* Jos Poortvliet
On Monday 20 December 2010 22:16:56 Nelson Marques wrote:
*my last attempt to explain the (too long, esp during a meeting) discussion we had on #opensuse-marketing
You said we had to make developers tell the marketing team what new features were in their projects.
Based on the fact that the devels are the ones who should provide that information for several reasons, being the most important of them, the fact that they would be the best persons to highlight the great advancements on their projects and how they would benefit more.
You proposed that us dig Changelogs (how many on the marketing team have the tech know-how to read a Changelog and select the best features?), making that like our own decision and use openFATE (which I stated it sucked for that purpose) because openFATE translates the users needs which is awesome (and I'm thankful for it to happen that way), on the other side, openFATE might not translate the true potential implementations and innovations present on the release.
I told you we could try and some would answer (like GNOME and KDE teams) but most wouldn't (kernel, Xorg). As is the case in most FOSS communities - developers care mostly about code, marketing isn't that interesting. Something I understand.
I did got a positive answer from GNOME and psankar offered his right promptly to work on the Feature list. Also on the GNOME meeting Vincent Untz made very clear that there are some generic guidelines proposed by the GNOME Project to support the release of GNOME shell across distributions. I see many people and random comments about working together, this initiative from GNOME places us a opportunity to accomplish it.
You were the one who tossed away the opportunity of developers to participate on this by stating that KDE would never go for it.
That's why I said re-read the discussion. I said it didn't work in KDE and it wouldn't work here - at least not to the extend that the marketing team can just watch the features flow in. I explicitly stated that both the GNOME and the KDE team in openSUSE would probably do this, as I know the people involved understand the value of marketing AND are willing to put in time.
Many other developers care less, or rather, have other priorities.
I won't go further into your mail(s), you have last word.
That's your words, not mine. And to me, this clearly indicates a conflict of interests, while openSUSE should be your highest priority for this matter, not what KDE thinks. If they wanted to do it... cool it would've been a poorer feature rich list... but that doesn't give you or anyone else the right to measure all other projects and cripple the chance for participation. In fact you doubled the work I was already pushing on the wiki.
Instead of promoting collaborative work within reasonable times, you suggested that the mass of the work would be done at FOSCOM in a meeting, thus increasing the amount of funding for it to happen and striking out people who can't attend FOSCOM because they have $dayjobs. I've sorry but you complicated unnecessarily this issue which triggered my 'bail out' on openSUSE Marketing because I don't see that you or Bryen are leading efforts in a real maner to improve things and choose the easier way just to get 'things done'. For me it's far more important how things are done and that a proper method can be implemented than just scrapping stuff on the last minute.
I'm sorry but we will never agree on this kind of things... either we push things into a better scenario where we can be more attractive or we will always have problems expanding the community to 'normal people'.
And I told you I tried it during my KDE marketing times, and got - well, somewhere, but not to the point where the marketing team didn't have to spend quite some time bothering developers again and again and reading changelogs to find the major features.
As project, and specially YOU as Community Leader should've escalated those subjects for Boosts, Board and even press on sponsors to make it happen that way, not because I want, but because that was an opportunity to improve to a more consistent workflow with methodology that would allow us to highlight the developers work and their concerns, thus improving the communication efficiency towards our audiences by serving better our developers concerns and their projects within openSUSE.
I don't find this hard as several people I've contacted promptly offered their help (example provided above). I tried to call you upon reason, highlighting that if you were unable to provide a favourable outcome and contact boosters/board to help us on this issue, instead you tossed everything away explaining KDE would never do it... That raised to me a lot of questions, specially when to me it became clear you are trying to use a 'short' group of people to accomplish a task during a certain moment on a certain location to fix something that could be accomplished without so much efforts in budget and involving a larger work force.
I'm totally against having Marketing to work a release in a time frame of 1 month and 2 weeks as you will do.
You repeated that the world had to be like you wanted it to be. I repeated it wasn't.
First you demonized the devs and other contributors by giving the answer that they would never provide a list of features, now you demonize me. Within a year or two you should make a balance of how many new people are actually working for openSUSE Marketing, then maybe you will realize that we're not attractive for contributors...
In short, I advocated realism based on earlier experiences. If you call that bias and are now scared of the future of GNOME in openSUSE, by all means, be scared. I doubt anything will change your mind.
And I advocated realism based on recent experiences (ex: GNOME). Thanks for stopping innovation (which might not suit you because you are more concerned about leveraging your position than taking openSUSE Marketing to excel and provide a realist work flow. But maybe you're goal is all about getting work done only on events at a far more expandable costs for our sponsors). Thanks for your 'earlier experience', that gives quite a good pointers on what we can expect for the future and why we don't improve.
By the way, what part of your experience supports that you say to a contributor things like: "they will laugh on your face"... I wouldn't mind that the whole community would laugh on my face as long as they could provide us the material we need to better support their projects in openSUSE marketing. Maybe a bit more of respect for those who don't earn their living from FOSS and still give their time without asking nothing in return trying to help?
By the way, you also demonized the community with that sentence. No I didnt felt offended personally.
BTW I have a strong suspicion that you either don't read other ppl's comments at all OR choose to ignore random words in there. Otherwise I have no idea how you could get to the point of worrying about GNOME vs KDE after the discussion we had at marketing.
"Hatred is gained as much by good works as by evil." - Nicollo Machiavelli.
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