Re: Report from Med@Tel
NB taking off other lists, but -project
I see few related aspects, where/how we could improve generic awareness
about Debian
1. although twittering and other tiny-news networking is useful
on its own, I think that we should aim at bigger picture...
When do people hear about Debian in general? when it hits the
headlines of the news. When does Debian hits headlines of the news?
when major event happens, e.g.
* Release (~once in 2 years)
* Freeze (~once in 2 years)
* Elections (once a year)
* Announcement about debconf (once a year)
* Major security issue comes up e.g. openssh RNG -- thanks god quite
rare
in those cases, attention, positive or negative (as in the later) gets
diverted to Debian. Otherwise despite having some news, Debian remains
in its own bubble as far as I could see it as the insider.
So what could improve our appearance:
* Having Debian CUT -- more release announcements
* ????
2. Another line, which shakes news lines across different media is
presentation of Debian at the variety of big big expos and conferences.
It provides good opportunity for targetted exposure of Debian, but
alone, as Andreas pointed out, seems to be not enough. Moreover,
most often Debian is exposed on IT events to those who already know
about Debian, thus just showing that we are still alive without really
bringing any fresh blood.
Exposure at Med@Tel, and other specialized conferences (e.g. our
NeuroDebian booth at SfN 2010 [1]) in our experience does bring more
attention of outsiders. Partially additional complication is that
usually noone invites us to those conferences, so booths do not come for
free and someone needs to cover the expense.
3. In Debian we have a number of great sub-projects which are not properly
exposed even within Debian itself. I have once suggested to float all
the blends up to the main Debian page to make it at once look appealing
and specific to a broad range of specialists. But I failed to generalize
the proposal, so it hasn't worked out yet.
Having 1. in mind -- Release Notes -- every subproject should have clear
and catchy release goals accomplished listed in the release notes. Our
section on "Comprehensive support for neuroimaging research"
surprisingly caught quite a bit of attention whenever squeeze came out.
Although some considered it as yet another geeky side of Debian, many
people saw it as the true universality of Debian carrying about various
fields of endeavor.
What I was leading to: we have great stuff in Debian, it is
underexposed, and whenever Debian is exposed great stuff is often
hidden. Thus we need a line of presenting Debian at higher level of
granularity than twits, more of little blog articles, providing
high-level descriptions (not installation instructions) in the fields of
endeavor which Debian has already covered quite extensively. May be
something like "Debian cookbook" but without step-by step instructions.
Debian blends tasks pages probably provide necessary level of groupping
and just would require human interpretation into a coherent articles
describing specific field, why Debian is good for it, what Debian
provides (brief outline of functionality, alternatives, future) with
accents on security/stability/ease of installation, where it is
possibly used already, etc.
And then having it as visible on Debian planet upon initial publication
of the post (which might get refined through its lifetime). Upon
Debian release, all those could be bundled to accompany the release in
one, hopefully exhaustive, "book" to guide various newcomers from
different fields into the world of Debian wheezy.
How about that?
[1] http://neuro.debian.net/blog/2010/2010-11-24_booth_sfn2010.html
On Sun, 10 Apr 2011, Yaroslav Halchenko wrote:
> Hi Andreas,
> Thanks for sharing!
> On Sun, 10 Apr 2011, Andreas Tille wrote:
> > "byte space" by using twitter so that I'm convinced that it is a
> > reasonable thing to ignore this medium - I could perfectly imagine to
> > twitter any uploaded Debian package. Something like
> > Uploaded <pkg> <version> - <shortdescription>
> FWIW: Debian is known to twitter:
> http://twitter.com/debian
> And for NeuroDebian we have exactly that -- brief announcements on new
> releases made available:
> http://identi.ca/neurodebian
> http://twitter.com/NeuroDebian
> So it would only be logical to get DebianMed and DebianScience out there.
--
=------------------------------------------------------------------=
Keep in touch www.onerussian.com
Yaroslav Halchenko www.ohloh.net/accounts/yarikoptic
Reply to: