Marketing/Project FooBar

Background

For the F11 release cycle, Marketing switched from a task-based model to a schedule based model. This went well, allowing us to keep better in sync with what was going on and what types of information were needed to be created/put out at any given point in the cycle. However, there are still many kinks and areas for improvement as were defined in document: F11 Cycle Retrospect. Bottom line, complacency is not a formula for success and we must always be looking towards the future and improving it.

Looking forward, we have always floated the idea of having a Fedora Magazine and the going logic is that we may be able to model Fedora Marketing around such conventions which would not be dissimilar to a magazine. The focus would be not only on producing the content that is required for each release cycle but also on producing relevant and interesting content, in many forms, audio, video and text-based for the consumption of both the general Fedora community and the Open Source community at large.

Present

Currently, the state of project/community produced content is clearly scattered. We have many groups, such as Marketing, Ambassadors, Docs, Design, etc. all creating great content for a variety of different purposes. The amount of this content is effectively multiplied by how much we care to and/or use the services of the translation team to localize this content. Once this is done, there are various and sundry methods of distributing this content. We have Fedora Weekly News, Docs Beats, Fedora Planet, local ambassadors newsletters etc. There is not one central process or policy for creating content and distribution channel/plan. Also, much of our content is not clearly licensed.

Much of this content is also centered milestones and it may be possible to fit it into recurring schedule-based publication which would help overall management and tracking.

Future

There are many questions to ask. What do we want this to be? Who should the audience be? How well do we actually know our audience to make that assumption? What types of content? These questions are what we are trying to ask and answer now so we can get a solid picture of how we proceed further. We need to clearly answer these questions to clarify our goals. Goals are in the goals section below and they will and should be refined by the community as a whole.

We might want to strive for something akin to a journal style format for community created/relevant content and including Fedora Marketing content might work best. We should start by investigating sites with similar goals/audiences. We look at sites like https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuWeeklyNewsletter, http://fullcirclemagazine.org/, http://planet.laptop.org/, http://www.olpcnews.com/, http://planet.sugarlabs.org/.

What we want might be a magazine, which is not really a magazine format, more journal-ish (technical, non-nephyte) but also not afraid to include some stuff for newbies, and mostly a platform where interesting content would show up for the community's consumption, which would act as a central hub.

Also, the goal should be to create something which is well laid out visually and consistent with the design teams work and general philosophy.

Goals

Centralized Content

There are too many avenues to information now, its innundating. Blogs/Planet, FWN, Ambassadors own work, etc. Also, a majority of this content is text, whereas we would like to make more multimedia content.

Content Schedule

Well established guidelines for what needs to be produced/is being worked and when it must be published by.

This also helps in running a proper marketing campaign.

Flexibility/Creativity of Presentation

Journal Format

Better able to target an audience

Standardized Feeds

One OFFICIAL Feed for each media type--audio, video, text/print

Translation/Press Distribution/Social Media Distribution

Process for getting things in Translation Queue.

Better plan with regard to something like NDN. Red Hat Intl PR is part of this

Develop strategies for syndicating media on social networks/news sites

Metrics

Who is our audience?

What are they interested in?

How can we better engage their interest?

ScreenShot

This is a quick mockup of the concept to help people better understand what we are trying to do.