March 12, 2008
General, freesoftware, gnome, guadec
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February 28, 2008
gnome, guadec
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To the surprise of everyone involved in the GNOME project, GUADEC 2008 has been announced, and will be held in AnkaraIstanbul (just kidding).
OK – so this isn’t a surprise to anyone. GUADEC this year will be great, I’m sure, and we’ll all have our fill of Turkish Delight this summer. I for one am looking forward to it.
Some of the things I’m most looking forward to are the keynotes which I have been organising this year. For the moment, we have decided to limit the number of keynotes to 3 invitees – we will add one or two community keynotes, based on what happens in the project between now and the end of March, these will likely be papers submitted through the Call for Papers which will be “promoted” to keynotes by the program committee.
This years keynotes are a varied bunch, and I’m very happy with them.
Leisa Reichelt is a renowned user interface designer whose name is pronounced as “Lisa”, and who comes highly recommended. Some of her past presentations are available online, including this presentation which she gave at the IA Summit 2007, or this one from BarCamp London, or this one from te Future of Web Apps talking about “ambient intimacy, the idea that what we really get from social networks is the impression that we’re close to friends & family whenever we want to be, regardless of distance & time constraints.
Eric Sink is the author of a blog I’ve been reading for a long time – particularly for his articles on “business for geeks”, which talks about stuff as varied as accounting, marketing, sales, fixing prices, … It’s a lot like Joel Spolsky’s blog without the overwhelming sense of self-importance. He also happens to be a founder of AbiSource, the company which funded and wrote the initial versions of AbiWord, before going out of business. He’s going to give a presentation on the business of software, with particular emphasis on free software, and the challenges of finding a business model that will allow people to make money on free software.
Matt Webb, co-author of “Mind Hacks” and consultant in product design and R&D with Schultze & Webb has been described to me as “inspiring and devastatingly smart and just wonderful” – that’s a lot to live up to. He’s promised to speak on interaction design, the future of technology and software, and generally to be entertaining.
So here’s looking forward to seeing you all on the banks of the Bosphorus from the 7th to the 12th of July!
February 4, 2008
freesoftware, gnome, guadec, marketing
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I can confirm two more keynotes for GUADEC! Yay!
Eric Sink is a co-founder of AbiSource, and author of an informative and influential blog. In particular, Eric has written some series’ of articles which might be considered essential reading for those interested in the business of software development: Marketing for Geeks and the Business of Software. Eric has eschewed the software megapoles of San Francisco and Boston to start his latest company SourceGear in Champaign, Illinois.
Leisa Reichelt is a User Experience Consultant, based in London UK, but recently of Sydney, Australia. Most of the work she does is in interactive media (web, iTV, mobile and the like) and she uses a mixture of User Research Techniques, Information Architecture, Interaction Design, and Usability skills mixed up with a background of Project Management, Producing, and Account Management to help define the requirements for a project, understand (and often define) the content and functionality involved, and design a structure (or architecture) and interface.
Leisa has been doing this kind of work for about ten years, under various guises, including project management, account management, web producing, information architecting, user experience designing, interaction designing, digital strategising and generally evangelising all the things she thinks are good about the internet and networked technology in general. She’s recently gone completely mad^Wfreelance.
These come after the confirmation of Matt Webb, co-author of Mind Hacks, as well as being a design consultant, who has already confirmed his attendance.
There is a fourth keynote which is currently very likely, but not yet confirmed, so I’ll keep mum on that person for the moment, except to say that of the 4, it’s the one I’m the most excited about.
November 29, 2007
General, freesoftware, guadec
13 Comments
I’m making up an aspirational list of people I would like to invite to keynote at GUADEC, and I’m interested in hearing about past experiences.
Who is the best speaker you have ever seen at a technical conference (not necessarily a technical presentation, mind), and what was the subject?
Answers in comments please, the winner gets a big sloppy kiss next GUADEC from someone of my choosing. Maybe Aq.
October 9, 2006
gnome, guadec
2 Comments
Back in June, Sun gave us two Ultra 20s to give to deserving GNOME hackers and announced the donation at GUADEC. Finally, we can reveal the recipients:
+= 
+=
We tried to think of two more deserving recipients, really we did.
September 18, 2006
guadec
2 Comments
If Lyon had been chosen rather than sunny Birmingham for GUADEC 2007, we could have had a conference reception here.
I don’t want to make people jealous or anything, just saying…
July 10, 2006
guadec
2 Comments
Davyd: I wasn’t coerced – Jono was doing such a crap job on it that I just had to save him from himself. My pride depended on the pig under my arm looking almost realistic, and not being a floating head.
July 6, 2006
gnome, guadec, marketing
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I finally got around to writing up my notes from the marketing BOF during GUADEC – they’re pretty scattered, and not an exact transcription of my notes. I started off with a from-memory outline of the main things we talked about, loosely organised, and then fleshed bits out from my notes when they needed it.
I would greatly appreciate feedback on this, as well as volunteers for some of the tasks suggested in there (such as setting up a CRM for contact management, and teaching enough people how to use it that it reaches critical mass – bonus points if it integrates with Evo and Thunderbird).
On a related note, there are a few biggish conferences coming up in the US in coming months where a GNOME presence is either confirmed or desirable – Ohio Linuxfest, SIGGRAPH, LinuxWorld San Francisco and OSCon. For the moment, we don’t have volunteers to organise a stand for Ohio, SF or Portland, and we need volunteers for SIGGRAPH (particularly if you’re a talented GIMP artist who can do a snazzy 15 minute demo). So come on down, GNOME marketing needs you.
Update: Ohio Linuxfest is taken care of thanks to Patrick Wagstrom, our man in Columbus (Patrick, why aren’t you on the GNOME map yet?).
July 6, 2006
guadec
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So – back to normal life after a week at GUADEC where I was the most disconnected person there. (Anyone who would like to offer me a laptop is welcome)
I spent more time outside talk sessions than I did inside them, but I still managed to see some awesome talks.
Simon Phipps from Sun Microsystems gave a nice session which tries to answer the often asked question, “why do companies spend money on free software and then give the results away?” (although he would probably have said open source). Almost the same presentation got some pretty spun press coverage earlier in the week. I guess we’re less radical in the GNOME world – the core message was “everyone wins by co-operating, but co-operation only happens when the individual’s self-interest aligns with that of others”. Or something along those lines.
Kathy Sierra got a lot of response already – suffice it to say that I really enjoyed her talk.
Luis Villa brought a tear to my eye (perhaps it was the fatigue) during his closing presentation.
jim Gettys’ talk on OLPC was eye-opening, if only because of the size of the laptops these guys are making. Overall, the talk was a little too technical for me, and I would have preferred to hear more about the “why” – how does the project plan to change the world? What will the kids do with their laptops?
The talk bu Luis Angel from Extremadura and GNOME-Hispano and Antonio José Sáenz from Andalucia was eye-opening both because of the sheer scale, and because of the thought that has been put into it. Both speakers insisted – computers in schools are a tool, not a goal. GNOME enables learning. But we have lessons to learn about remote deployment and management – our current infrastructure doesn’t scale. We need to start spreading the word about how Andalucia are handling their 200,000 computers (and soon to be 800,000).
The lightning talks were great, and came off surprisingly smoothly. I wish I’d noticed that Avid and Pitivi were back to back, but I am really happy to have seen the all-jumping, all-juggling Chronojump presentation, and Stuart Langridge’s surprising Jackfield talk (download and use 8% of all Mac Dashboard widgets as they are on your GNOME desktop!). The Elisa media center was very impressive too.
I also got to see Federico talking about the “measure, change, remeasure” mantra of performance hacking, and I thought it was an interesting trick to apply the same mantra to 10×10 – growing the user base as a performance hack.
June 22, 2006
gnome, guadec, marketing
2 Comments
Unfortunately, I won’t be doing the subject justice – by rights, this deserves two or three entries of its own – but I’d like to give an overview of things we can do easily to better market GNOME to hobbyists.
Remember, inform, listen, react is the order of the day.
When I’m talking about hobbyists, what I’m talking about are people just off GNOME’s radar.
- People who regularly buy computer magazines, and are interested in technology, but who have perhaps never tried free software
- Students, particularly in science and computing courses
- Momentum users – the type of person who has been using free software for donkey’s years, and who has perhaps not appreciated some of the recent noises coming out of the GNOME project
- Developers looking for a project to sink their teeth into
- Existing GNOME users looking for a way to help out
There are a massive amount of easy targets here, and typically what we’re missing is people to take care of them. What we need to do is start organising, both top-down and bottom-up, to improve our presence on the ground. What we need is information centralisation and organisational decentralisation – you are responsible for what you do in your area, but when you do stuff, you should make sure that everyone knows what you do, and how it works out. Here are just a few things we could be doing:
- Contacting journalists in magazines to introduce yourself as a GNOME contact, and perhaps suggest including a LiveCD, or a copy of WinLibre or the OpenCD on the cover – we must centralise journalist contacts
- Contact the local university computer club or LUG, and help organise some free software presentations. Invite a well known GNOME developer from the region to come and do a presentation
- Use the database of presentation material that we have built up, and give some presentations yourself
- Help improve the database of presentation materials that we have
- Write articles for the GNOME Journal, or a monthly GNOME corner column for local language magazines
- Contact your local magazines offering to translate existing GNOME Journal articles
- Start a Spread GNOME effort
- Summarise negative and positive reviews of GNOME, and push your conclusions with the relevant developers
- Work the forums! Get feedback from our existing users, and make sure that they’re heard
- Offer to organise Friends of GNOME not just as a financial ressource, but also as a source of advocates for GNOME
So you live in the middle of nowhere, and you don’t know how to help. Contact your local LUG, contact the local university computer club, propose your services as a member of the GNOME community. Contact the marketing list, contact me, blog about your region, the LUG, the events you’re helping organise. Try to get a small microcosm of GNOME advocacy around your area. If you succeed, and we get lots of those microcosms, all of a sudden they start interconnecting. If there’s a GNOME user group in your region or country, sign up, join in. If there isn’t consider starting one. If you want a well known speaker for a presentation, contact the marketing list, or contact the board.
Everyone add yourselves to the GNOME map! This is our best view of the distribution of GNOME advocates, developers and users worldwide. I recently used the map to find someone in San Diego to man a stand. He couldn’t do it, but the map made asking him possible. I don’t see anyone on the map in Bhutan! Or Mongolia for that matter, Sukhbaatar.
As a summary for this series, the main points to take away are:
- Most people we deal with prefer a human and personal touch to a mailing list
- There are lots of things to do – far too many for one person, or even a small group of people. We need to build up a distributed marketing structure
- Luckily, 95% of what there is to do is easy stuff. One motivated person can change the image of GNOME in their area by getting to know their local press, geeks and politicians
- Marketing GNOME is about informing people who should know that GNOME exists, listening to the feedback of people using GNOME, and reacting to that feedback in a positive way
Looking forward to seeing you all at GUADEC for the marketing BOF. We’ll be holding it from 10 to 12 on Wednesday morning (although it might be Tuesday) – I’ll be posting the time & place on the wiki.
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