Fedora gets new users, which eventually become contributors, by doing successful marketing campaigns promoting all the benefits of Fedora to the end user. A good marketing plan can be recognized in various ways, but some key elements clearly stand out:
- We need to work with a wide variety of people (SIGs, developers, beat writers..) to receive news content on a regular basis. This is the Marketing group's work.
- We need to get this content out to people who are outside of the traditional "Fedora-land". This is the Ambassador group's work.
The news distribution network concept
Based on Smolt language statistics [1] and the Fedora Ambassador mailing list, we have an idea of what the most popular languages spoken by Linux users are. We want Fedora news delivered to them in an efficient way.
What we propose is to:
- Chose a set of language we really want to focus our marketing on (during a first period).
- For each of these languages, find 2 or 3 dedicated people in the Fedora ambassador pool who are willing to push news to websites in their language. A small number of people is better to avoid the dilution effect, people feel more responsible.
At this point in time, the most obvious languages to focus on are English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Hindi and Italian.
How does it work?
The news distribution network workflow is quite simple, following a hierarchical structure:
- People of the Marketing group are assigned to specific Fedora features for each release cycle. This means that they get in touch with SIGs, Fedora developers, beats writers, reading the mailing lists etc.
- When they see something interesting, they write a comprehensive text in English and post it to the marketing mailing list. One news item every 2 weeks seems reasonable.
- Once a news gets to the marketing mailing list, moixs will 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 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 means to define the audience, 3 levels seem appropriate:
- Linux-centric websites: every news can concern them.
- Technical IT websites: alpha, beta and RC releases 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 Fedora press archive page so we can track the marketing progress.
How do I join this effort as an Ambassador?
If you are interested in joining the news distrbution network for a specific language, simply contact moixs or write to the marketing group on our mailinglist. If we feel that you are motivated, you will have the job for one Fedora release cycle.
If you don't want to participate after a cycle, simply tell it to us and we will find someone else to replace you. What we need are dedicated people, so there is really no shame to resign.
Responsible people for the Fedora 11 cycle
For the current Fedora 11 cycle, the responsible ambassadors are: