Re: Ideas for improving debian marketing
Hi,
On Tue, 13 Jun 2006, James Duncan wrote:
> After a discussion with just now, I have signed up to
> debian-publicity, and will continue these discussion there.
> My concern about that list is that it seems very low traffic, so I
> wanted to gather some opinions on my initial ideas here (I'll also
> post this there).
Of course it's very low traffic, it has just been (re-)created.
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2006/06/msg00005.html
Furthermore Debian developers are good at hacking, but there aren't so
many interested in "marketing". Hopefully this will change over time...
So your help is very welcome!
> a) Debian did have a press archive at
> http://www.debian.org/News/press/. This has not been updated since
> 2005. The problem with this is that the project does not have a
> central overview of how it is viewed in the media, and thus it is
> difficult to come up with a sane media strategy at first. A simple
> selection of major RSS feeds with the appropriate word filters will
> produce a rough list, and it can then be filtered down to a
> representative sample. I'm happy to handle this if people think this
> is useful. One thing to note is that this will also include negative
> press by default - normally I'd suggest a private summary (maybe
> through debian-publicity) that included these, and a public press
> showcase with only the positive pieces. Where do other people stand
> on this?
Looks like something to try! If you need some infrastructure for that,
please ask, we can certainly arrange something (on alioth.debian.org
maybe).
> b) The Debian website. At the moment, it seems somewhat developer
Yes, please get in touch with debian-www@lists.debian.org. But there's a
big inertia in this project, so it's difficult to make it evolve quickly.
It's unlikely that the site will use something else than WML for its
generation, so you'll have to learn that and see if you can update it
within that framework.
According to your other mails, your criteria could match those of the
debian-www team. I believe they find it important to keep the site
accessible to non-graphical browser, to not make too "heavy", and to keep
its exceptional level of localization. There's also a strong
identification with some of the colors/style, and even if it's not
beautiful, there may be fears to loose some kind of "branding" that we
built over time.
> c) Debian Weekly News: In my opinion, Debian need to *generate* news
> for people to write about. It is fine to have announcements for major
I agree with Joey Hess. DWN is for the community (and by the community).
We can however post other things on debian-news even on a weekly basis if
you(we) manage to produce something each week. And providing some material
for journalistes is certainly one of the goal of the new publicity team.
> e) Infastructure. A dedicated section of the wiki for
> marketing/branding ideas, and maybe a marketing team made up of both
> technical and non-technical guys to generate ideas.
>
> Opinions? I'd really welcome some feedback on this.
Most of your ideas look very sane. Feel free to go forward with them!
Maybe don't start with all of them, we don't want to burn you as we need
volunteers like you that help on a regular basis.
Cheers,
--
Raphaël Hertzog
Premier livre français sur Debian GNU/Linux :
http://www.ouaza.com/livre/admin-debian/
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