F12 marketing retrospective

This is a Marketing postmortem generated using the Marketing postmortem SOP. This particular postmortem was generated largely from the first morning's log from the Marketing FAD 2010.

History

From Max: I can talk back to F5, the first release I worked on. When we got close to release for F5, there were a few people who basically wrote lots of release note type stuff for us. We had an F5 release summary page on the wiki that was a list of highlights. And that was about it. And that was all F-mktg did for a while. So we fell into a pattern where the FPL would get set up with interviews by RH PR and the rest of it was what Slashdot posted and that was about it. So looking from that to what we have now, there's been a lot of progress.

Good stuff

• We had deliverables with due dates for the first time. This is the best Marketing has ever done at sticking to a schedule, out of 2 attempts at doing so (and prior attempts that didn't have a schedule, and didn't go nearly as well)
• Our schedule was internally imposed - The board can't come down and say "marketing, here are your due dates," since it's a volunteer project, not a corporation. The fact that the team comes up with these dates is uberimportant.
• We produced more raw material than ever before, and it's all remixable.
• Another thing we did right: hitting the quantity, and eventually we hit the quality as well.
• The beginning of one-page release notes: this was THE SINGLE BEST NEW WIKI PAGE that we had in a year. It was a much better projection of our core values and the way we portrayed ourselves than we've ever done in the pst.
• Our deliverables now "show source" - in the past, from the standpoint of a user, markeitng wasn't very visible - no identity of who wqas behind it or how to get involved, deliverables "just appeared." Now deliverables have things like "this was created by the marketing team (JOIN OUR LIST) using this procedure (LOOK AN SOP) and you can help (JOIN THE TEAM)" embedded in them, so people can more easily trace things back to us and start helping out as well.
• The marketing mailing list has more - and higher quality - discussions than ever before. It's at the point where people are starting to say "if you're an Ambassador, you should read the Marketing list to find out things." (We may want to capitalize on the relationship between these two groups more.)
• The Marketing team has been a great example of a team coming to maturity "the open source way." We're not swooping in "from above" to solve a problem; we're building a community of contributors to do and learn and teach Fedora marketing, with radical transparency as a cornerstone.

Could improve for F13

• Hit the quality bar for deliverables more steadily instead of everything being polished right at the end.
• We need to make sure our message syncs up with what Ambassadors deliver at events. The Marketing team produces a lot of material, but I don't know how much we got that out to Ambassadors. We have a March 30 item for briefing Ambassadors and should make sure we do that well.
• Clarify shared deliverables with Docs - for instance, who does release announcements, and how does that work out?
• Ditto for relationship with Design and Ambassadors in particular.
• Actually work on press kits - we have little notion of what they are or how to make them, and we should bring more of this process out to the community. Press kits are liveusb sticks with documentation to send out to professional journalists; their fundamental purpose is not to market Fedora or glam it up, it's to give them the facts they need to start it up and poke around like everybody else. However, current press kits are only usable by journalists who already have context on what Fedora is and how to use it - can we make it so well documented and supported that it's usable by random journalists and bloggers who pick it up as well?
• catalogue barriers to entry - we think IRC and wikis are normal, but they are not for most people (and then we wonder why more contributors don't show up). Of note: "there are certainly tools that are at least as complex as IRC within commercial marketing environments - how are they dealing with that challenge?"
• Actually finish getting up our tools - for instance, launch FI. Use the engineering services queue to help with this.
• Fix the home and Join pages of each team (which is our game plan for between Beta and GA already). "people show up with random ideas and need to understand the context within which ideas become reality in FOSS."
• Improve default messages on Fedora IRC channels for new users: "perhaps a notice at the top that says "people do this thing called idling and may not be there all the time"
• use devel-announce to inform developers of marketing deliverables and deadlines coming up that are pertinent to them

Ideas for F14 and beyond

1. IDEA: Delineate the purpose of each deliverable and its raw source material so that there's less redundancy of work.
2. IDEA: Making a briefing slide deck out of the talking points and possibly other important info (stickster, 15:31:17)
3. IDEA: sync with FAmSCo as a way of strengthening the mktg <--> ambassadors comm link (mchua, 15:31:40)
4. IDEA: have a joint mktg/ambassadors meeting once or twice a release on IRC (mchua, 15:33:10)
5. http://www.redhat.com/ --> lulz @ outage (spevack, 15:35:26)
6. IDEA: make use of new F-Eng services queue (mchua, 15:47:04)
7. IDEA: clarify purpose of various announcements/notes (and audience) (mchua, 15:48:06)
8. IDEA: link tracking and other tools to help figure out what to eliminate and what to keep (mchua, 15:48:59)
9. IDEA: need to fix background about audience and purpose of each of the release announcements (ke4qqq, 15:49:48)
10. IDEA: Future marketing deliverable: poster for a USB filling station to be used anywhere by anyone (stickster, 15:52:28)
11. webchat.freenode.net <-- Easy to use, we should promote this for our contributors? (rrix, 15:58:21)
12. IDEA: use webchat.freenode.net/#channel for links on the wiki to encourage lower entry access (quaid, 15:59:11)
13. IDEA: openoffice.org mediawiki exporter to also lower barrier (rrix, 15:59:34)
14. IDEA: Marketing materials archive location (mchua, 16:11:12)
15. ACTION: rewrite Marketing (mchua, 16:23:09)
16. http://mairin.wordpress.com/2010/02/13/random-idea-for-design-collaboration-tool/ (rrix, 16:24:31)
17. http://mairin.wordpress.com/2010/03/09/another-design-hub-mockup/ (rrix, 16:24:36)
18. IDEA: actually use our ticket queue (mchua, 16:27:06)
19. Clean-up the wiki - we need better info for newcomers. (mchua, 16:28:37)
20. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing/F13_Brainstorm (quaid, 16:43:33)
21. IDEA: people in booth are getting same questions over and over - which if we can capture will tell us what we need to be answering (ke4qqq, 16:46:09)
22. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Tatica/Laptop_show (ke4qqq, 16:48:30)
23. IDEA: Fedora video archive (mchua, 16:51:54)
24. IDEA: Fedora slides archive (mchua, 16:51:57)
25. IDEA: larger display for above slides/video looping (ke4qqq, 16:52:13)
26. IDEA: deliverables for promoting the community in addition to the distro (ke4qqq, 16:55:30)
27. IDEA: press.fp.o landing page (mchua, 16:57:11)
28. http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/advisory-board/2010-March/008194.html <-- Ryan's original idea (stickster, 17:00:55)
29. http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/advisory-board/2010-March/008195.html <-- Spot's requantification (stickster, 17:01:14)
30. IDEA: "Maturity model" for tosw to get a notion of where mktg team is along this process (mchua, 17:02:41)
31. IDEA: sub-projects are accountable to the community, SIGs are accountable to themselves and whomever they choose - both are teams (quaid, 17:08:07)
32. http://talk.fedoraproject.org:8000/status.xsl (quaid, 17:19:50)
33. IDEA: do the F14 schedule creation in an documented (SOP!) community-centric way; the F13 schedule, due to time pressures, was mchua and poelcat sitting down at FUDCon and mchua semi-arbitrarily picking dates.