[CentOS-promo] Some thougts about the ToDo List

[Dag Wieers]

On Mon, 16 Jun 2008, wonderer wrote:

> I read over the ToDo List and have some points to mention and hope its ok:

Certainly, I made that list to encourage anyone to help out. So I guess 
you were my target audience :)


> The following tasks needs one or more owners:
>
>   * Create appealing screenshots for the website, articles or events
>
> additional: take pictures from events...

Right, we have pictures of events taken, but none of them have been put 
online in a structured manner :) So where do we want to put those ?

Is the wiki a good place to put a few photo's of every event ?


>   * Feed information to journalist as an incentive to write a CentOS article
>
> That could be very dangerous if it is not planned good enough...

Not sure what you mean with dangerous. As long as we do not want to spin 
anything I do not think we have to fear. As long as we give proper 
information to when CentOS is good, and in what situations CentOS is not 
suitable we at least educate people.

I think we should do education more than promotion. Most people have no 
clue what Enterprise Linux is and why they should pay attention to it.


>   * Contact magazines for CentOS related articles or include CentOS media
>
> Therefore CentOS should have ready made press kit (could work out something).

Yes, we need a press-kit.


>   * Contact publishers (of Fedora/RHEL books) to include CentOS on cover, in 
> print or as media
>
> additional: contact Writers and ask to work out the CentOS related parts.

Right, go over the current RHEL and Fedora books and make sure we can 
improve the part about CentOS.


>   * Sell and ship branded goods on the website and at events (stickers, 
> mugs, posters, media)
>
> idea: build up a little spreadshirt shop (see 
> http://www.spreadshirt.com/us/US/T-Shirt/Spreadshirt-1342/ ) and look how it 
> goes. Selfmade shops  are expensive in  costs and time to administer it...

I think we are blocked in this area as well. There have been meetings 
where this as popped up but none of them really were decisive. As long as 
we do not have a good plan about what we are using money for, I do not 
think we should be collecting money at all.


>   * Provide a wiki page that contains paid-for support and services for 
> CentOS
>
> Question: Who are the Supporters? How many people are in the Crew?

First of all that list should start off with a good explanation towhat 
CentOS is and what Red Hat's role is. You cannot be honest and not mention 
Red Hat's role.

Secondly we probably should make a distinction between different 
service-providers. You have consultancy, support, products, training, 
development, ...

Giving a single list without at least some guidance will do us (or our 
users) no good.


>   * Create a CentOS Weekly News that summarizes BLOG articles, events, 
> progress, etc...
>
> idea: could the blog used to improve the idea? Because of archiving articles 
> and redirect from the Newsletter...?!

Yes, I like the way Fedora Weekly News works. In general it contains links 
to useful threads on the mailinglist or forums, it points to interesting 
blog articles, it reports about some progress or about some technology, it 
talks about the people involved in the projects.

All of that is very useful to build a community and to have people 
involved. As soon as we have something like this, I am sure that people 
start paying attention to interesting stuff that could go in the 
CentOS Weekly News.

And if there is a slow week, it may be a shorter CWN than on a busy week.

Having the CWN appear on LWN or Distrowatch would be very good to get some 
more attention.


>   * Create and maintain pages about how to install CentOS on your laptop
>
> additional: Install CentOS under VMWare.

Yes, both are probably not really part of the promo SIG but I considered 
it important :) I started it, but it is not as successful as it could be. 
Maybe new additions to the Laptop page could make it to CWN as well to 
drive that a bit too ? :)

-- 
--   dag wieers,  dag at centos.org,  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
[Any errors in spelling, tact or fact are transmission errors]