Safe as Milk

Desktop Linux Summit

The GNOME Foundation has a stand at the “Desktop Linux Summit” in San Diego this year – the event is on the 24th and 25th of April.

I’m looking for a couple of volunteers who would like to go and man the stand during the two days, we can cover some printing costs for the stand and send on some merchandising. We can probably also cover (reasonable) travel costs, if you need them. Jeff Waugh, Nat Friedman and other GNOME lovers will be there as speakers, and it’ll be great fun.

Who’s up for it?

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Join the GNOME marketing team! We need all the help we can get!

Nice story on GNU/Linux migration

Via Marcus Bauer on the marketing list: An art professor gets his students using free software.

There are some gotchas for using external devices like scanners and tablets, but all in all, it’s a nice mix of GTK+ and QT applications which just goes to show that at least in this domain, we’re not in competition with KDE.

Envy

I envy people with the sense of humour and subtlety to come up with a t-shirt like this.

Board meeting this evening

I’m looking forward to the board hand-over meeting tonight. There was a similar twilight zone last year where new board members kind of go “what happens next?” and new board members probably don’t do enough hand-holding. The passing of the torch is the moment when the new board realises that the old board wasn’t really that good, and they can do better 😉 It should be interesting.

And, Christian: the midnight oil is the oil you burn at midnight in your lamp. “Burning the midnight oil” just means keeping the lights on late.

GUADEC and creating passionate users

I just confirmed Kathy Sierra, of Creating Passionate Users fame, as a keynote for GUADEC 2006.

Kathy rocks, I’m looking forward to seeing her in action after having wasted so much time reading her blog.

Explanation time

So – I’d like to explain what I meant yesterday.

I completely agree with jdub: we’ve lost a lot of momentum users and that we need them back.

I also agree with this:

We shouldn’t ignore it just because it’s Linus and we shouldn’t be overwhelmed by it just because it’s Linus.

A while back, we lost Jamie Zawinsky – another momentum user.

http://jwz.livejournal.com/78731.html
http://jwz.livejournal.com/337238.html?thread=3647062#t3647062
http://jwz.livejournal.com/494040.html

That hurt (for me) more than Linus’s outburst because Jamie’s always been more or less polite when dealing with us in Bugzilla, has always attached his complaints to concrete functional problems, hasn’t assumed that things are the way they are deliberately, and in general, hasn’t called us “fucking idiots”.

Some people’s opinions *do* count more than others, and a lot of the weight an opinion gets in my mind comes from the level of respect the person across the way has for me, and the other members of this project.

Of course, if someone other than Linus was involved, it wouldn’t have ended up on pgo, slashdot and newsforge. More’s the pity.

Linus is irrelevant

Linus Torvalds’s view of GNOME is irrelevant. I can’t believe anyone still listens to the guy when he goes off on one of his rants.

He lost all right to authority when he chose a commercial program made by a guy who doesn’t understand free software to manage the kernel, and then backed him when he turned on a free software developer acting in good faith. Any technical credibility he had went out the window when he claimed that all specs are useless.

It’s sickening to see people pandering to him and trying to calm him down just because he’s Linus. There are easier ways to make our users rock than wasting time on this kind of shit.

Personas

The marketing list has caught on to the idea of personas, we’re currently going through some iterations, and hopefully something useful will come out the other end.

A persona is a characterisation of someone who represents a target market. An imaginary character, with a background, a name, and some typical use-cases. It’s a way to make a reference to a need, and point to a “real” person, and explain why they have that need, and why it’s important. They’re often used as a tool in usability studies to describe an existing user base.

What do personas have to do with marketing, you might ask? Well, marketing has a number of stages – deciding on a target audience and positioning, then evaluating how we’re doing against that target, and if we’re not doing well, making sure people know that, and that we are moving to address our shortcomings. And obviously communication – telling people in our target audience why they should consider us, focussing on their needs as compared to what we offer.

A persona is a tool to ease communication through all of these stages.

We can agree, given a certain amount of detail, whether someone is in a target audience (“Of course Roger, the 37 year old marketing executive, is the kind of person who is likely to be interested in driving a Porsche!”)

We can use that person as a reference for our positioning (“does Jane, the 40 year old housewife who sticks friendly reminders for her husband to the fridge with a fridge-magnet really care that this moisturiser contains beta-kerotine? Then maybe we shouldn’t be talking about it in ads in the magazines she reads.”)

And internally, we can use personas as a yardstick for measuring the usefulness of features and as a usability tool.

The great thing about a persona is that you can get to know them – they have real needs and behaviour patterns which happen to roughly correspond to a target. They force you to avoid focussing too much on corner cases.

It’ll be interesting to see what gets produced. Particularly since this work will be complementary to the market segmentation work with the KDE promo group are cooking up at the moment.

Web traffic stats

First off – congrats to the KDE project for a new major release. With the performance improvements going into GTK+ and friends, and the performance gains in QT 4, the next generation of KDE and GNOME should both be smaller and zippier, which is brilliant.

I came across http://www.alexa.com via http://radar.oreilly.com today, and checked out the web reach of www.kde.org versus www.gnome.org – the results are pretty interesting.

The first thing to notice is that we’re both trending upward, albeit erratically.

The most interesting point, I think, is that over the last few days, when KDE made a major release, *both* projects got more attention.

Board size referendum

I was delighted to see that the board size referendum was carried this morning, with 62% of the vote. I was disappointed that turnout was a low 53%, though.

I’d be interested in knowing what the people who don’t vote in foundation elections feel they get out of being a foundation member, and I hope that we can get turnout up past 60% for the board election.