Distrowatch on Fedora this year

[Paul W. Frields]

On Mon, 2007-12-17 at 10:24 -0800, John Poelstra wrote:
> Christopher Aillon said the following on 12/17/2007 09:27 AM Pacific Time:
> > The ideal situation is we have people that care about Fedora that may 
> > not necessarily be technical that will create buzz for the engineers who 
> > don't necessarily have perfect verbal/hype skills.  These are two 
> > completely different skill sets.  Don't confuse them.
> > 
> 
> This isn't a viable solution.
> 
> How will these not-so-technical people get this information without the 
> help of a mind-reading module?  If you assert that less technical people 
> fill this role it is not reasonable to expect them to read source code 
> and change logs.  If you aren't willing to communicate with them, how 
> can they get this information?
> 
> Many of the developers have done a great job creating feature pages and 
> these help a lot... I realize we share a different opinion on the value 
> of the feature pages :)

Interestingly, I had recent occasion to hook up an online writer with a
developer in our community, and that worked out well.  Although I'm sure
the developer in question took some time out of his coding to answer
questions, I think he saw the value was going to be in publicizing his
work so it would get more notice, use, testing, etc.  And here was
someone who would do all (well OK, at least *part*) of the publicizing
for him!

Part of the act of publicizing involves composition, which is really
what takes the time away from coding.  To make a message clear requires
time and thought on matters of word choice, sentence structure, and
overall thought progressions expressed in written language.  I can't
speak for any engineers in specific or general, but if they want their
message to get out properly, why not trust that work to someone who
specializes in working with written language?  I guess it's a little
like getting an expert Tcl guy to write the bindings for your C library.
You'd do that, if you didn't want to take the time out to learn enough
Tcl to do it yourself.

As Greg said, to a very great extent you want people working on what
they want to work on -- it sets a high morale level and improves overall
effectiveness.  If everyone wants to do the same thing, that gets a
little dicey, but fortunately we have many different subproject areas to
spread our efforts more evenly.  The Marketing project is here to
"develop process and content" to "support the efforts of other Fedora
projects," according to its wiki page.  Instead of asking how engineers
can do what some are obviously not that interested in doing, let's talk
about how Marketing can improve the situation by making its own
contribution.

-- 
Paul W. Frields, RHCE                          http://paul.frields.org/
  gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233  5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717
           Fedora Project: http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/
  irc.freenode.net: stickster @ #fedora-docs, #fedora-devel, #fredlug
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