 They refuse to install that build for their support. All right. Give it just one more minute. Is this webcam picking up audio too? Yes. Okay. All right. I'm going to go ahead and get started. And so what I want to talk about today, I suppose we've been discussing this many of us already, but I've been participating in open source marketing things for a number of years. I've been doing stuff with Fedora marketing for about two years, a little bit more than two years. And so today I want to talk about marketing is not a spectator sport and I'll explain what I mean by that as we go through the talk. So in keeping with good marketing practices, how many folks in here have a Twitter account or some sort of social media? Okay. I would like to encourage all of you to tweet about this talk while you are here, since you're all looking at your phones anyway. I'm JZB on Twitter and on most other things where I can claim that name and they allow character names below four characters. I'm Joe Brockmeyer. So who is this person? By the way, sorry. The hashtag for flock is just flock, I believe. No, it's flock to Fedora because flock is a little bit of a joke. Oh, flock to Fedora? I didn't know it was a Twitter conference, but we asked him to change the course and he didn't. Wow. Okay. So flock to Fedora. Okay. I have been using flock. All right. So I hope it's not anything not worth saying. All right. So who is this person? My name is Joe Brockmeyer. I'm a recovering tech journalist. I work for Red Hat these days. I'm in the open source and standards group. These days I manage the community team. Before that I was working on Project Atomic and before that I was sort of an open source floater working on many things including Fedora marketing. So why am I giving this talk? My experience the last couple of years, I've been writing in the Fedora release announcements and things like that, trying to participate in Fedora marketing. And I often experience people coming to Fedora marketing and saying things like marketing should really do this or why hasn't marketing come to us? And I'm sure that other people and other groups have experienced the same thing and I'm sure that we're not exclusive to that. But a lot of things that we do in marketing are things that everyone in the project should participate in. For example, tweeting about the conference. This is a very low energy task that anybody in this room with an account can do and yet most people don't. So I want to encourage people to, when they think about why are we doing all this great work on Fedora and it's not, we haven't achieved world domination, at least part of that is because we have yet to communicate our message to all of the people who we could. So what do we mean by marketing? There are textbook definitions of marketing which Bruce is probably far more qualified to explain than I am, but when I talk about marketing in the sense of this talk, I'm talking about all of the things that we do to promote Fedora and hopefully in the future the things that we also do to gather feedback from users and help improve Fedora and make Fedora more awesome so that we suck in more people and eventually achieve the aforesaid world domination. So the topics I want to go through today the goals for Fedora marketing as I understand them today, what marketing currently does, actually the activities that we take on, why you, yes you, must help, ways you can help, and then open floor and discussion of the time that we have left. So goals for Fedora marketing and if I'm saying anything here and anybody strongly disagrees with, please say, but we want to raise awareness of Fedora. We want to promote the foundations, freedom, friends, features and firsts. We want to go out and make sure that we spread not just the distribution itself but the philosophy behind it. We want to encourage use of and contribution to Fedora and we want to gather feedback and input to the future for the future of Fedora. Did I miss anything or is any of this controversy on any way? Okay. So now I want to talk about ideal versus reality. What does marketing do and what does it do ideally and then what do we actually accomplish right now as a body? So ideally, we collaborate with all of the teams or at least most of them. I don't know how much, for example, marketing and relinch really need to work together, although probably it's a good idea if marketing has some idea what the release engineering team is doing and they know that they can come to us if there's something that we can help promote but maybe release engineering and marketing don't have to be that tight. Design and marketing on the other hand? Yes. Ambassadors of marketing? Yes. The work groups? Yes. We should be developing messaging and materials for the ambassadors and the rest of the project. You know, Matt is awesome. Matthew Miller is awesome and he does a great job of talking to press and he is very situationally aware of Fedora but it still helps if he has somebody building the talking points and things and giving him information the insight into things maybe he doesn't have in Fedora. We should be providing an editorial strategy especially for the magazine but also otherwise. When I say that, I mean it would be great if we can get to the point where not only are we writing things for Fedora magazine but we have people who are ambassadors, not just ambassadors that go out and go to events and talk about Fedora but people who will actually go to publications outside of the Fedora landscape and write about Fedora for us. So Linux Magazine and opensource.com for example, we'll take contributed content LWM will take contributed content. It would be great if we had people who were participating in marketing who would take it upon themselves to work with us and go out and write about Fedora in those videos so we can spread the word farther. We need to manage social media for Fedora which we've been doing for a while. We should be developing surveys and administering them to users and giving that feedback to the different groups. We should be able to go back to cloud and help them when they write their PRDs. Anybody know what a PRD is? I know you do, Paul. Product requirement document. It's what we go to the council with to say this is kind of where we see this addition going. So we actually have some, you know, we relate the addition and the product to reality and what we should be trying to achieve. We also should be maintaining the marketing and new contributor materials and so forth. So what does marketing really do? We kind of poke teams last minute when we need something sort of. I've been doing the release announcements for the alpha, the beta and the finals for a while. I'm always thinking like next release, I'm going to go to these groups earlier and I'm going to ask for input. What really happens is the week before the readiness meeting I'm like workstation, I know you guys do something this cycle. What? Tell me because I need input and then Paul comes and rescues. You know, the only group I'm really tied into right now is cloud, you know. So we create the bare minimum of content for the ambassadors. Usually when the ambassadors roll up and say, so I have a talk tomorrow, what do we got? And then we scramble and try to put things together. We manage the door magazine. We're doing that kind of well. I would give us at least a beat right now on what we're doing with the door magazine. We do some social media stuff. Right now we have the talented and beautiful Brian Prophet is doing some work for Fedora social media as well. Surveys? No. Not in several years. And Wiki, I just seriously need a shot of Scotch when I think about the state of the Wiki, is bad is what I'm saying. So how would I rate Fedora marketing, especially relative to the other groups in Fedora? I would struggle to give us a C minus right now. And I understand all of the caveats that go with this. I understand that we're all volunteers. I mean, how many of the folks in this room work for Red Hat? How many folks have contributed to Fedora marketing in the last cycle? How many people were actually paid to do that as part of their day job? A lot fewer hands are going to go up on that one. Since my job description has always been vague, I can kind of say that it fits my job description, but honestly, I'm usually writing the release notes at about 10 o'clock at night. It's a volunteer organization, and so we have a lot of work to improve, but we can't crack the whip too hard because everybody's doing this kind of in spare cycles. All right, so I've kind of... Yeah? I have something that's in between. Okay. A lot of the year ago, there was a big discussion. There were people getting together and she started blowing away the whip and made it not a disaster area. Do you really think they'll do that? Do you think that happens? Probably, you know. Others just have no idea, but I would assume that they had a family screaming. Oh, yeah. There is this thing going on. I don't know if there was a massive undertaking of being organized, but I don't think that happened. All right. Now, I've just said a bunch of things that are a little bit negative, and maybe people aren't feeling good about themselves. So this is what I do when I'm not feeling good about myself. A little positivity for the room. Everybody just soak it up for a second. A little positivity. All right. We good? All right. Remember, we're doing things in the name of open source, and we should all be excited and positive even when we're getting a little bit of negative feedback. We have to remember we're fighting the good fight. We're doing the good things. We have to be energized and excited. So now, now that you're energized and excited and have kitten power, I'm going to talk about why you, yes, you, must help. Marketing really needs new blood. Okay, we have a number of people who have been involved in marketing and on the marketing list and participating in discussions for a while. They are not sufficient. There's nothing wrong with the people who are participating, except that they have lives. I've advised against it, and yet people insist on doing it. So they have lives, and they have other responsibilities. That's the main problem that most of folks have. And they don't have situational awareness into all of the things in Fedora. We need more participation from people. Even if marketing is not one of your core skills, you still have information and you still have the ability to help us do things, okay? A core group can do most of the work, but many hands are needed for some of these tasks. And members of the core group often, you know, participate heavily in one or two cycles and then something happens. They move. They get married or a life change happens. They get a new job. And when those things disrupt the flow of contributing, it's hard to get them back. Nothing wrong with that. It's open source. It's fine. But we have to have new people waiting to step up and take those roles when that happens. So Fedora is awesome. We all love Fedora. And I honestly think this is true. The last two or three years of Fedora have just been an increasingly better distribution, even though it's always been great. It has increasingly gotten better over the last couple of years. And the stats that Matt showed Monday shows that that's getting some traction. I think there are some other things that are impacting that as well. But we can do better at getting our story out there and do better at getting people to try and use Fedora and contribute to it. So unless people know it's awesome, we can't win. And finally, you must help because if you don't, Matthew will be sad. We don't want to make the FPL sad, right? So... Now I want to talk about some ways that you can help. From easy to harder. Okay? So the first couple of things anybody in this room should be able to do without any training. Subscribe to the marketing mailing list. Okay? I'm assuming everybody in this room can do that. Pretty much everybody in Fedora should be subscribed to the marketing mailing list in my opinion. This way, when we are talking about the things that we need to do, we can give us information that we need without too much friction. Use social media to promote Fedora. Okay? Again, as I said, a couple of people have entered the room since I said this, but if you have a Twitter account or a Facebook account or a Google Plus account or maybe some form of social media that I am unaware of that is popular in a different region or younger crowd than maybe because I'm old, you know, whatever. I don't know that Tinder would be the right mechanism to promote Fedora, but many, many different ways you could use to promote Fedora. I would like to see this the next time there is a Fedora release. I would like to see us break Twitter with the mighty waves of Fedorans going to Twitter to promote it. I don't know if we can do that. Well, I was going to get to that. I was going to say I don't know if we can exert that much pressure, but also since they've retired to fail well, we might not get that. But we could still, you know, we could still make a shot at being a trending topic and maybe attract some people to Fedora that have never heard of it. How many folks are developing something in Fedora land in some way, shape or form? How many people are working on technical features related to Fedora in any way? If you're working on a feature, again, I've seen this phenomenon a number of times. Someone will roll up after a release and go, I've seen this great thing for the last release. Why didn't anybody promote it? That also applies to the least known of Fedora. What's that? Communicate? Yes, yes. But I mean, you know, I'm not psychic, thank goodness, because there are rooms I've been in that I do not want to read those people's minds. But if you're working on a feature, you need to communicate it to us. You need to surface that to us to help us out. You write for Fedora magazine. We just had a very, very passionate discussion about Fedora magazine. And I keep coming back to one of the biggest problems we have with Fedora magazine is not enough content, not enough people writing for it. I want to see more people, even if it's just once a cycle, if there is something going on in Fedora that you're passionate about, work with us to write articles about it, surface those features that you are working on, help us write user-facing content on how to use things in Fedora. You know, I'm going to pick on just some random people. You with the Gorillaz sticker, what is your interest in Fedora, but better for gaming than since I was probably right. Have you written anything through the Fedora magazine about gaming? Okay. You, sir, with the glasses. My dependence on the base products with Fedora and... How long have you... Now I feel like I'm in an AA meeting. I used to be a Microsoft user. It's been 12 months since I booted Windows. So how long have you been off of Windows? Five years. When I bought this machine, I made a copy of the hard drive and put it there on it. And like, Adam, have you constituted the initial hard drive since? I bet you have some great stories that would help other people take that path. Have you thought about writing for Fedora magazine and sharing that? Yes. Have you done it? No. Okay. He thought he was going to make it. All right. No, you can't phone a friend either. So, Circo, I'll pick on you. You have written for Fedora magazine. Have you not? Yeah. Has it been successful for you? It has been really successful. I have written before and I gave always my written things to Chris and he has published with that. But this time I have written for myself in the progress. I used this time Fedora magazine to announce the World Table Submission Phase. And it's very successful. I have already since yesterday that much submissions as I had last time, probably over time. So, on one day not all of them are good so I have to reject because they are bad. But it's still a lot. So, it was very successful. Cool. So, I won't... Thank you. I won't torture everyone in the audience, but you know, you get the point that this is one, a good way to reach people and two, we all have stories that we can share that would be useful for the project and useful for you too. So, on the thing that Ruth raised if we're going to blow away the wiki then this is sort of the relevance. But, if we are going to keep the wiki as is we could really use some help cleaning up the marketing wiki, going through getting rid of the relevant content adding, you know, looking and seeing like what are we missing? Because we don't necessarily communicate as well as we can with the outside world what they can do to help marketing or we have a lot of standard operating procedures on there that I don't think have been updated since, you know, since the door was in the teens. So, another thing that would be very helpful is have people participate in the release activities. By release activities I mean writing or contributing to the release announcements, the alpha, the beta, and the final. Also, I would consider, you know, helping with the release notes, the final docs and things like that, part of that as well. Talking more with the docs folks. So, I would like to see people do that but also, again, when the release happens I want to see people out there vlogging about it and shouting about it and working with ambassadors to schedule things. You know, I know the ambassadors take the bulk of planning release parties and things like that but we should also be using the door magazine and social media to promote those and we're not doing that right now. We need to be creating presentations and other materials for ambassadors. We have a lot of people who are very knowledgeable about Fedora and willing to go out and evangelize Fedora, but I can tell you, creating slideware is no fun. If we can take the load off a little bit and help create some of those presentations that they can then modify to suit their own tastes, that would be very useful. Do you have a comment? You look like you. No? Okay. That was quite a user. You look like you might have a comment. Okay. Another thing, and again these are going from easiest to hardest to start getting a little bit more advanced level. Take lead on a user or potential user survey. I've looked at some of the things we've done in the past to survey Fedora users and I think one of the biggest fails was we tried to survey just the existing users which is sort of like you've already bought our product what are you going to do so that we can buy it again. I want to reach people we haven't gotten to yet. I am not a master of creating survey type materials. I would love someone who has a background in that sort of thing to take the lead on not only creating the survey but saying, here's 10 ways I think you could reach people who are potential Fedora users or contributors, but aren't already on a mailing list where you can reach them directly. I would love to see someone take the lead on, for example I was talking in the break talking to Paul and Chris a little bit. There are hundreds of universities just in North America where people study things like marketing and journalism, although journalism is not as healthy as it used to be and these people could probably, there are professors who might in fact direct people towards Fedora as an activity they could do for credit and work with us. There may also be computer science folks who are just might be an easy way for students to get involved in Fedora. Most importantly, do something. What we have right now is not as much activity as we really, really need and we need people to step up and realize that Fedora is not going to market itself and a group of people who are currently involved in Fedora marketing are not sufficient to do all the things we need right now. We need people to step up and take a little bit of responsibility and be willing to work with us on promoting Fedora. Any questions? I guess not. I'm kind of wondering what's going on over there. It sounds very interesting. No questions or comments? Surveys? Yeah. Have you done those before? Is it something you feel comfortable doing to have with it? So, me personally, I know Fedora has in the past done some surveys, but that was before my time. Rue might be able to speak to them. I think that predates me. Do you have any institutional memory to help us? Sorry, I was looking. He was asking about surveys. Does anybody in living memory remember doing any of the surveys? I think that crafting survey questions to get down graphics and taking the full results and seeing or at least I think you're doing tasks. I do not. Could I volunteer you to make an introduction? That would be awesome. Any other questions or thoughts on that? Who's the lead? It's like something we answer. So, how many folks went to the council meeting we had earlier today? I'm toying with the idea. Fedora has objectives and the council is now taking on the objectives. A small number of objectives at the time. For example, one of the objectives is the additions. So, Fedora has an objective to have separate additions that are specialized for different use cases and different user personas. We have a couple of other objectives, but they mentioned an interest in having at least one or two more objectives to rotate in as they're rotating out because we're kind of far along on the addition, so we no longer maybe need to have that as an objective. We're not going to stop doing it. It's just that we may have gotten to the point where we've completed that work and it is now part of Fedora institutionally. And I am considering proposing reviving and improving Fedora marketing and objective for the next several releases. I'm debating I don't want to propose that unless I am also willing to own a large part of that and do the work because that's the way that Fedora works and it should. So, I'm debating whether I want to jump in that particular Sarlacc at this time. But I would like to see that as an objective. I would like to see I'm very interested in Fedora having very healthy marketing because I hate to see all of the work that we do not reach the fullest audience who possibly can. I won't say the work goes to waste because everybody in this room is probably using Fedora benefiting from it. I think even if Fedora's audience never grew, we're still doing a good thing for the world and we're still reaching some of our potential but I don't think we by any stretch of the imagination reached our full potential or even tapped into more than 30% of our full potential yet. That's what I think. So what I think there are myself and a few others who need replies saying what we are called by the board. They actually came down with the saying they actually want the marketing to be they want it to be done with an effort and task between multiple people. That way one person doesn't have a full burden but it's more of a group effort which could yield a better result. Personally I disagree with that approach just a little bit because it's not about making you responsible for everything but in order to have somebody to counter those we're making sure of. So one of the hats that I wear occasionally is that of a member of the Aging and Software Foundation and a participant in some of those projects. Each top level project has a vice president that reports up to the board and that does not mean that that person is responsible for certain things like making sure there is a report to the board and a recorder and a couple of other housekeeping tasks and nominally they are the spokesperson for that project but they are by no means responsible for all the things that happen in that project or even like technically the VP doesn't have to write the report they merely have to deliver it to the board. You know so I'm with Paul on we probably need a fedora marketing lead who is responsible for for example like for the last couple of releases I've taken on the responsibility of poking people with a stick to make sure that we have release announcements and you know going to readiness meetings for example nobody went to the last readiness meeting for fedora at all for marketing. What Matt was probably trying to resolve is to capture that problem in that for a very very long time the lead has ended up being responsible for every stage. Yeah and I you know I think there is a big difference between I will take responsibility to find someone who will do this versus I will do all of this myself. That's what we were trying to come up with we were setting up like a wiki page like hey who's going to do like social media who's going to do the magazine who's going to do who's going to do kind of like recruiting who's going to focus on like flyer who's going to do release notes and we were trying to divide it up that way I'm not stuck with I got to maintain the magazine I've got to do the release notes and I'm like crap okay I forgot to do that and I'll put it where it's coming out tomorrow so that's why we kind of Matt was like well we should split it up and have tasks I think it doesn't need a person for this job I think the push that he was making with time was that rather than have another meeting about who was going to be the leader and no one wanted to do it that if everyone started taking on tasks that would lead to a difficult time given it was sort of dodging the question of the time how much have you seen at the Dora Hubs? I have seen zeroes at the Dora Hubs because one of the interesting things about that so the key thing for this comeback is just designed to be a feed an activity feed to the different teams is one of the things about recruiting people that votes with the generalism of black and black being able to see the stuff that's already being done and say hey I can help them I can help them may actually help with that hopefully internally now we have a resource where we can help feed coordinates and for the first like hi how are you we're on as we are and he's interested in what comes along in our community we've been stepping up and in fact we may have some feedback that it was maybe a little bit of a fire hose but he stepped up and put all of the including some of the Room 6 talks on Twitter for us so he's already stepped up to do some of that stuff and he may even have bandwidth to help us a little bit with editing or writing occasionally and that's a great point but at the same time Brian is also tasked with all of the other projects so we can only rely on well Brian's amazing so like this much of his time is like this much of anybody else's time but still he can help us a little bit yes we've taken them for each release now and that way we have we can assign accountability for that task and so forth and it's actually made things a lot smoother once new screenshots are messed up we can go down the list and so forth and by creating tasks it's a great time to build on the second of all we don't need the age old protection of somebody who wants to help the market and what do I do there's nothing that we do I find something to do so there's always something that's making me doubt but something too different to what we're talking about there is tasks or something screenshots on the wiki any other comments, questions if not you can reach me if you have anything to add or volunteer for or comment on just JZB at Red Hat also on Twitter you can find me there at JZB if you want to subscribe to the marketing list or you have information to send to it it's just marketing at listfiduroproject.org we have that block where you can't send anything I'm a moderator though so if you send something like if you absolutely just don't want to subscribe something important to send to it if you send and it's not spam I'll flag it through and in fact, whenever anything comes into the existing lists the admins can usually okay, Paul I know Paul does a lot of things in Fedora and he sent a mail for the list and he isn't subscribed but I'm going to go ahead and click the little box that says in the future he can send without being subscribed because I know Paul is moderately unlikely of sending any spam to the list so we'll let him through alright, thanks folks