GNOMG

We’re engaged

One of the many awesome things that happened at GUADEC was that the GNOME marketing team was able to meet again, pretty soon after our New York hackfest. The most visible thing that was decided at this meeting was to change our name from “marketing” to “engagement”. The team has actually been wrestling with this since New York. We realized that using the term “marketing” to describe us was misleading. Marketing is often associated with commercial companies and suggests that we’re trying to sell something (and maybe something that’s not that great either) to make a profit. It also implies that we’ve got professional marketing help. In fact, the team is more about outreach, education, promotion and advocacy. Since we can’t fit all of those words into our name, we decided to go with “engagement” – the aim of all of our activities is to get people to see how great GNOME and our community is, and to make them want to participate more in both our project and the dialog about it. (We also took a little inspiration from Mozilla.)

So thanks to great work by Andrea and Allan and the rest of the team, we’re officially called the “engagement” team, and you can find us on irc.gnome.org at #engagement. The team is amazing – it’s a very diverse group of people, all doing this work as volunteers in their spare time. The group meets every other week and has been impressively productive lately. If you’d like to contribute to GNOME but aren’t sure how, engagement is a great place to start. Plus the IRC channel is just a really nice place to be. Come talk to us!