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

[Hugh Buzacott]

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).
On 2/11/06, Tom Chance <tom at acrewoods.net> wrote:
>
> 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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> please e-mail me at: telex4 at yahoo.com
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--
Thanks,
Hugh Buzacott
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