Eight of us from the GNOME Marketing team got together in Chicago for a hackfest earlier this week. We had a lot of great discussions, came up with some good material for people manning a GNOME booth at conferences, a slogan and talking points for GNOME 3.0, presentation material for GNOME, ideas for mentoring GNOME marketing volunteers, conversations about recognizing GNOME contributors, fundraising, involving module maintainers in marketing, a plan for making GNOME videos and much more.
A marketing hackfest is a bit different than traditional hackfests as there isn't a single product that we are working on but rather a large project "GNOME marketing". We narrowed it down to marketing to end users (as opposed to developers or distirbutions) and GNOME 3.0.
We had a great cross representation of people. Paul Cutler (marketing team lead, documentation team member), Shaun McCance (documentation team lead), Jason Clinton (GNOME Games module maintainer), Denise Walters (marketing team), Brian Cameron (marketing team, director), Bryen Yunashko (OpenSUSE, GNOME a11y team), Vinicius Depizzol (art team) and myself. Kevin Harriss joined us one night for dinner.
To give you an idea of how it worked, the morning of the first day we worked on our event presence. We talked about what people willing to host the GNOME booth at a conference need. We have event boxes. In addition to what is currently in the event box we decided we needed to add a banner (which Vinicius worked on), tshirts for the booth staff (like Rosanna put in last time), stickers and a brochure about GNOME. Then we focused most of our effort on the text for the brochure (which will also be printed in Braille for the CSUN GNOME booth) and other material for the booth hosts like GNOME 3.0 talking points and an FAQ. We worked out an outline on the whiteboards and then we edited the documents in Gobby so we could all edit (and see each others edits) in real time. Occasionally side conversations would break out or we'd go to the white board to work out a major point.
As we had way more to do than we had time, we continued our agenda over into dinner. We had good dinner conversations about things like how to mentor new members on the marketing team and recognize all GNOME contributors.
We have lots of follow up to do now – everyone left with action items. When I expressed frustration that we still had so much to do, several people suggested we should have scheduled three days! We got a lot of great work done. Look for lots more help and materials for GNOME people representing GNOME to the greater community as well as new ways to reach out like through videos.
Thanks to Novell and Google for sponsoring the GNOME Marketing hackfest!
I wish I was in town when this was going on as I live here in Chicago. Though I am a KDE developer, it would have been fun to hang out with you all. I am sure Kevin took you somewhere nice, as he is my party buddy here in the city and typically knows where to go and when. Glad you all had a productive time here. I am hoping to finally meet up with Shaun to work on some cross platform documentation strategies. Weird how the documentation leaders for GNOME, KDE/Kubuntu, and Xfce/Xubuntu all live fairly close to one another here in Illinois.