Talking points & Features

[Robyn Bergeron]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Jaroslav Reznik" <jreznik at redhat.com>
> To: "Fedora Marketing team" <marketing at lists.fedoraproject.org>
> Sent: Friday, December 7, 2012 7:35:31 AM
> Subject: Talking points & Features
> 
> Hi!
> As there's a huge discussion regarding what Features should be and
> how Features influences marketing - let's take a look back on the
> what we can do there.
> 
> Initial idea of Features as far as I understand was to help
> marketing, now it's definitely more internal tracking tool for the
> development and probably should not be used by tech journalist etc.
> as it's frequently updated, could be out of sync with what's really
> in release some times and of course, Feature pages usually provide
> too much technical details to be used as a base for a good article.
> Also I'd like to avoid limiting number of Features for development
> because of marketing.
> 
> Well, we have Talking Points, we have Beats, also Announcement
> picks up most important features in a less technical way. Could we
> do more from PR? To offer tech journalists something more pre-
> prepared - to avoid a lot of confusion, FUDs etc.? It's also very
> close to Announcements itself.

I don't know that the "initial idea" was actually Marketing - maybe someone from back in the day could pipe in?  As far back as I can see (F7) Feature Pages had at least some technical scope/information to them, and about as many then as now were "shiny" vs "technical detail" type stuff, and there were release engineering meetings which actually looked at them, as far as I can tell from the Wayback Wiki.

Most of the *journalists* I know still follow FeatureList reasonably closely.  They like to see the shiny and the under the hood internals; they do follow closely to get an indicator of what will eventually come in RHEL as well.

I'm not sure what you mean by "limiting the number of features because of Marketing" - we've never done that, but we have to (at some point) limit how much we actually market on. 

I think one of the best things we could do is to ensure that when Features are dropped, that the info is fanning out to both Docs and Marketing, or that Marketing/Docs both have a note on their schedules to re-verify the FeatureList against any output they have (release announcement, talking points, etc.).  We could probably also pull in the time when the Beta Announcement is written to be before "the day of the Readiness meeting" or day of go/no-go - but not before Freeze.  Even the fated announcement I helped PR out with was kosher at the time we wrote it - just before original beta change deadline, iirc - but as we progressed through several weeks of extra freeze things got dropped. 

> 
> We should definitely fill-in F18 Talking Points [1] based on release
> announcements - not sure it makes sense to fill it in before Alpha/
> Beta but for final, yep. It should also serve as a good source
> for Final announcement. Who's usually responsible for Talking points
> here?

Whoever gets them done. They've never been a blocker - since it's literally just a shortened, bulletpointed list of selected features on featurelist, and not necessarily "which ones are most shiny" / "will get us lots of PR" - it was really just intended for Ambassadors to have as a reference point for when boothing.  Sometimes technical things would be added because it was bound to be asked about quite a bit.  But it's been several releases since anyone has put any serious effort into them, and nobody has come asking where they went, which leads one to believe if it was actually a valuable resource.

> 
> Btw. reminder - Final announcement should be based on schedule
> written during the Christmas holidays - I'd say the right time should
> be before - so I'd like to ask marketing to start working on the
> TP/announcement.
 
We should also make some effort to clarify "who writes it" at some point - GA announcement (as well as alpha/beta) is still listed as "docs and marketing" and I think it has potential to either be written twice or not written at all. 

> 
> Thanks
> Jaroslav
> 
> [1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_18_talking_points
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