing testing process. While I'm thrilled
that fedora is shaping up towards a fc5 release, and I'm glad you
found the test release reasonably useful, I'm not excited about novice
users seeing reviews and snapping up the test release without having
an idea as to what is expected from testers. Just downloading test
releases and taking them for a drive isn't very useful to the project.
 We need people who are going to follow up with bugreports when they
experience unexpected behavior.  As an active tester, I would greatly
appreciate it if you could add information into the lead-in overview
page paragraph of your article which points people to the
fedora-test-list mailinglist and to
http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/Docs/Drafts/TestingGuide , though
the Draft status of that page will change as the text firms up.

Beyond explicitly adding information in the lead-in paragraphs
concerning how someone gets invovled in the testing process. I think
it would be a very good idea if your led by example and referenced
bugzilla report tickets urls in the body of the review for any of the
outstanding issues you noticed while you did your own personal testing
leading up to the review writing. Like the oddness invovling the
mounting problem.  As much fun as it is to tell the masses about your
experience and to get them excited about fc5.. what really matters for
the test releases is making sure that bugs get reported to the
developers and that means searching for and filing bug tickets.  I
think if you referenced actual bugtickets in your review, that could
help bugzilla usage by readers who find the test release by reading
your review.  Also currently
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FC5Test2CommonProblems  attempts to
track widespread problems and bugzilla ticket references for test2.