Safe as Milk

Marketing GNOME: third-party developers

Over the coming weeks in the run-up to GUADEC, I’ll be dumping my brains about some of the things I’d like to propose during the marketing BOF to develop the ideas I listed recently on marketing-list.

First up is third party developers (more colloquially, ISVs, but since most of our third-party developers don’t sell anything, that doesn’t seem appropriate).

Greg Kelleher from IBM told me that initiatives aimed at third party developers have three levels – high, medium and low touch.

1. High touch is when the person meets a developer or trainer in person – interractive training sessions and workshops, or conference presentations fit here. This kind of interraction is the most beneficial for the recipient, but is a one-to-few effort.
2. Medium touch is a rich, interractive experience without the human contact. Something like webcasts, conference videos and streaming, online seminars. These often provide the possibility for interraction, and allow a greater number of people to attend, with the loss of human contact.
3. Low touch is our website and printed supports. API and interfaces documentation, tutorials, books, training manuals, archives of previous high and medium touch materials. This is passive learning – the developer comes to us to look for what he needs, spends as much or as little time as he wants, and leaves with no human interraction whatsoever. KDE has started an interesting initiative in the area, aiming to produce high quality distance learning paterials for a full QT/KDE course.

So – how are we doing now? Not as brutally badly as you might think – our core APIs are pretty well documented (with some notable exceptions), we are building up some tutorials, GGAD is still a great reference book, although it could do with a freshening up (like many of the tutorials, unless things have changed since the last time I looked), we stream and archive GUADEC presentations.

But we are not doing any high touch training, we’re not organising any web seminars, we’re not yet doing anything similar to OSDW. Even though we have lots of documentation, developer.gnome.org is missing a bunch of stuff it really should have (how hard is it to add a Google search-bar to the site?). In spite of our rich bindings, it’s hard to figure out how the API docs map to each of the languages.

Beyond that, we don’t sell GNOME books or developer kits on the website, and we haven’t really tried organising our third party developers to get them talking to each other.

So that’ll do for training & information diffusion. I haven’t even touched on application certification, which is a huge opportunity for us, as well as being enormously useful to third party developers.

Last chance to join the fantasy world cup

So far we have a fair few teams signed up to the Fantasy World Cup I mentioned before. Now is your last chance – you can join after the start of the tournament, but you won’t get any points for matches before you join, so it’s better to join up now.

Non-technical GNOMEys

There has been some debate recently on how the project can attract more people outside of the male geek group. Shaun McCance made the point that non-technical posts in general are typically under-represented in GNOME.

This echoes closely what Mitchell Baker has been saying about Mozilla:

[…] filling [non-technical] roles often means bringing in people who haven’t “come up through the project.” These folks who are new to the Mozilla project need to be accepted by the development community in order to be effective. Status as a Mozilla Corporation employee isn’t enough.

and

If one’s skillset is something other than code, then proving oneself through understanding the intricacies of our code is at best inefficient and probably a blocker for many people. So the challenges are to find mechanisms for people in non-code roles to demonstrate they share the values of the Mozilla project and can make contributions that people want to support.

Conclusion?

Integrating non-engineering contributors takes a lot of trust and feeling our way gently. Those people joining us in non-engineering roles must trust that the technical contributors will give them a fair chance to participate, add value, become respected and gain influence and leadership. The engineering community must trust that these people who may be new to the Mozilla community and don’t have deep technical expertise are worth listening to and giving a fair shake.

In other words: Be excellent to each other.

But more than that, we need to start recognising when there is a skills deficiency in the project, and actively recruit people with those skills, drawing them the map of how the project works, and helping them become great contributors. There are a number of examples of non-technical people coming into the project and making an impact – Quim Gil, John Williams, Telsa Gwynne – but there are probably more examples of people who passed close by, felt the water, and went on their merry way without ever engaging, or being engaged by, the GNOME community.

So during the marketing BOF at GUADEC this year, I would like to focus on this – how can we make non-technical people interested in marketing GNOME feel like their work makes a difference.

Marketing is not just promotion – real marketing is a two-way dialog between the project and the market, with us saying what we do and why, and the market telling us how we can do better, or what they need that we’re not doing. And GNOME marketers will feel like a part of the project from the moment where something we do changes the project for the better.

Lightning Talks

We will be having Lightning Talks again this year at GUADEC!

For those who missed last year’s talks, we got wowed by (Dave Reveman?)’s wobbly windows and cubic workspaces, Jonathan Blandford’s demo of Evince, J5 showing off his worth on session management, and Sebastien Tricaud showing off Gscore, the first application to fully use Cairo for its rendering, among others.

This year, we already have some interesting candidates – for example, a GStreamer based media center, desktop tagging with Leaftag and a demo of the Pitivi non-linear video editor.

Sign up on the wiki to stake your claim for a lightning talk spot – there is no lower limit on the amount of time that you take, but talks are limited to 5 minutes including set-up time. It’s fast & furious, and a great way to get wider attention for your project or idea – pique our curiosity – people can always spend the rest of the conference hasseling you for details, show us why your work is great.

Some tips on lightning talks from perl.com will help you make a killer presentation:

• Prepare. Don’t stand up without an idea of what you want to say.
• Avoid slides. You’ll spend precious time setting up your laptop. If you use them, have everything set up, and test with the projector before your talk.
• Get to the point. Introduction is fine, but if you’re not into the meat of what you want to say after 30 seconds, you’ll run out of time.

Update: Thanks to Daniel Glassey for letting me know he wasn’t the wobbly cubey guy. I’d like to know who it was though…

Fantasy World Cup

So – a world-changing event collides with a world-stopping event at the end of the month, when GUADEC is happening right in the middle of the FIFA World Cup (TM) (hope I don’t get sued for saying World Cup (TM) or Germany 2006 (TM)).

I have signed up for Channel 4’s fantasy world cup competition – it’s just for fun. The idea is simple – you make your dream international team by picking 11 players in a 1-4-4-2 formation with no more than 2 players coming from any given country. Your players get points for appearances, saving penalties, keeping clean sheets, scoring goals or making key passes. They lose points for goals conceded and cards.

And I’ve created a friend’s league – the idea is to have a bunch of people sign up their teams and then join the league, and we can find out who’s got the best team as time goes on. The end of phase 1 is the first cut-off point of the competition, and it falls right at the start of GUADEC, just before our football competition. So head on over, sign up a team, and we’ll have a little friendly competition to see who’s the besty judge of football in Villanova.

Once you’ve signed up, the league PIN is 8992 (you’ll need that to join the league).

Initial schedule ready

So, the first draft of the GUADEC schedule is ready – just waiting for publishing, and it should be online over the next couple of days.

I’m a low-tech kind of guy, and the process for doing the schedule was sufficiently interesting I thought I’d blog about it.

First, I taped together some A4 sheets, and drew out the schedule shape we’d agreed on – 3 parallel sessions, X hours for lunch, Y keynotes per day, etc.

Then I wrote the names of the accepted talks on sticky notes, color-coding them according to their track & stream.

And the sticky notes attacked the paper. A first quick draft was easily shuffled until I had something I was more or less happy with. And a few photos and a rough stitch later, here’s the end result.

GUADEC authors notified

Last night I sent out 33 acceptance mails to people who had presentations accepted for the core days of GUADEC. We now need to arrange those talks in a schedule which will annoy as few people as possible – it’ll probably be done in July 😉

I would like to thank everyone who helped with the selection of papers – it was relatively pain free this year. Those people are Ross Burton, Rodrigo Moya, Edd Dumbill and the ever-present Quim Gil. All these people are rock stars, and should be hugged in Barcelona.

This year we have made GUADEC’s core days lean and mean – there will be 6 keynote sessions, the conference opening and closing, the GNOME Foundation AGM, a lightning talks session, and 33 presentations, split along the lines of theme and target audience.

The “target audience” idea seemed to catch some people off guard, so I’d like to explain it a little, since most of the accepted papers will not be where they were proposed.

User: Showcasing an application, or API, that is shipped with the GNOME desktop, or a closely remlated application. The APIs are part of our products as well, and third party developers are important users of the platform product.

Developer: Talks aimed at GNOME developers – people working on improving core GNOME applications or APIs. Most of the talks were submitted here.

Client: Poeple who will pay for GNOME, or sell GNOME, in one way or another. Third party developers fit in here too, GNOME deployment stories, writing vertical applications, GNOME marketing; that kind of thing.

We got the fewest applications for the client day, so many of the talks there will only be tenuously associated with the theme. But since there was so much confusion about the categories, I thoughth it would be useful to (re)explain them.

Lyon for GUADEC

So – the Lyon candidature was submitted earlier today, and thanks to some magnificent work over the Easter weekend from Vincent Untz and Oscar Figuieredo (especially Oscar), it was looking rather spiffy.

The final copy is online at http://dneary.free.fr/lyon-guadec.pdf (.odt for the OOo source). The introduction summarises why I think Lyon is a good candidate:

Lyon is a great city for this conference for a number of reasons. First, the city itself is young, vibrant, beautiful, and well placed in Europe. Second, the GNOME and free software communities are particularly active in the region. Thirdly, CPE Lyon, the host university, knows the free software community, and has fantastic facilities. It is the ideal location for this kind of event.

Did I mention the food? Lyon is a great place to eat – just ask the people who came here in March for the Libre Graphics Meeting.

It goes without saying that as supporters of this candidature, myself and Vincent Untz will not be taking any part in the decision which town will host.

GUADEC candidates

I was working on Lyon’s candidature as GUADEC host last night, and noticed that the closing date for proposals was next Wednesday, the 19th of April.

I had forgotten it was that close, and I wonder if others had let it slip their minds too.

It’ll be interesting to see if the earlier announced candidacies from Vienna, Vilnius and London materialise – but the Lyon candidature will be in decent shape.

I’m looking forward to the mud-wrestling competition we are going to have in Barcelona to separate the shortlisted candidates – Thomas Wood, are you ready to rumble?

Speaking of conferences…

For those who have forgotten, the closing date for the submission of GUADEC abstracts is really soon.

You can submit an abstract directly on the GUADEC web site (after creating an account). The deadline for submissions is the 31st of March, and since the conference is now only 3 months away, you might want to get a move-on.

You can have a look at the existing list of abstracts on the site too to get ideas. Just search for all articles with the “Presentation” type.