Last call for talking points - what makes you excited about F12?

[Paul W. Frields]

On Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 01:15:27PM -0400, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-08-18 at 22:18 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> > On 08/18/2009 10:15 PM, Mel Chua wrote:
> > >>> PS: I know this is last-minute notice - sorry about that. We're still
> > >>> learning how to do things on a schedule, and next time around we'll put
> > >>> the call out here much earlier.
> > >>
> > >> Is there a particular reason today is the last day instead of some date
> > >> closer to the release?
> > > 
> > > We need to brief Ambassadors on Talking Points at Beta release (9/22) so
> > > they need to be complete by then, so we have to freeze the list asap to
> > > give us enough time to find writers, and give the writers enough time to
> > > write them.
> > > (http://poelstra.fedorapeople.org/schedules/f-12/f-12-marketing-tasks.html)
> > > 
> > > (Feel free to push back if this schedule sounds unreasonable, btw; it
> > > probably could use some patches for the next cycle in terms of having
> > > more time for getting dev feedback.)
> > 
> > The schedule itself might have been fine but it still looks rather early
> > to me. If you want to collect feedback from developers, one day is
> > definitely not going to be enough. Atleast three days or so needs to be
> > provided and you usually need more than one reminder to get as much
> > feedback as you can. Otherwise you are going to end up with a rather
> > small list which is not meaningful.
> 
> To a first approximation, the relevant information should already be in
> the feature pages, no ? I don't think it is wise to establish the
> feature process as painfully as we've done over the last few releases,
> only to then start new, different initiatives to collect marketing
> talking points...

The talking points really do come from the feature pages, and to that
end I revisited the feature list to pull out a couple features that
are comprehensible and interesting for developers, and added them to
the developer-centric talking points.  The list for each audience
(desktop users, sysadmins, developers) is short, as it should be.  We
do have entries in the list now, although we'll be fleshing them out
with more descriptive information over the next few days.

The purpose of the talking points is to call out specific features, so
Ambassadors and other people can explain what they are to a variety of
audiences, and why they're important in terms of advancing FOSS.  To
do this, we develop additional material like podcast and print
interviews with the people responsible for or involved with the
features.  Developing that material takes time and energy so it
behooves us to get an early start, shortly after feature freeze since
the list is complete at that point.  The list is short so that we can
concentrate on the most compelling features from the audience's
standpoint.  So yes, the feature pages have a lot from which we can
pull at this point.

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
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