The Marketing Working Group is progressing quite well, and it has been received well by the
community it seems – judging by the number of requests we’re getting. Putting infrastructure in
place and creating a list of TODOs have been two of the issues that we’ve been working on. In the
meantime, we’re reading “This is a job for the Marketing Working Group” nearly every day.
I’m happy with people recognizing the Marketing Working Group and knowing at least one possible
place to go to with all kinds of issues. Sadly, “Marketing Working Group” does not mean that there’s
suddenly a 1000 monkeys doing all kinds of promo work. This will be the major focus of the Marketing
Working Group: Building a community that is able to do more work than what’s possible at the moment,
backing that work up with coordination and structuring it. Helicopter view, maybe. At this moment,
the most important thing is getting spreadkde in shape,
having a decent taskmanagement set up to
be able to route work to volunteers.
In the background, work on market segmentation has started off. Getting to know who you’re
targeting with KDE as a product is a requirement to be able to do meaningful work.
Ah, and business cards. Can of worms freakin’ business cards. Most current status of that is
that we’re trying to get hold of the designer who’ll be working on it, defining a roadmap and
getting him to start working really soon now.
And then there’s documentation, we all love it (translates to everybody needs it, only a handful
of people actually write it). Documentation in the case of the marketing team means writing a
handbook of best practice guides, conserving knowledge, making it easier to compensate contributors
shifting away from KDE and putting new volunteers in their place. To improve our practises, we need
to care that the knowledge gets preserved for KDE. Examples are a release promotion guide, a guide
that lists important things and has checklists for visiting fairs and events, simple practical
things as well as structural and strategic measures to improve current performance and make
volunteer’s efforts more efficient.
While we’re at it, any webdevelopers or graphics designers around who’d like to help out? :-)