See https://mail.gnome.org/archives/marketing-list/2012-December/msg00052.html

Participants

sri, karenesq, andreasn, gonyere, aday, bkor, Deindre

Agenda

Community outreach

• Define the problem
• Define the message
• Define methods that we can resolve gaps in communication
• How are forums and world of gnome working for us
• reporter outreach

Minutes

Community Outreach/Development

Sri: Theres a common wisdom that GNOME will throw out features and are unfriendly. We've let others tell our story for us. As a result, most of the press we receive is negative, focusing on GNOME 3's failures and shortcomings.

Andreas: Whats the biggest drawback of this perception?

Emily/Karen: Because the result is many people who have simply never seen GNOME 3, and are surprised by it when they do. Because of the perception we are limiting both our development and user bases.

Karen: Addressing these myths is hard, though there may be an opportunity coming up with Vincent Untz's “Has the GNOME community gone crazy?” talk at FOSDEM.

Sri: We need to have people on Twitter during the talk addressing comments on Twitter in real time.

Overall we need to be more vocal about what we're doing. Need to expand outside of IRC & mailinglists. Forums are going well, but input from real GNOME developers/contributors would help them expand much more rapidly. Be open to outside ideas – express more clearly that we want to hear from outside users & developers. Also be open to outside contributors and accepting of whatever they have to share.

Sri: How do we continue to support our theme/design while being open to outside ideas? By promoting extensions?

Karen: We have this message/theme of 'Simple by default. Configurable by design.' - extensions are how we make it configurable and we should be promoting them. But we need to figure out the issues with extensions and any infrastructure issues related to them.

Sri: Back to communication – we have problems as well communicating what we're doing to each other.

Emily: Should we revive the GNOME Ambassadors program?

Sri: Rename my 'community outreach' to GNOME Ambassadors – will look into it.

Olav: We should continue having these meetings – they are helpful.

Emily: Should look into including the release team & other key members of GNOME community in these meetings.

Action items

Everyone should be participating as much as they can.

Look at the design area of the forums, as well as at re-doing their theme. (Andreas)

Talk with Vincent & Karen about talking to the press. (Karen)

Look into the GNOME Ambassadors program. (Sri)

Setup a regular call (bi-monthly? Around releases?) with the release & marketing teams to better coordinate between them. (Karen)