Next year for mktg

[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 at gmail.com>
Date:    Mon, September 8, 2008 15:43
To:      "For discussions about marketing and expanding the Fedora user
base" <fedora-marketing-list at redhat.com>
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

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).