Notes from yesterday morning that we characterized as "postmortem" have been put up - sorry for the delay, I fell asleep last night before I could get to this (I was, for once in my life, extremely tired). Without further ado, here is the Marketing F12 postmortem.

How did we do during the F12 cycle? What was good - what could be better? You'll see lots of ideas for improvement here, as well as things we're happy about. Please add your thoughts! Here are some of ours...

Things that went well

  1. 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.
  2. The beginning of one-page release notes: "It was a much better projection of our core values and the way we portrayed ourselves than we've ever done in the past."
  3. Our deliverables now "show source" - in the past, from the standpoint of a user, marketing wasn't very visible - there was no identity of who was 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.

Also a plus that wasn't listed in the postmortem: attending a hockey game after the first day of the FAD. (Photo CC-BY-SA from Neville Cross, featuring Ryan Rix on the left and David Nalley on the right.)

Things we need to do better in F13 (and beyond) - this is stuff we can actually commit to now.

  1. 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."
  2. 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?"
  3. 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.

Not listed in the postmortem but also important to consider during the remainder of the F13 cycle: BBQ consumption. (Photo CC-BY-SA from Robyn Bergeron; going from front right arcing around through the semicircle to front left, it's Henrik Heigl, Paul Frields, Ryan Rix, David Nalley, Mel Chua, Ben Williams, Neville Cross, Max Spevack, and Russell Harrison.)



Things we'd like to do in the future, but may or may not have the bandwidth for - this is the "if I'm looking to start contributing to Marketing, this list has good things to pick up on" list.

  1. Make a marketing materials archive location (for things like past release deliverables, videos, slide decks...)
  2. Create a press.fp.o landing page.
  3. Ambassadors are getting the same questions over and over; if we can capture these, that list will tell us what things we need to be answering.

And this is what we actually look like when we're working. (Photo CC-BY-SA from Robyn Bergeron: from left to right, Ryan Rix, Ben Williams, Neville Cross, and Max Spevack.)