Problem Description

In certain countries such as Thailand, exposing the foot toward someone or even pointing with the foot is a taboo. From Wikipedia:

  • Many societies have "foot taboos":
    • In countries strongly influenced by Buddhism (e.g., Thailand, Nepal), feet are the least respected parts of the body and strong taboos obtain against touching with feet, pointing with feet, or exposing the sole of the foot toward someone. In Thai custom, feet should not be in a higher position than someone's head and must never face someone or an image of the Buddha. In Nepal, sleeping on the floor with someone's feet oriented toward another sleeper is considered entirely unacceptable.
    • Traditional Arab culture also has the same anti-foot bias as in the Nepal or Thailand cultures.

Therefore, the GNOME foot logo has hindered its spread in such countries, in terms of acceptance for people who are totally new to it.

Note that an explanation to the logo as a footprint does not help much, as long as it's still related to that part of the body.

This of course does not include people who are already willing to dive into GNOME. They can bear the taboo for the software they like. This cultural issue is for marketing GNOME to new comers.

Countries Known to have such Issue

  • Thailand
  • Lao
  • Nepal (as referenced by Wikipedia)

Proposed Solutions

Summarized from marketing-list and gnome-i18n threads, proposed solutions are:

Reduce the use of the foot in some apps

Rationale

  • Some apps like Epiphany and Nautilus can use other sensible throbber like spinner or alike.

Steps

Add a secondary logo for GNOME

Rationale

  • The foot logo has been used for a long time, and is too costly to replace. More importantly, people like it.

  • Having secondary logo is common in international organizations, such as Debian and the International Red Cross and Red Crescent.

  • Some kind of acceptance from the GNOME project would make the alternative logo equally, or at least unofficially, recognized by people, not just a fork or casual customization.
  • This also allows its use in promotion web sites and events without losing the unity with the main stream project.

Steps

  • Mention the alternative logo somewhere in GNOME web site.
  • Create alternative icon themes with the new logo.
  • (optional) Set the default theme based on locale.

Rationale

  • The foot logo has been used for a long time, and is too costly to replace. More importantly, people like it.
  • It's an unintrusive solution, as countries with this issue are small minorities.

Steps

  • Create a mechanism to localize the logo based on locale.
  • Translators choose the logo for their locales.

Possible Problems

  • Many Thai users don't like to use Thai translation. This method will not work for them.

Proposed Logos

Engagement/FootAndCulturalIssue (last edited 2013-11-25 16:23:16 by WilliamJonMcCann)