On 10/08/2009 01:29 PM, Seth Vidal wrote:
Let me see if I can sum up the differences in this thread to a couple of
options:
1. pick a target audience and follow down that path, as rigidly as we
possibly can, excluding and removing things which distract us from the
target.
2. Don't pick a target, cast out as large a number as possible of
directions and see who we pick up. Then cast out more.
I'm seeing a third:
3. Pick a primary target audience and cater to their needs as the
highest priority, others a secondary priority, in a default spin, as the
main focus of the project. Continue to enable other communities to build
other spins with differing targets. Clearly delineate between the
default spin and secondary spins - the default is more 'the product',
the secondary spins more the 'innovation / research lab.'
If you take away the spins space (and it doesn't need to be in the form
of producing spins, eg. there are cool things in spins I'd like to be
able to install on top of a default install) then you take away the
ability to experiment & learn. Perhaps I'm just re-posing #1 in a softer
way, though.
Looking at things in terms of spins poses Fedora as a platform; looking
in terms of the default spin you're viewing it more as a single product.
I think a platform is complicated and hard to sell to anyone but
technical users & developers which is why I tend to think the folks who
support that as our target userbase are very supportive of promoting spins.
Fedora-as-platform vs. Fedora-as-desktop-product also makes folks
unfamiliar with Fedora wonder what the heck it is, which I think is why
the question 'What is Fedora' keeps coming up. I don't think the
question should be 'What is Fedora' because we know at a great depth
what Fedora is. The question should be perhaps, 'What should we tell
someone in an elevator what Fedora is?'
E.g., let me pose a few different strategies based on potential answers
to the elevator pitch question.
1) "Fedora is a desktop operating system that you can use as an
alternative to Microsoft Windows or Apple's OS X."
The resulting strategy would be a default Desktop or Simple Fedora spin
being productized as the *Fedora* itself. You go to the website, perhaps
not fedoraproject.org, maybe something like fedoralinux.org or
getfedora.org or fedoraos.org, and you see a site solely focused on
extolling the virtues of using Fedora, obtaining Fedora, and getting
help with using Fedora. The platform and community get branded as 'the
Fedora community' or 'the Fedora Project' and are no longer branded as
being Fedora itself. There's a website likely fedoraproject.org (but
maybe based on Fedora Community) geared far more towards joining the
project, starting a new group or project, finding tasks to work on to
help out, filing bugs, etc. etc. etc.
2) "Fedora is a family of operating systems. These operating systems are
tailored versions of an operating system with different goals and
specific target uses. For example, we have the Fedora Electronic Lab and
the Fedora Art Studio. We throw them at the wall and see what sticks and
promote the strongest ones."
The resulting strategy would likely result in individual spins having
their own websites. E.g., fedoraelectroniclab.org, fedoraartstudio.org.
They may have light overarching Fedora branding to keep a common thread
between them and to link back to the mothership fedoraproject.org, but
they'll have a lot of latitude besides that in tailoring their branding
and messaging to attract their target audience (which may differ wildly
from the target audiences of other spins.) Your fedoraproject.org here
would serve as a directory of spins, supporting heavily both the
downloading and usage of individual spins. It would keep the most
well-established / successful ones front and center. It would also
promotes the creation of new spins and provides workflow for anybody to
come in an do this. Maybe it'd have some kind of 'spin creation lab.'
You'd probably have rating systems and forums for the different spins
and it would result in a large community of sub-communities around
individual spins.
3) "Fedora is a desktop operating system for free & open source software
developers and highly-technical folks."
Here you'd probably end up with a default spin with a ton of complex
features in it with a high level of customization - KDE would probably
make a better choice for default desktop here since it tends to be a lot
more customizable than GNOME. You'd have the development tools package
group installed by default, or maybe have different primary spins, eg.
OS Developer, Java Application Developer, LAMP developer, etc. On the
website, you'd probably end up putting a lot more focus and polish on
working with Fedora Hosted, since we're supporting developers in making
FOSS. You would keep spins around and they would be really important,
but you would be able to get by with just the tools we have in place for
them rather than having a nice interactive website for creating them and
rating them and such.
I don't know that any of this really changes the ingredients we've got,
just the recipe we're making with them. And I think the vision is the
recipe we need to decide on.
~m
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