If you're interested in marketing/branding and/or open source outside the domain of software, read  Robyn Bergeron's comment on Chris Grams's post on whether "truly great design can be done the open source way."

I guess, the "chorus, not a crowd" thing - there might be a conductor who says, "we're going to sing a song - but I'm not going to pick the song, you guys can decide the song, and what parts you want to sing. I'll be here to referee while you pick the song, and I'll direct it and keep everyone singing together when we're ready."

One of the things I'm most excited about the Fedora Marketing Team is that we are learning how to do marketing the open source way. Not just marketing of open source things, but marketing done by a community practicing radical transparency, breaking a common vision into modular pieces, making not just our outputs but our tools and processes open and subject to review, debate, refreshing.

It will be time for me to pass the hat on soon, and to a pair of far more able hands. I think it's been apparent to anyone watching the Marketing Team that Robyn Bergeron has been stepping up to inspire and lead the team more and more as time goes by. It's really just a title change so that she's doing it in name as well as deed; on our June 1st meeting, we will pass an invisible baton, and ding! I will officially be Robyn's minion. I'm looking forward to this, as it fulfills two goals I've had ever since I started leading Marketing this past July: (1) leadership by the community, of the community, and for the community, and (2) having marketers run marketing.

The last one, perhaps, requires a bit of explanation. I'm an engineer by training. I walked into this job knowing nothing about marketing at all; in fact, the first thing I had to do when I was asked to lead the team was look up "marketing" on Wikipedia, because I did not know what it meant. And as I got started, I notice that... whereas the Infrastructure team had many sysadmins, and the Design team had designers, and so forth, the Marketing team... had very few marketers. Excellent contributors and open source community members, to be sure - but we needed to bridge out to those with expertise in the domain of marketing as well.

And what a difference it's made. In the past 8 months, we've been fortunate to have new contributors come in and teach us about market research, SWOT, keyword optimization, and more - techniques and ways of looking at the world that I as a relatively new-to-the-world engineer hadn't heard of or even considered before, and I think the process has been similarly eye-opening for others in the community.

"Open source marketing is the community-driven process responsible for enabling users to identify, anticipate, and satisfy their own requirements sustainably." --draft definition of open source marketing

We're moving in all the right directions to get better and better at this, and I'm looking forward to seeing where the team goes - and continuing to help shape it as a contributor and general Marketing minion. (One of the things I'm most looking forward to is having more free time to learn how to work with upstream Marketing groups, and figuring out what that dynamic looks like.)

I, for one, welcome our new pwnie-toting overlord. Looking forward to plowing forth on F14 under your benevolent reign, Robyn!