I agree with the fact that most - if not all - press releases but FOSS project are dead boring, long and badly written but I think we need to develop some simple, easy to follow guidelines for press releases, etc. if possible. Just an Idea. -- Thanks, Hugh Buzacott btw. This idea may be totally stupid to the journalists on the list (it might not be). <div> <div>On 2/11/06, Tom Chance <<a href="mailto:tom@acrewoods.net" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)"> tom@acrewoods.net</a>> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> 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 (<a href="http://dot.kde.org" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">http://dot.kde.org</a>) 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 -- I'm aware that e-mails to me may be blocked by my host because they are mistaken as spam. If this happens, please e-mail me at: <a href="mailto:telex4@yahoo.com" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)"> telex4@yahoo.com</a> _______________________________________________ promotion mailing list <a href="mailto:promotion@lists.freedesktop.org" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">promotion@lists.freedesktop.org</a> <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/promotion" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)"> http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/promotion </a> </blockquote></div> </div> -- Thanks, Hugh Buzacott