Thoughts about GnomeMarketing/AnnualReport/AnnualReport2014

Here's the approved version: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/engagement-list/2014-February/msg00018.html

What and how we are doing it, story first corner™

Our story is GNOME achievements in 2013. Let's ponder about that a bit:

• Why are we telling this story?
  • To share our achievements and goals with our extended family of friends and contributors.
• Who's this story about?
  • The people involved in GNOME: designers, translators, sysadmins, promoters, hackers.
• What's our continuous struggle, what are we trying to overcome permanently?
  • Outreach is our continued effort to gain in diversity and health as a community. This is big, and innovative for the context.
  • We have been worried on innovation and modernization, fighting our own legacy and other's expectations
• 5 keywords that define, or to highlight in, this story:
  • Diversity: we are a big mix of friends of every size, kind and style.
  • Dynamic: we are changing everything we need to change, adapting and improving.
  • Community: GNOME is people, and that's why we love it.
  • Resolve: we are not afraid of aiming high, we can't be stopped.
  • Solid: we are all fun loving, but also know how to do serious business.

This is based on the wonderfully didactic Stillmotion's 4Ps method. Film is just another medium of communication, and the method is a great way to distill a rationale for a communication product. Highly recommended: http://stillmotionblog.com/storytelling-series/

Thoughts about past editions

About content

• We can aim at smaller articles. So that we keep the report more "entirely readable in a day of commuting".
• Can we produce articles? Planning and producing a main article (text + photos) would be a great highlight of the publication.
  • Might be hard to find a topic that relates to last year and also be relevant.
  • Hard to do if we can't find the topic + resources to be in geographical proximity.
  • Could be done in the West Coast hackfest? Maybe an exclusive report on it? This would put a deadline on our necks.
• Challenge: the content is by definition "last year news". How can we make it more engaging to casual readers? Is it possible?
  • This is not a blocker, understandably we are producing a report, not a magazine.
  • Maybe something related to the 3.12 release?

About design

• We need more padding and white space. Big blocks of text are hard to read, as well as blocks that are too wide.
• A font for texts that is more inviting to lecture would be great. Again, being text-focused, we need to ease the task of reading the publication.

  • There are nice free alternatives we can look into. Example: https://www.theleagueofmoveabletype.com/

  • If we are looking forward to print this, a serif would be great in print.
• Improving on our photo selection and edition. So that they can make a bigger impact on the reader, using keywords to guide the process would help a lot.

Other stuff

• Can we put in place a process? Maybe we can create a recipe, as the Hackfests/New one, to help future teams produce the report.

• Infra ideas:
  • Use Google Docs to collaborate on articles and edition. Advantages: simultaneous edit with formatting