On 07/28/2015 01:57 PM, Ankur Sinha wrote:
Well, not all the conversations we have are at booths with laptops
around, are they? Booths generally have one or two contributors there
and they can speak to one or two people at a time. Flyers can be given
out to people that can read them at leisure, and even if they do end up
in the bin, as long as they read the flyer, it served its purpose.
People don't go to conferences to pick up flyers they can download at
home / read at their leisure on the web. They cost too much for that.
They go to meet people. I have manned many, many, many tech conference
booths over the past decade. Folks are interested in talking to you and
ask questions, to pick up swag / free items, or both. Rarely are they
interested in the flyers unless you really press them to pick up one (eg
"get a chance to win our raffle") or if they are really good reusable
reference material they can refer to again and again (eg the cheat cube.)
I really have no objections to not having flyers. I'm merely passing on
information gathered from the discussion on the ambassadors list here.
I read the full ambassadors-list thread. For ref
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/ambassadors/2015-June/023543.html
Some do feel tat flyers are a good idea, and if we don't want to
produce them, we should have a better way of showing off what the
products do and what's new and so on - an alternative that doesn't
sacrifice on information content, basically.
I also saw a lot of feedback on the thread saying that the flyers were
wasteful and usually ended up in the conference trash bin. I also saw a
lot of suggestions for alternative ways of achieving the same goal, such
as a scripted demo or slideshow.
The initial version of the plan had only one flyer - the timeless one
which would provide some information on all the products. When Matthew
suggested we follow an approach similar to the targeted products
approach, I added the product specific flyers. I, frankly, have no
other ideas on how to do this at the moment:
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/marketing/2015-July/017782.ht
ml
https://fedoraproject.org/w/index.php?title=User%3AAnkursinha%2FMarketi
ng_Collateral_Ideas&diff=418723&oldid=415777
I don't follow how product-specific flyers leads into needing
release-specific flyers, though?
I see it noted in the chart. However, *print* materials are still
suggested rather prominently in the actual proposal for these users.
I
disagree that this is necessary. The information (which I agree is of
value to those audiences) can be shared with them without the need
for
printed materials.
Great! Please add these other methods to the wiki page - gathering this
information is the entire point of this RFC :)
I am happy to provide suggestions and help with feedback but I don't
have the cycles to commit to edit the proposal.
There should probably be a 'general return on investment
(effort/cost)'
column added there too to help with evaluation. That's the reason we
did
release notes flyers before and don't do it anymore!
I thought that was because no one had the time - that they weren't high
enough priority in the task list, not because they weren't required at
all.
They would never hit high enough priority because the return was never
good enough compared to everything else in the queue. Assume time is
always constrained with volunteer-based teams!
The plan here is:
- to request the design team for scribus templates (you'd suggested
this yourself in the meeting where my original e-mail was
discussed)
Where are the minutes from this?
https://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-design/2015-06-02/fedora-desig
n.2015-06-02-16.02.log.html/
is where you'd suggested coming up a visual design and then in your
feedback on the ML, you'd said LaTeX wasn't the best choice and Scribus
would be much nicer.
That log is regular design-team meeting minutes. This isn't what I was
referencing (it turns out it was the design-team thread I was thinking
of, see below.)
When I said we should come up with a visual design and a scribus
template, that was for the 'timeless' flyer, not for release-specific
flyers.
For example:
"one thing that came up is that the content is very release-specific and
thus not very 'timeless' in that if a large print run was done, the
extras wouldn't be able to be used for very long. [...] "
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/design-team/2015-June/007185.html
No answers to these questions:
"So what is the motivation to give them out at events? What is the goal
of making them available? How are ambassadors using them at event
tables? Do we have any specific feedback from ambassadors about how
useful they were, specific feedback about how booth visitors use them /
how the ambassadors might use them to direct a conversation / etc? Are
there specific ambassadors we can talk to in order to get this
information? Are these only meant to be given out at events or are there
other anticipated applications?"
also
"This is definitely not a recurring item on the design team's task list
because the design team does not (well we try very hard not to) come up
with content and we honestly don't have the manpower to update something
like that every single release - the cost / benefit analysis doesn't
really show a good payoff there for the effort expended vs other
projects we typically have on our plate. Providing outdated material
IMHO is worse than providing no material at all. I also strongly believe
any material we do produce needs to have a well-defined goal and purpose
so we can assess whether or not it is successful over time and tweak it
to keep it useful (or drop it if it no longer is.)"
No answer to this q:
"How would these four pieces of material (1 generic + 1 per Fedora
edition) interact though? Remember that folks at conferences are picking
up an awful lot of stuff, and there needs to be a clear story about the
relationship between the materials we offer. (I'm not saying there
isn't, just that I don't know what it is.)"
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/design-team/2015-June/007187.html
Since this meeting log is being brought up, I'd like to say that this
statement is incorrect:
16:59:14 <gnokii> well I told the guy last time that it is not his job
to create them, he ignored it and the flyer got printed behind our back
Understand that the design team is the team primarily responsible for
Fedora's visual brand identity, and when materials are produced without
some level of collaboration or at a minimum communication with us, it's
a challenging situation for us. We like to have a reasonable level of
input / control over the quality and design of official visual materials
handed out in Fedora's name seeing as its our responsibility. It's from
this context that I believe the quote above is coming from.
I'm sorry if it seems like the design teams input was not considered.
It was because of the feedback that I'd received from the design folks
that I took a step back and went to the ambassadors for their input. I
put all the info and feedback I had out to the ambassadors and
marketing teams. There have been various views on the marketing
collateral and I've done my best to put them on the wiki page there,
which I've regularly encouraged people to view and edit.
Your efforts are appreciated on gathering the info and documenting it in
the wiki.
I think what might work a little better than telling folks (who've
already indicated they are time-strapped) to view and edit the wiki
would be to organize a project team around this (since it's a
significant project), have regular meetings, assign tasks to folks, set
milestones, etc. Because in the absence of direction, it's not likely a
Fedora-like collaborative effort that brings about the best output is
going to happen.
On the other hand, if it does
become a task that needs to be done each release, it can be added to
the per release task lists that the Fedora program manager publishes,
and that will hopefully imply that we'll have to do less work to get
the information.
"hopefully" is a key word there :)
Oh? Well, I'd done this, and it was sort of easy - probably because I
didn't do any design work at all - and I left alignment and everything
else to LaTeX:
https://ankursinha.fedorapeople.org/fedora-flyer-workstation/fedora-fly
er-workstation.pdf
This, unfortunately but honestly, isn't a design that would pass muster
were it filed as a design-team ticket. There's a number of issues that
would need to be addressed before I would feel comfortable having
something like this printed up. Which is perfectly understandable -
you're not a designer, this isn't based on a designed template.
I'd really rather us point to a much more easily-managed web resource
for this kind of content, because the end product quality is much
easier
to guarantee.
This is a great idea, and zoltahn has made this suggestion already -
something on the lines of Mozilla's press blog. We could just come up
with QR codes and things that take people to the relevant web
locations.
Unfortunately neither zoltahn's initial suggestion nor my reiteration
received any feedback and the idea didn't get anywhere:
https://fedorahosted.org/marketing-team/ticket/177#comment:6
This is a comment on a ticket. I think it is a very good idea that could
help solve some of the problems I've mentioned, but ideas take a bit
more work to realize than a comment on a ticket, no? Nor is this idea
listed on your wiki matrix.
and point 3 here:
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/marketing/2015-June/017546.ht
ml
So how do you envision this (very good) idea to get anywhere? When
people bring up ideas in Fedora, they unfortunately don't just happen.
(I proposed the idea for Fedora Hubs at least a year before any actual
development work or real mockups were created.) Just because an idea was
posted somewhere - as fabulous as it may be - the fact that it doesn't
automagically come into being A Thing doesn't mean people think it's a
bad idea or not worth working on, it means it needs some direction and
management.
We're (the design team) trying to up the bar on the
materials we produce and associate with the Fedora brand. I think
achieving that involves more design team input than us spitting out a
scribus template one-time and dusting off our hands.
That's good to know. The goal of this thread is to improve the
collateral plan until we have stuff that meets everyone's standards at
least:
- design wise
- content and information wise
- work load wise
- ??
So, all input is welcome. Please edit the wiki page directly when you
need to.
See above on telling time-strapped folks to edit wikis.
I hope this makes sense and is fair,
~m
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