September 2008 - openSUSE Marketing - openSUSE Mailing Lists

[opensuse-marketing] spokesperson - first draft
by Martin Lasarsch 05 Nov '08

05 Nov '08

Hi As mentioned before we are thinking about how to gain more marketshare, a bigger community, more local support ... whatever you want to call it. Thats a good point, we also need a name for it! :-) It would be similar to the fedora ambassador or Ubuntu LoCo but most of us think that a unique name for it would help a lot. So please put some fuel into your brains and tell us what your favorite is! In this draft we are using the term spokesperson to have at least one ... (and yes, this not describes all the tasks ...). The openSUSE Project is largely managed by Novell employees, but that's not the long-term vision for the project. As the openSUSE Project matures, we want to be more inclusive and find ways for openSUSE community members to take up equal responsibility for the growth and promotion of openSUSE. We already have openSUSE supporters who are doing an awesome job of building a community locally. We want to find ways to assist those members, and make the most of their experience to expand to new local communities. The spokesperson concept will improve the situation and create an environment in which the creation of local openSUSE spokespersons and teams is easier, to support openSUSE and Linux in local areas and channel feedback to the openSUSE project. Here is a list, this is a rough draft and feedback is highly appreciated/wanted. *Who can be a spokesperson - everybody who signed the guiding principles and is an openSUSE member Q: is this necessary? - everybody who is willing to put time and effort to support the project and Linux/FOSS in general - everbody who likes to communicate with other people *What are the tasks of a spokesperson? - in general these community members should spread the word about openSUSE in their area, like: - promote openSUSE - dispatch openSUSE DVDs/CDs - contact to local LUGs - attend events (tradeshows, university, community etc.), give presentations - help updating the event calendar on news.o.o - contact for local community (in person, chat, mailinglists etc.) and get feedback to the project - mentor other interested people - create/maintain local wiki page for their region on en.opensuse.org - write reports from events, meetings etc on news or lizards.o.o - create/maintain a localized wiki, minimum set of basic pages (approx. 15) - maintain a localized mailinglist/forum on opensuse.org - create - if necessary or requested - a local group of spokespersons/assistants (this should address the case if more people per region want to help) - attract contributors to the project This sounds like a lot of work. Sure, it's work but it's managable in a reasonable time, especially if you doing it for some time, and you don't have to do it alone. We support the idea of having more than one spokesperson for a territory. See the list rather as a "would be nice" instead of "have to" list. Q: How to organize this? Is it "everbody can join", do we need a "master" spokesperson for the territory, how will it be decided? Of course we support: "do and you are it", but we probably can't support 50 people for Germany for example. Q: is there something "below" or "above" a spokespersons? Do we need a (quite flat) hierarchy like country spokesperson - local spokesperson - assistant - helper? If yes there should be a definition of these terms. Q: do we need a spokesperson council which makes decision if problems can't be resolved otherwise? Is the board responsible for that? *What does Novell provide? (since there is no decision on the budget so far, please don't nail us on that ... use them as ideas ...) - welcome box (t-shirts, caps, Promo DVDs), to be resend with each new release - special business cards (template or real) - special t-shirt - a special guide/howto to make it easier and better organized - event box (portable booth, signage, banner, flyer, poster etc.) - give-aways, spiffs - certain budget for travel - create a spokesperson day parallel or a day prior to the openSUSE conference - single point of contact to drive the program and manage travel, DVD shipment, events etc. - exclusive mailinglist for spokespersons to allign our efforts (albeit it's public anyway to get feedback) *Benefits for spokesperson - becomes opensuse member after certain period of time and proven support and receives a @opensuse.org email address Q: or do they have to be members in the first place? - reputation, fame, pride - gets once a year a present or - invitation to the openSUSE conference (draft by michl, Zonker & /me) -- with kind regards, Martin Lasarsch, Core Services SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, Maxfeldstr. 5 90409 Nürnberg GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg) martin.lasarsch(a)suse.de - http://www.opensuse.org -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+help(a)opensuse.org

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[opensuse-marketing] Wikipedia Articles
by Stephan Binner 07 Oct '08

07 Oct '08

Hello, if someone is bored please look over the English and <your language> Wikipedia articles about openSUSE for obviously wrong or missing stuff, like [1] saying that 5 CDs are required and linking to the old forums and 10.1 reviews. :-) Bye, Steve [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SUSE_Linux_distributions [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opensuse -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+help(a)opensuse.org

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[opensuse-marketing] Improving the How to Participate
by Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier 03 Oct '08

03 Oct '08

Hi all, We discussed improving the How to Participate page during the IRC meeting today. I just wanted to throw this out to the list as a discussion starter. The page I'm referring to is here: http://en.opensuse.org/How_to_Participate The page is a good start, but we need to make it more friendly, and easier to get information from more quickly. Also -- I see that the page is only available in five languages -- this is something else we need to work on, as we definitely want to have the page text available in more languages. Some of the ideas discussed during the meeting: * Videos * Storyboards * Improving the text on the page Other thoughts? Best, Zonker -- Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier openSUSE Community Manager jzb(a)zonker.net http://zonker.opensuse.org/ http://blogs.zdnet.com/community/ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+help(a)opensuse.org

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Re: [opensuse-marketing] spokesperson - first draft
by Kevin Dupuy 30 Sep '08

30 Sep '08

From: "Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier" <jbrockmeier(a)novell.com> To: <suserocks(a)bryen.com> Cc: <opensuse-marketing(a)opensuse.org> Sent: Monday, September 29, 2008 11:27 AM Subject: Re: [opensuse-marketing] spokesperson - first draft > For the U.S. it's somewhat easy -- we can divide by regions (mid-west, > northwest, mountain states, east coast, west coast, etc.) or by states, if > we ever need to. Huh. New England, Pacific Northwest, West Coast, Southwest, Gulf Coast, Midwest, East Coast... I thought one "spokesman" per local group... right now the United States seems to be dividing up into states for the local groups... which could pose a problem of having too many spokeman if we begin to have many individual groups in a particular country. -- Kevin "Yeaux" Dupuy - openSUSE Member Public Mail - kevin.dupuy(a)opensuse.org Meet Bob Barr - Libertarian for President http://www.BobBarr2008.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+help(a)opensuse.org

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Re: [opensuse-marketing] spokesperson - first draft
by Andreas Demmer 29 Sep '08

29 Sep '08

Gabriel Franco schrieb am Montag 29 September 2008: > lizard evangelist - evangelizards Evangelizard! That's brilliant! :-D Zoooooooonker, can I haz "Evangelizard" please? Greets, Andreas -- Skype: andreas.demmer ICQ: 103 924 771 http://www.andreas-demmer.de

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[opensuse-marketing] help.o.o
by Pascal Bleser 29 Sep '08

29 Sep '08

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 As you probably know, we have a "help" icon on the desktop that points your $FAVOURITE_BROWSER to http://help.opensuse.org The pages there are then served depending on what your $FAVOURITE_BROWSER sends as preferred language (Apache content negotiation). It's just a set of static HTML files that have been designed by Jacob "spin" Caudill and Robert Lihm, with most of the initial content written by me. The current translations have been provided by many I've contacted on IRC and on the opensuse-translation mailing-list. Basically, the idea behind help.o.o was to replace the somewhat short "how to get help" section of the greeter by a *simple* *overview* for beginners on how to get in touch with other openSUSE users to get *help* (the three fundamental qualities are in *bold*). The idea is also to make the path as short as two or three clicks. I don't have any numbers and I have no idea whether it is actually helpful or just a waste of time. I tend to believe that the idea is good and that it should be pretty useful (after all, who wouldn't click a "help" icon on the desktop in order to get... help). Up to now, it was pretty much a one man activity wrt keeping an eye on it, which means that nothing has happened since quite some time. I'd like to see those pages endorsed by a somewhat larger scope of people, with the marketing team being the most adequate for that task (IMHO). 1) Please have a look [1], and let's share and debate about ideas and criticisms. I do have SVN [2] commit access to those pages, which means I can act as a review+commit hub. Everyone has read-only access so you can check the sources out ("svn checkout " + the URL referenced at [2]), make changes, generate diffs (using "svn diff") and send them to me (please make sure to use HTML entities such as é instead of é, ä instead of ä, etc...). 2) One of the first things to address would certainly be more translations. I'd love to have a Japanese translation, for example. 3) We should also rework the "forums" section, in order to add a direct link to the official openSUSE forums, at least for the English version. 4) Robert, what needs to be done in order to update the CSS+images to the latest version (and match en.opensuse.org) ? 5) I think that the wiki pages that are linked from help.o.o should be translated, and some of them currently aren't, such as the mailing list netiquette page [3] References: [1] http://help.opensuse.org Note that if you want to see a specific language use e.g. http://help.opensuse.org/index.html.fr [2] SVN repository is here: https://forgesvn1.novell.com/svn/opensuse/trunk/infrastructure/help.o.o/ [3] http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_mailing_list_netiquette cheers - -- -o) Pascal Bleser <pascal.bleser(a)opensuse.org> /\\ http://opensuse.org -- I took the green pill _\_v FOSDEM::23+24 Feb 2008, Brussels, http://fosdem.org -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFI3/PZr3NMWliFcXcRAifIAJ9d7vqYNu9Ksq7q+N3uNDoRjn6PwwCeO076 jcAPuSnaQq7zz1oYRCi81UM= =CFSA -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+help(a)opensuse.org

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[opensuse-marketing] Guerilla Marketing the Media
by Chris Coray 25 Sep '08

25 Sep '08

Zonker has requested I send a post to the group on this topic. In our openSUSE marketing meeting today, we discussed ways to use "Guerilla Marketing" to help spread the word about the release of openSUSE 11.1 beta and final release parties. As a non-profit organization, it should be fairly easy to find and utilize local media outlets to reach the most amount of people for the smallest cost possible. Having worked in radio for almost five years, I know that it is much easier to get a local radio station, news paper, television station, or other media venue to help promote your event or information as a non-profit group than it is as a business. Many of these media businesses realize that helping local non-profit events can help them in turn by promoting their own image as a team player in the community. It is similar to Novell's monetary support of an open-source community (before anyone comments, I know it's not the *only* reason Novell contributes, just one benefit for the company). Some of the potential media venues include- + Local newspapers often have a section dedicated to local events for small to no cost. + Local radio stations (non-syndicated) are generally happy to be involved with the community and to give a free mention or two for non-profit organization events. As a previous producer of a morning show, if someone contacted me with a topic that I thought would be interesting to my general audience, I was more than happy to have them on the show for 20 minutes, or sometimes longer. I once had a one-time guest that quickly became a weekly contributor based on positive response to his original participation. + Local television stations often have small announcements on local stories of interest. Approaching them can sometimes be more difficult than print or radio media, but it can still be done. + Classified ads, such as Craigs List, are also a great on-and-offline way to advertise. Some of these charge a small fee to run an ad or a week or a certain number of issues, but are fairly easy to get in contact with and use. There are many other potential venues out there, including university newspapers, newsgroups, blogs, message boards, and social networking sites. Remember when approaching these various sources that you are asking them for the favor, and the worst that can happen is that they say "no." You are more likely to get a positive response if you are prepared with all of the information, you are polite, and you make certain to let them know how much you appreciate their help. Consider how you word your approach carefully. Telling them that you have information on "openSUSE beta 11.1" might not get you very far, but catching their attention with "Reducing computer costs with free, stable software" or "Breaking Free of Windows" are something that appeal to a wider audience. One last consideration - often in these free venues, your time or text space is limited, so for best results, keep it to the most important details. A fun (truthful) headline with contact information (a website, phone number, or e-mail) are your top priority. Including "openSUSE" to attract those who might have heard of it is a second. An example: "If you hate Windows viruses but don't want to pay a lot for a Mac, contact our non-profit group for a free operating system demonstration - lizardlovers(a)gmail.com." Again, much of this will be determined by your own local customs and regulations, but clear contact information will always be your biggest asset. I hope this helps somewhat. -Chris Coray (cap_pickle) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+help(a)opensuse.org

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[opensuse-marketing] new front page
by ¡ElCheVive! 25 Sep '08

25 Sep '08

Hi, How can we translate the new front page? www.opensuse.org ? regards, Luiz -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+help(a)opensuse.org

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[opensuse-marketing] openSUSE 3rd birthday and countdown
by Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier 25 Sep '08

25 Sep '08

Hi all, We ran a counter that ticked off the days to the 11.0 release, I'd like to see about reinstating that for the 11.1 release. I'm hoping that 1) this is relatively trivial to implement now that we've done it, and 2) that the responsible parties are on this list and ready to run with it. :-) Also, we have a milestone coming up -- openSUSE's 3rd birthday. Obviously, there are a lot of dates we could pull out of the air to use for the project's birthday, but I'm using the first release based on the project info on Distrowatch. That date is Oct. 6th. (http://distrowatch.com/?newsid=02946 or http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-announce/2005-10/msg00002.html) >From AJ's email: I'm glad to announce the final version (aka the Goldmaster) of SUSE Linux 10.0. Developing 10.0 as part of the openSUSE project with an open bugzilla was a new and great experience. Thanks a lot to everybody that contributed in testing, reporting and fixing bugs, discussions etc. So, the release wasn't "openSUSE" by name, but was the first stable release done as part of openSUSE. I'm pulling together an announcement and so forth, but I wanted to see if anyone had suggestions for other things to do to promote this -- anyone willing/able to put together some birthday graphics, for example? Thanks, Zonker -- Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier openSUSE Community Manager jzb(a)zonker.net http://zonker.opensuse.org/ http://blogs.zdnet.com/community/ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+help(a)opensuse.org

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[opensuse-marketing] Next Marketing meeting: September 23, 2008 at 15:00 UTC
by Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier 19 Sep '08

19 Sep '08

Hi all, The next openSUSE Marketing Meeting is scheduled for Sept. 23 (Tuesday) at 15:00 UTC. As always, it will be held on IRC in #openSUSE-Project on Freenode. Agenda items so far: Reports * Helping Hands * openSUSE TV * New openSUSE start page * Improving How to Participate Page New * Promoting openSUSE 11.1 release * Improving Welcome to openSUSE.org page Anything else we need to discuss? Thoughts? Everything is up on the wiki: http://en.opensuse.org/Marketing_Team/Meetings/Marketing_Meeting_2008-09-23… The transcript from last time is available here: http://en.opensuse.org/Marketing_Team/Meetings/2008_09_09-transcript In the interest of time, we should probably try to discuss as much as possible on the mailing list, since the hour usually flies by pretty quickly. Best, Zonker -- Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier openSUSE Community Manager jzb(a)zonker.net http://zonker.opensuse.org/ http://blogs.zdnet.com/community/ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+help(a)opensuse.org

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