Hi Ben, thanks for starting this conversation. I CC'd other lists as well to get wider feedback on this topic.

On 4/12/19 4:41 PM, Ben Cotton wrote:

For F31 and beyond, I want to start a conversation about how we want to produce this (or if we want to continue doing it). Do we know how/if people are actually using the talking points document? My observation is that Eduard and others spend a lot of time and effort trying to drag content out of the working groups and it's not clear that we get much value from that effort.

To understand the added value of talking points, understanding why this work happens and where people look today for this information is a pre-requisite.

Talking points inform Fedora contributors about new things happening in a release. Traditionally, talking points reflect priority areas of Fedora engineering efforts. For example, in Fedora 15, we talked about the GNOME 3 desktop and systemd[1] because those were HUGE parts of F15. That importance was also echoed in the F15 release notes[2]. Today, talking points seem "out of sync" with Fedora's current priority areas.

Talking points should be narrative "stories" around the technology areas Fedora is focusing on. For the last ~10 releases or so, talking points read more like a detailed changelog. This seems to repeat what the Fedora Docs already produces each release. For example, consider the distribution-wide changes section of the release notes[3].

Eduard, current Marketing Team members, and past team members have gone to great efforts to producing these every release, but I feel like the Project changed on the Marketing Team in the last ~10 releases.

Since the Marketing team is driven by volunteers and not paid staff, it is easy to repeat a familiar process when there are Fedora release deadlines to meet and you are also working another full-time job and/or studying in school. Time spent reflecting on what is working and what is not is cut short. The Mindshare Committee aspired to move strategic planning from the Marketing Team and guide the team towards executing a common marketing strategy determined by Mindshare. But I have not seen those conversations in the Mindshare Committee yet.

The Marketing Team needs external support to be more relevant in Fedora today. This guidance could take form of evaluating ways to better return on value of volunteer time.

For example, what if instead of producing wiki page talking points, we shifted to Fedora Magazine "feature profiles" that hinted at what is coming in the next Fedora release? This would fit the "storytelling" aspect better and requires creative skills to share this story more widely. (This happens already in Fedora, since these types of articles appear on the Magazine regularly. Perhaps the Marketing Team could better tap into that process as it currently happens.)

One way to generate more ideas is to consider asking Ambassadors / Advocates how they keep up with Fedora news today. Have we ever asked our contributor community this? What if we designed a short questionnaire to help inform a better strategy to guide the Marketing Team's work and get the most value out of volunteer contributor time?

On a related note, the design team produces a digital ad that is displayed in Red Hat offices for Fedora releases[1]. Mo asked how we should get the content to them and I answered[2] that it should be part of the talking points process; we should open a ticket with the design team to provide the wording as we product the talking points. Any disagreement or other comments?

[1] https://pagure.io/design/issue/621 [2] https://pagure.io/fedora-marketing/issue/288#comment-565425

I agree that this work is useful but I disagree that it should be the responsibility of the Marketing Team to push this work. I believe this role should be taken by the Mindshare Committee. Consider this excerpt[4] from Mindshare responsibilities:

Communication between teams (outreach teams rely on the work of other groups). Mindshare ensures all information from technical teams will get out in time to all outreach teams, working out also a common strategy with Marketing of how to communicate them outside and how to manage them within all outreach teams.

I think assigning this responsibility to the Marketing Team requires that common strategy to be in place. What and how does the Marketing Team need to communicate to the Design Team for this to happen and for the work to be utilized by Ambassadors / Advocates? For this reason, I think this responsibility lies within the Mindshare Committee to coordinate between outreach teams.

This ran a little long, but I hope the feedback is useful and constructive. Most of this comes from the benefit of hindsight for the couple of years I led the Marketing Team and also my term serving on the Mindshare Committee.

[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_15_talking_points [2] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/F15_one_page_release_notes [3] https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora/f29/release-notes/sysadmin/Distr... [4] https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/mindshare-committee/#_responsibilities