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.
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:
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We tried to think of two more deserving recipients, really we did.
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…
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.
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?).
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.
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.
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:
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:
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.
A fairly obvious principle when talking about target markets is to look at your existing user base, and try to categories and generalise from that. If 80% of your users are 18-25 year old college girls, then if you are targetting 50-65 year old businessmen, you’re probably on a loser.
In GNOME, we have a luxury – lots of people have already installed our software without us having to ask them to do so. So we have a decent sample of the kind of people who are interested by what GNOME has to offer. And a big identifiable group in the free desktop user base (and GNOME in particular) is public administrations – national or local governments (Largo, Birmingham libraries, the UK’s NHS, Itaipu in Brazil), school districts (Extremadura and Andalucia, Tyrol, Macedonia, China), city and state funded social projects (Sao Paolo, Bahia, Linz).
Many of these installations have happened with no help from us – either distributors who base their product on GNOME sold their product and we came along for the ride, or the local governments made their own decisions, usually without managing to contact the GNOME community at all.
Governments are clearly interested in free software, and we should make sure they know about GNOME, and have a place to go to ask questions. That place should be a personal email address, and not a mailing list, because governments can be quite edgy about going public with things like this. And also because, in the words of Tristan Nitot from Mozilla, “Guys are really shy – it’s the Munich Linux thing… They start talking about it and suddenly Ballmer comes in and twists your arm until you cry”.
To get the message out to governments, here’s what we need to do:
The GNOME Journal articles written by Murray Cumming and Arangel Angov are excellent examples of the kind of feedback which works well – human, and presented to a wider audience than the marketing team.
But we shouldn’t focus too much on creating the message – we have a decent idea already why governments are interested in free software, and if we find that other points are interesting, or points we thought interesting are not that relevant, we can modify our message from that.
The marketing theme can be nicely summarised by a tripleverb.
This is another third party developers thing to follow on from my last entry on the subject – but it’s sufficiently important to be treated separately.
If we want GTK+ as a toolkit, and GNOME as a platform, to be adopted in public administrations, and embraced by third party developers, then we need to make sure that it’s easy to write vertical applications for the platform. A vertical application is an application written for a specific use, such as an accounting package, or a programme that surveys air quality, or the application which takes care of all the traffic signals in a motorway tunnel. We also need to make it easy to write mass market software such as VMWare, The GIMP or Abiword.
This means having good developer tools, in particular a good IDE, but it means a lot more than that. Most developers in the commercial software world get by with little more than a C compiler and a debugger. Good profiling (including memory profiling) tools are useful, and they already exist for the most part.
More than tools, what a third party developer needs is a roadmap and a checklist. A list of best practices that he can follow like a “For Dummies” book, and get to where he wants to go learning the minimum amount possible about what’s happening underneath the hood, and a list of things against which he can verify that his application is a good citizen on the desktop.
Here’s what you do to make your app accessible, here’s the right way to interact with GConf, D-Bus, GNOME-VFS, GStreamer and so on.
Update: library.gnome.org, when ready, will be a huge step in the right direction for third-party developer documentation. This is a Google Summer of Code project which will do enormous good for us.
And it’s not just the developer that needs a check-list – customers and users also use certification marks to inform their decisions – does this product work well with my existing software? So once the developer has finished, he wants to be able to point the customer to the mark on the webpage or on the box, and say “look – we respect all the best practices these guys say are required to behave well on the free software desktop”.
We need a certification process. This will grow out of good developer documentation, to some extent, but it’s more than that. Ideally, we would do what the Portland project is doing, and generate a test suite that a developer can run against his app to verify certain points – things like default shortcuts and file placements and management of WM hints.
And obviously, GNOME certification should include recommendations from Portland and LSB and freedesktop.org and ARC where appropriate.
So why does this count as marketing?
Because providing a GNOME certification program encourages adoption of GNOME. Preparing such a program will need us to think hard about what a GNOME application is, and think about the needs of the people developing GNOME applications. Finishing it will make it easier for people to write applications for our platform.
So far in the wiki, there are two people, myself and Vivien Malerba, who have declared that they’re coming to GUADEC by car – Vivien is coming from Toulouse on Sunday, and Anne and I are arriving from Marseille on Saturday. We both have seats available, for those who hadn’t thought of making the trip because it was too expensive. Drop me a mail, or add a note in the wiki, if you’d like a lift – we’ll figure out meeting plans.
I’m coming back to France, via Marseille, on Saturday the 1st.
