Attention / Interest / Desire / Action, getfedora.org, or why marketing 'the Fedora project' is a bad idea.

[Jeff Spaleta]

On 6/24/05, Chris Ricker <kaboom at oobleck.net> wrote:
> I disagree. There are obvious niches which specific distros suit quite
> well (or don't fit at all, as the case may be). If you're wanting to work
> with SELinux, you're going to have much more success with Fedora than with
> SUSE Professional. If you want to recompile your system from scratch
> fortnightly, you're going to be much happier with Gentoo than with Fedora.
> And on, and on, and on.

I see your point, and I raise you a point of semantics.
I think its very difficult to "know" what an easily labelled group of
people are interested in aggregate. That's my point. Lumping more than
3 novice linux users together and saying they are looking at linux
because of X feature or technology, is a doomed endeavor. I am wary of
trying to guess as to what people who are looking at Fedora are really
interested in in terms of "leading edge" technology.  Example "Wanting
to work with SELinux" is probably not the question the uninformed are
really thinking about... do they even know what SELinux is?  Its more
like users who are interested in "security" in a general sense might
get a kick out of Fedora because of the SELinux integration effort.

Do we need to do a better job of describing some of the key features
and technical objectives for Core.. surely. But I don't want to skew
the discussion with pre-conceived ideas as to what the "target"
audience as broad as "linux curious" is interested in.

> If they're like the users at any of the LUGs I keep in touch
> with, about 80% of them will have major misconceptions about what Fedora
> is or isn't, and that's something marketing can address. Marketing can be
> about informing without being about misleading....

I didn't say it couldn't be.. I just want to be on guard against it.

Here's a challenge for you, can you produce a rough draft of a 4 page
pdf aimed at LUGers, that aims to address specific misconceptions in
the LUG environments you have personally been associated with.  Once
we have a working draft to discuss we can get feedback from other
LUGs. something similar to the openoffice 4 page brocure maybe:
http://www.openoffice.org/product/docs/OOoFlyer11s.pdf

-jef