Distrowatch on Fedora this year

[Paul W. Frields]

On Mon, 2007-12-17 at 13:50 -0500, Greg DeKoenigsberg wrote:
> On Mon, 17 Dec 2007, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> 
> > With Free software, the line between developers, testers, users and 
> > marketing folks often blurs. In Fedora, the "marketing team" is just a 
> > bunch of loosely organized volunteers including developers. That might 
> > be a bit troublesome to deal with it but we need to consider the feature 
> > process, blogging etc as part of our work too instead of deviation from 
> > "real work".
> 
> Wait a minute.
> 
> Feature planning is, of course, part of the "real work" of engineering, 
> and no engineer I know would claim otherwise.  I certainly didn't see 
> caillon say anything like "feature planning is a waste of my time."
> 
> Blogging can certainly be useful in gathering momentum around an idea, 
> yes.  But that doesn't mean it should be compulsory.

Especially not when we have non-engineer attendees at FUDCon who could
take it upon themselves to listen to what's being said, and use that
information to kickstart these information feeds.  This is a major
back-end consideration in Karsten Wade's idea of Release Notes "beats."

For those who haven't heard the term yet (!), a "beat" is a subject
matter area that a journalist or reporter covers.  Only covering a small
handful of subjects (or maybe even only one) and then spreading the work
over many reporters makes the information more accurate, since the
reporter can get to know more about his or her beat over time.  FWN also
took up this design and I think everyone will see it's done wonders for
their ability to cover lots of different Fedora areas of interest.

Perhaps Marketing team members should get more involved in this kind of
beat writing, whether it's by participating in the Release Notes process
(which the Docs team is happy to edit for consistency of content, as we
have continued to do for many releases), or some other channel.  I
should note that Rahul does a LOT for the Release Notes, and it would be
nice to see him get some assistance so he's not doing so much lifting by
himself at the last minute for every release.

You can read more about Release Notes at
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Docs/Beats/HowTo .

-- 
Paul W. Frields, RHCE                          http://paul.frields.org/
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           Fedora Project: http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/
  irc.freenode.net: stickster @ #fedora-docs, #fedora-devel, #fredlug
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