Fwd: [Promotion] wake up... a news portal for free software?

[Tom Chance]

Ahoy,

On Friday 10 February 2006 21:00, Thilo Pfennig wrote:
> This is surely true. And I think I would not want anybody to switch in the
> free desktop environment to found a press site instead of making good
> stories or good marketing. If they do it. I think sharing knowledge should
> be happening today, not waiting on a new site. I still believe such a site
> can be useful and I would still target the free desktop projects as major
> users, although I rather would have people from the boarders of the
> movement to jump in here to build this. Because that is what I thought this
> site could do: Leave the developers more time for their work. This site
> should be helpful where ressources for marketing and public relation are
> the lowest (that means the smaller the community the more useful it would
> be).

I absolutely agree that we need to find ways to involve non-developers in 
marketing and promotion work more. I'm not a developer, I'm a lousy 
PHP/Python hacker, I pretty much exclusively do promotion work for KDE and my 
background is in philosophy / activism / arts communities, not software. I'm 
quite happy to free developers up to write code for me :-)

I think you've identified a good goal. But having watched and helped efforts 
to get more people writing press releases, articles for the KDE news site 
(http://dot.kde.org) and articles for other media outlets I've realised that 
it's a fairly hopeless way to get these non-developers involved. Very few 
people are interested in subscribing to a mailing list, writing technical 
articles and/or editing a techie web site. Most free software news is 
*extremely* trivial and boring to non-geeks. Making new volunteers write 
about it is just imposing the interests of developers on them.

To get people from the borders of the movement to jump in we need to provide a 
space where they feel comfortable working (so not mailing lists and SVN/CVS). 
We need to provide the tools and documentation so that they can quickly find 
useful jobs to do and find out how to do them well. Then we need to cede 
control, directing energy but not imposing our will on them. This is exactly 
what motivated me to start working on SpreadKDE. We can't expect miracles, we 
won't get tens of thousands of "volunteers" like SpreadFirefox, but we have 
to start somewhere.

Whilst also doing official market research, press and events work, etc.

Regards,
Tom

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