Chinese marketing

[Gerard Braad]

A little belated reaction... have been very busy recently with
arranging stuff for my move to China.

On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 1:36 AM, Paul W. Frields <stickster at gmail.com> wrote:
> Your goal statement is perfect, Gerard.  The goal of building the
> community should definitely be to give them the tools, and help them
> become self-sustainable.

The statement is not perfect in my own opinion as I only geared it
towards the western community as being 'leading'. Recently I got in
touch with Rahul Sundaram and see how we facing similar challenges and
how we can cooperate. The same goes for the other Asian communities...

> Fedora has always taken a hit in terms of brand recognition because
> our sponsor did not invest in carpet-bombing the planet with discs.

Well, for the Asian area it is easier to do carpet-bombing of
LiveDVDs. These are generally easy to produce in China and also very
cheap. It might be possible to distribute them from here to other
places...

> Another possibility is to create a more formal document using
> Publican, and then use translation infrastructure to provide Chinese
> contributors a way to translate it -- and at the same time, any other
> locales as well.  However, someone would need to pull together all the
> content, and convert it into a Publican format (DocBook XML).

It does not sound like this is easy to do. A lot of time would be
wasted on preparing it, but maybe in the long-term this would allow to
better manage our marketing efforts in any language.

> I think having someone present in China to bridge the divide is going
> to be a very important step for us, Gerard.  I've had several email
> conversations over the last year trying to find different ways to get
> system administrators and other tech contacts to help us find people
> in China who want to contribute to free software and Fedora.  It's
> been very difficult because the language barrier gets even higher over
> email.
> So your email clearly indicates our outreach needs to be very
> proactive to make progress in the Chinese community.

It takes time, especially to win trust. I am luckily for having a
Chinese partner and understanding the culture... since knowing Chinese
language, even just a little, can win this more easily. But I also
want it to be their community. The focus should remain on it being a
Chinese effort, more than being Western. I would say, give them the
means to develop... provide them with a platform... deliver the
tools... but don't take direction away from them, just steer them.

> What people,
> places, or groups do you propose to visit or talk with as a start?

I currently have planned to meet up with some people in Beijing.
Mostly in different fields of the Open Source community and  even
hardware and software. As soon as I am in China again I will focus on
commitment of the current ambassadors as I said before; shirts and get
events planned like participation in SFD 2010. In July I will also
give a presentation about Fedora at the BeijingLUG. I haven't settle
for a subject yet, but probably a general talk. Introduce Fedora an
the project and explain how people can involve. And related to it I
wanted to start a Fedora interest group for activities.

As you notice most activities currently deal with Beijing. Depending
on possible employment I can plan further activities for other cities.
Currently this is unknown. I am also trying to see what the other
ambassadors can do in e.g. Xi'an, Shanghai, HongKong, etc.

Let me first set foot in China as things will be a lot easier being in
the same timezone again.


Gerard - 吉拉德