Fedora news distribution network (NDN)

Fedora gets new users, which eventually become contributors, by doing successful marketing campaigns. A good marketing plan can be recognized in various ways, but some key elements seem to stand out:

• We need to generate content on a regular basis.
• We need to generate content from a wide variety of sources.
• We need to get this content out to people who are outside of the traditional "Fedora-land".

This document tries to address the third point in the list.

Current problem

Currently, news about Fedora are produced in a number of different places and with luck they end up on the marketing mailing list. Once they are there, there is no real plan to get them out to the general public. Fedora Ambassadors and Marketing people are supposed to take the content and spread it around them without any precise goal. This doesn't work for a couple of reasons:

• There is no clear plan where to send the news items.
• People tend to think that someone else will take care of it, why bother.
• People are not concerned about sending news to websites they don't regularly use.

Proposed solution

Based on Smolt language statistics [1] and the Fedora Ambassador mailing list, we have an idea of what the most popular languages used by Linux users are. Remember that Smolt is also used by other distributions. What we propose is to:

• Chose a set of language we really want to focus our marketing on (in a first period)
• For each of these languages, find 2 or 3 dedicated people in the Ambassador pool who are willing to transmit the news to websites in their language. A small number is better to avoid the dilution effect, people feel more responsible. There should be one main responsible for each language.

The most obvious languages seem to be English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Japanese. Marketing in China wouldn't be bad considering the enormous population.

Proposed workflow

For this system to work, we need a good workflow, a proposition would be:

• Some Marketing people have to be dedicated to regular news generation by poking Red Hat, Fedora developers, reading the mailing lists etc. Fedora Weekly News is a good source too. When they see something, they should write a comprehensive text in English and post it to the marketing mailing list. One good news every 1-2 weeks seems reasonable.
• Once a news gets to the mailing list, one of us should contact all the responsible people for each language and ask them to translate and publish it to websites they care about. The primary target seems to be generalist IT websites. Free to them to dispatch the work to their colleagues.
• People responsible for each language should decide who a news item is targeted at, that's define the audience, 3 levels seem appropriate:
  • Linux-centric websites: every news can concern them.
  • Technical IT websites: alpha, beta, RC can concern them, as well as the Fedora Feature List items.
  • General IT websites: they usually only care about distribution releases.
• Once a news has been published, add it to the PressArchive so we can track the marketing progress.

This system is already working well in the French ambassador team.