Debian needs to care about PR image too.
Hello,
The PR of Debian has collateral effects.
The constant stream of (bad) news (they "sell" press), reaches the
management level.
Beyond the yesterday blog and LT events, I receive a depressing news from a
coworker.
For months I have been trying to influence [0][1][2] a big migration plan
(5k to 50k units)
(I was not officially in the working group).
Despite FACTS and (private) DATA (hey me and others colectively manage
various (hundreds?)
Debian servers and desktops with real data collected), the decision was
seriously affected by PERCEPTIONS.
Debian lost to a forked derivative (at least, not a total loss)
with better PR organization [4] and better HYPE.
As you likely know, above a given management level, at private and public
sectors, decisions
are taken without so much technical deep analysis, and affected by
PERCEPTIONS, hype and marketing.
The technical people have to summarize hundreds pages reports and data
analysis in 1 to 5 pages
(the higher the mgr, less pages).
At least, a reasonable technical background was present and a "certain
empire" could not fulfil
the requirements and marketeers "soft rosy talk" was debunked with real
hard data.
If Debian Project cares about attracting
- new skilled developers
- new (home?) users (what kind of?)
- new corporate users
- new government users
- new sponsors
- new hardware device drivers supporters
We need to care more about PR image also and spread the word about the good
things we accomplish,
for example.
Debian is not a company. But we need (some kind of?) users to help further
development as it is
becoming bigger and bigger. Do we need users? Why? Do we need more
developers? Why and how get them motivated?
Is it possible to send a message to our users and developers, after
defining that the debian-publicity
IS a Project's team?
The recent effort [8] is a demonstration that debian-publicity team efforts
are even still unknown by DDs
and efforts are not being coordinated.
Regards.
Andre Felipe
[0]
http://www.techforce.com.br/index.php/news/linux_blog/massive_installation_management_tools_p_1
[1]
http://www.techforce.com.br/index.php/news/linux_blog/massive_installation_management_tools_p_2
[3]
http://www.techforce.com.br/index.php/news/linux_blog/massive_installation_management_tools_p_3
[4] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MarketingTeam
[5] http://marketing.openoffice.org/
[6] http://lwn.net/Articles/269815/
[7] http://live.gnome.org/GnomeMarketing
[8]
http://goinggnu.wordpress.com/2008/04/01/debian-wants-to-hear-from-you/
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