On Sat, 2005-04-23 at 19:40 +0200, Andreas Schuldei wrote:
> if (press_release != sent) {
AFAIK, this is the case.
> Do we know what the culpit was?
> was it a person or a problem in the process?
According to http://wiki.debian.net/?DebConf5Meeting20041003 a number of
persons, me included, were appointed to do press releases. We were
supposed to hold a meeting to work out the details, but attendance was
almost 0, so nothing was decided. Instead, some emails were exchanged,
but the focus was on the video stuff and coverage of the event itself
(summary at http://ajt.iki.fi/temp/dc5-press.txt).
We also didn't know the time-frame for sure, and there was uncertainty
of what to do until we got an affirmative date for DebConf5. In the
meantime, I think people just forgot about the whole thing. No-one took
the role of coordinating.
The current status appears to be at
http://wiki.debian.net/?DebConf5TodoPress but most details are missing.
I quickly inserted some basic stuff there, extracted from previous
discussions.
So I believe the main problems were:
* the tasks were unclear,
* the people involved didn't know what each of them was supposed
to do,
* there is very little material to look at to get an idea of how
things should be done (previous years have mainly had press
releases after the debconf is already over),
* time constraints early in the process didn't help either.
> How can we make sure that this problem will not re-occure
> in the future?
The press team should be bootstrapped with material from earlier years,
and a more detailed list of requirements. This should be updated with
target dates for the press release(s) once the time of the event is
known.
Also, having at least one person on the press team that has been in the
game before and has sufficient time to oversee the progress, would be
useful.
> How can we help to fix the problem?
> }
Does this still apply:
* one PR when we have the preliminary list of talks ready
* one when we open registration
* one afterwards
?
Registration has opened and Andreas has sent an announcement to
d-d-announce. What about a press release for that -- Debian Weekly News,
for instance has had no general information, just the fact that the Call
for Papers started and ended. What about the first point? (The last one
has obviously not occurred yet :)
It would be great if the PR people could receive a short notice to
trigger these. Attendance at the IRC meetings has been somewhat
problematic for me lately, so even if it has been decided there to send
a press release, I'm unaware of it. Also, I'm unsure of what information
we want to provide in each of these.
I will shortly send an email to start fleshing out the contents of the
press releases. One way of helping is to start suggesting ways to
improve them.
Cheers,
--
Fabian Fagerholm <fabbe@paniq.net>
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