marketing June 2005

marketing@lists.fedoraproject.org

39 participants
35 discussions

Worth noting the words we use...
by Colin Charles 09 Aug '05

09 Aug '05

We casually use terms like schwag[1]. Maybe we need to stop. We need to make sure our marketing materials and people doing the marketing, use words, oh so properly. Can't expect the rest of the world to think we're pot heads now, can we? [1] - http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=schwag&r=d -- Colin Charles, http://www.bytebot.net/ FUDCon II @ LinuxTag June 24-25, 2005 in Karlsruhe, Germany http://fedoraproject.com/fudcon/

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Fedora Boot for LWCE:SF
by Jesse Keating 06 Jul '05

06 Jul '05

Now that FUDCon2 is over, and we've pretty much decided to not have a FUDCon3 in SF can we put some serious resources into planning the Fedora Booth for LWCE:SF? We've had a couple booths under our belts now, and I think it's time for us to progress beyond the 'tossed together last minute' feel of the booths that I've seen. Not to take away from any great effort that booth people have put in in the past, just having a booth is an amazing amount of work. But with more and more people willing to help out I think we have the opportunity to do a bit more. Having some systems in the booth is good, having them DO SOMETHING is even better. Since we're not going to have any FUDCon talks, I thought doing some mini presentations in the booth using the systems might be a good way to draw some people over and show them what it really is. Personally, I'd love to do a mini talk on kickstart complete with a system being kickstarted. By the same token somebody (or myself) can do a talk in just regular installs because I feel that the installer is one of the best parts of the distribution, and it is unique. Rather than talking about 'and this is how the new openoffice.org looks on OUR distro! See the widgets!?' we can talk about what really sets the distribution aside. In past LWCEs I've been to, the majority of the crowd are 'why would we use your distro' and not 'how can we contribute to your distro', so I think pitching our mini-presentations toward _users_ and if they proceed to ask about contribution, then we can have side discussions about contribution. Maybe we could score a little round table or something so that people that want to talk contribution and project stuff can sit down and take a load off instead of stacking up in front of the booth and blocking the way for people that want to take a look at the shinys. I also think we should have a good diversity of arches represented, an Intel box, an AMD box (dual cores anybody?), I'll have my Apple laptop but maybe a mac mini would be cool for the table. I'd like to do what some other booths have done, have one system (or maybe all systems w/ a switcher) plugged into a projector and the projector projecting on the back wall of the booth or the corner of the booth or something like that so that people bring their eyes up and look ahead instead of stooping to look at table level monitors or whatnot. It could also free table space for systems instead of having a bunch of (heavy) monitors stacked up. Of course, there is the swag aspect too. I assume we'll have t-shirts galore again (do they HAVE to be white?), CDs or DVDs of the distro (maybe we can ping vendors again for vendor branded ones rather than paying to master them ourselves), but what about some higher class items for the people that have a sit down talk about contributing (maybe even an extras contributor account sign up kiosk)? We won't advertise the items so that we don't get freeloaders just faking a talk to get swag, but for those that have a genuine interest we can give them something to thank them for their time? Anywho, these are my thoughts for now, I'm sure I'll have more soon. I'd like to start a wiki page for the booth planning, anybody have a preference where this page goes? -- Jesse Keating RHCE (http://geek.j2solutions.net) Fedora Legacy Team (http://www.fedoralegacy.org) GPG Public Key (http://geek.j2solutions.net/jkeating.j2solutions.pub) Was I helpful? Let others know: http://svcs.affero.net/rm.php?r=jkeating

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reports from FUDCon2?
by Paul Stauffer 05 Jul '05

05 Jul '05

Anyone who attended FUDCon2 care to give us a report on how things went? - Paul -- Paul Stauffer <paulds(a)bu.edu> Manager of Research Computing Computer Science Department Boston University

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Re: Cool Fedora schwag idea
by Greg DeKoenigsberg 03 Jul '05

03 Jul '05

So here's the meat of the argument: On the one hand, you want to recognize people. Why? * To thank them for their achievements. * To hold them up to the world as exemplary. * To encourage others to follow their example. But on the other hand, such recognition is inherently exclusionary -- because some achieve, and some don't. The letterman's jacket is, I see clearly now, too highly charged for too many people. I liked the idea because of the "geeks inherit the earth" message, all the way down to the letterman jackets, but I see clearly that it's too easily misinterpreted, and as much as I'd like to disagree, I can't. Still, I think that the notion of pins/letters/merit badges/etc. is a good one, and I would argue that it *should* be exclusionary. Either you earned it, or you didn't. So maybe just the pins, awarded for excellence. Wear them on your Fedora ballcap brim, or your T-shirt, or hanging from your pierced left nipple. How does that idea feel to people? A bit less ugly-clique-ish? *** As an aside: to me, this is the real value of this group -- discussing ideas like this. Figuring out "all of the messaging behind Fedora" is a strategic problem that will take time to figure out. But working out tactical questions like "better schwag" and "names for FC5" and "fund-raising activities" is an ideal use of this group's time, IMHO. So thanks for all of your helpful input. Thanks even to Seth for the public ass-whipping. :) --g _____________________ ____________________________________________ Greg DeKoenigsberg ] [ the future masters of technology will have Community Relations ] [ to be lighthearted and intelligent. the Red Hat ] [ machine easily masters the grim and the ] [ dumb. --mcluhan

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Fedoraproject.org website
by Hrishikesh Ballal 01 Jul '05

01 Jul '05

Hello All, A couple of things. I spent sometime last week trying to "checkout" the website from the CVS. I followed everything that as was written on the Fedoraproject.org website.. entered my GPG key etc. but with no luck.. I tried to check out particular modules out of the CVS and did not get anywhere.. so I emailed the repository administrator and am awaiting a reply. I hope someone can help me with that here. Anyway.. When I saw the Fedoraproject.org website (for the first time), I had a hard time navigating it finding the right info. So I started tinkering around with CSS and came up with a layout. I did not know if there is a "test" fedora server it can be uploaded and everyone can see it.. so I uploaded it on my own site.. at.. http://www.hrishikeshballal.net/other/fedora/ ... Can you please take a look at it and give me some feedback on the what I have so far so I can work on it later this week. As you can imagine all the links etc are broken.. I wanted to create a better layout. I am no artist and I don't know if we have one on this list.. I guess we need a "logo". I am not sure if anyone else is working on the website / layout,maybe he / she can take some ideas from it. But if you have any suggestions, comments brickbats on it please feel free to reply. Thanks Hrishi

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Fedora Core 4 reviews
by Rahul Sundaram 30 Jun '05

30 Jun '05

Hi Check out these reviews of Fedora Core 4. http://fedoranews.org/mediawiki/index.php/Fedora_Core_4_Reviews http://star-techcentral.com/tech/story.asp?file=/2005/6/28/prodit/11304408&… If you would like to respond to them with your feedback, feel free to do so. regards Rahul

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Re: Logos: everybody wants one but nobody seems to have any constructive comments. (was Re: Cool Fedora schwag idea)
by Matt Frye 30 Jun '05

30 Jun '05

On 6/30/05, Jeff Spaleta <jspaleta(a)gmail.com> wrote: > >...Perhaps in the band? There's all kinds of meaning > > in a white hat with different colored bands. > > did you mean to do this offlist? No, I meant to send it to the list. > I think you'd need to keep a central element of blue and add > additional colors somehow. > A striped band? Jesse's suggestion of press passes tucked into the band sounds neat. MPF

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FUDcon2 presentations?
by Rahul Sundaram 30 Jun '05

30 Jun '05

Hi Would FUDcon2 participants kindly make the presentations available here: http://fedoraproject.org/fudcon/. More information of any form such as meeting minutes, notes etc would be useful. I have already read the blogs about in Fedora people (http://fedoraproject.org/people) regards Rahul

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Attention, Interest, Decision, Action
by Jeremy Hogan 29 Jun '05

29 Jun '05

Note the mild subject adjustment, uttered most notable by Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross. Anyway, the thread needed a quick bump, I have some F/OSS marketing experience that I think I can lend. This project is getting ahead of itself re: defining discrete and ongoing roles, establishing baseline metrics, and decisions about who belongs here. There are some basic questions/assumptions you can line out first. 1a)What is Fedora?1b)Who is it for? (Today). Answered partly on the homepage nicely: "The Fedora Project is an open source project sponsored by Red Hat and supported by the Fedora community. It is also a proving ground for new technology that may eventually make its way into Red Hat products. It is not a supported product of Red Hat, Inc." That may or may not need to change as the NPO emerges, but it doesn't answer who it's for. If it's not for the average end user, then a whole suite of distros are out for comparison. Developers, hobbyists, enthusiasts, professional IT interested in the future direction of RHEL, etc. 2)Who else is in that space? Only SuSE is built this way (community feeding and fed by a big publicly held sugare daddy with a large install base, and market cap of 3-5Billion. No, Mandriva not out of the game, and if you threw out F/OSS values you could throw Sun in mix, but it's fair to focus toeard SuSE/Novell. 3a)What is Fedora? 3b)Who is it for? (Tomorrow). Some TBD, of course, but you'd hope that if today's mission succeeds, that you'll still have Developers, hobbyists, enthusiasts, professional IT interested in the future direction of RHEL, etc. Now, if Fedora *is* to be comared to Ubuntu, the core mission would have to reflect that to a degree, and comparisons and metrics should be made. And you can add more Ubuntu-esque users. If Fedora definition were to stretch from "proving ground for Red Hat" to "proving ground for Linux Innovation" or similar, then you can add small IT companies, tech savvy internal IT staff, and even an eco system of VARs for SMB/SME -- *cough cough* -- I mean people deploying and supporting it for others. And the verbage invites spin-off projects. (Still seen as to Red Hat's benefit). #3 is what needs rounding out before you decide you goes out saying what to whom, and in what medium. When you get through 3, you need only two more: 4) So what? What is unique and/or important about feature x, or relationship y? If I agree that I understand Fedora, and that it is for me -- so what? Every line of you PR, and every slide in your deck has to answer that question, or it's noise. 5) Who cares? You now have your sniper shot of a message. You can stand up, in confidence, and explain what Fedora is, and articulate what it is not. (And why Ubuntu is them, and you is you.) You add that to the answer to part b, of question3, and you no who this should resonate with. And you go after events, and online venues where they are and talk to them. Or when the come to where you are, they know quickly whether and how they fit in. No dancing, no marketing buzzwords. Recruit active participants, but you should be open as many interested onlookers as possible. 4 and 5 have potential for looping. %POST Then... -FAQ the hell out of 1-5 on -use PRWeb or a similar free service regularly (not feature releases, more like "Fedora guy writes free book in native language" type stuff, create news -- recognition is a core human need, get lots of it and attract lots of folks) -press contacts (invite a NewsForge editor to an exclusive at FudCON, send the LiveCD out for reviewers -- I like the documentary idea, but there's only so much of our collective navel the world needs to gaze into, give the project a broader context) -a media kit (zip file of the logo, the About statement, and ONE sheet giving the FAQ and spiel, contact info for one/two people at the most to follow up with) -an event or street team "SWAT" kit (swag like LiveString bracelets and LiveCDs) -etc --jeremy

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10 steps towards more effective collaboration
by Colin Charles 26 Jun '05

26 Jun '05

Seems this link was sitting in a tab, and thought it might benefit us: http://www.itmanagersjournal.com/article.pl?sid=05/04/14/2246226 Warm regards -- Colin Charles, http://www.bytebot.net/

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[MOVED TO DISCOURSE] Fedora Marketing - https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/tag/marketing June 2005