Re: press item announcing success of DebConf 5?
On 7/29/05, Fabian Fagerholm <fabian.fagerholm@linux-aktivaattori.fi> wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-07-28 at 20:43 +0200, Martin Schulze wrote:
> > That's something I've told the debconf people after the announcement
> > as well. Since it was more than one week after the end of the conference
> > I didn't feel like we should wait another week until some stuff is found,
> > so actually released it with a too few information. I hope the organisers
> > for the next Debconf will collect interesting stuff *during* the conference
> > that we can use later.
>
> The issue with the press releases has not been lack of awareness of what
> should be done, or how it should be done. The people involved in the
> press work for DebConf5 have all worked with the press before, and (at
> least some of us) have worked as journalists for TV, radio and/or print
> media. We know what an ideal communication with the press looks like,
> from the "sender's" point of view, from the press' point of view, and
> from the audience's point of view. The details that I think joey is
> looking for *have* been collected prior to, during and after the
> conference, but merely collecting them doesn't mean they end up in a
> press release.
Looking back at the event, one aspect that I feel was seriously
compromised was respect of the role assignment and task distribution.
Too many people wanted to have their say into everything and went
behind the scene to "fix" the work of those whose responsibility it
was to handle specific tasks, which resulted in several
misunderstandings and in an infuriating waste of resources.
Arto, Tero, Fabian and I all have prior experience of dealing with or
being a member of the press ourselves. Still, much to my amazement, a
lot of what we wrote ended up further mingled by some invisible hands,
which resulted in less than statisfactory PR material being sent out.
In the case of the post-event PR, an unfinnished draft of it was even
circulated among certain foreign mailing lists and presented as final
material, which I found totally inapropriate. Likewise, the curious
rephrasing of our PR material into grammatically challenged texts that
was seen on some mailing lists was rather discomforting.
So, to answer the question, yes, a lot of what made this Debconf5 a
success was in fact noted and put into the draft, then mysteriously
disappeared from what was finally sent out. I would really like to
know who did this and why they felt they had a right to interfere and
damage other people's work.
--
Martin-Éric Racine
http://q-funk.iki.fi
--
To unsubscribe, send mail to debconf5-team-unsubscribe@lists.debconf.org.
Reply to: