The Triangle of Fedora User Zen… or perhaps the Bermuda Triangle of Robyn’s Very Tired Mind

So….. I did a lot of thinking this evening on the discussions of the NOT YET SOLIDIFIED OR SET IN STONE User Base Triangle, as discussed earlier this week during a FAB meeting.  Of course, I’m totally wiped out from all the work we plowed through at the Marketing FAD, so who knows if any of this is even coherent.  I think it is – maybe some of my definitions are off, but it’s a start.

Basically – it comes from the User Base work the FAB SWG has been drafting up.  Rather than have these folks as Horizontal Layers of addressable markets – which, it seems, makes a lot of people think that what is defined as the “absolute bare minimum type of user” will actually be the only people we market to (NOT TRUE) – I decided that the Horizontal categories should actually be the Fedora Foundations – Freedom, Friends, Features, First.   And that the User Base people should actually be vertical groups, overlaid onto the Foundations – the higher their understanding / experience of those foundations are, the more likely they are to become serious contributors, over time.  There are 4 user base “buckets” – I added a fifth one to the diagram, Developers (there’s a longer name, actually, but that’s the short version).

• Features: This is what gets the User Base in the door.
• Friends: After being in the door, individual Users can become Friends via various paths.  Reaching out to someone tweeting about their experience, good or bad; responding to help requests on forums; commenting on blog posts; for some users, IRC, mailing lists, etc. Getting local users to attend FUDCons.   Reaching out and basically doing one of the many things that the Fedora community excels at already: being a Friend to those new users, starting the dialogue, and helping users not just understand Fedora the Distro, but also Fedora the Community.
• Freedom: This is where users are aware of how they can contribute to Fedora – whether it’s submitting a bug, being willing to discuss and/or document an experience, working on the wiki to contribute thoughts, coming to a meeting, supporting other Newer Users who are going through what they went through.  They realize that they have the Freedom to change things for the better.  Further along in their path up this horizontal bracket, they start to learn about things like F/LOSS, TOSW, and perhaps even the concepts of how licensing affects them, and how being an open community helps to better the very product they are currently using – and they become participants in that community.
• First: This level is truly about innovation.  It’s about doing the things that make Fedora the Distro, AND Fedora the Project, a true leader.  This is about empowering contributors who may have been working on helper tasks to embark on bigger projects; getting engineers to do New Things that nobody has done before; anything that is a new way of thinking.  These New Things become Features – and those features head down to the bottom of the triangle, paving the way for a new group of Users to discover Fedora.

This is all about moving people UP the triangle in their understanding of the Foundations – living by the Foundations make Fedora the Community a great place to be, and encourages users to stick around.  Some users, perhaps a portion of some of those on the edges in this diagram, may never do more than be friends, and that’s okay; other users, as they discover Freedom, will move up.

Draft goodness, yo... might want to click for larger version for readability's sake

There is quite a bit of redundancy between the diagram and what I’m saying here; but, there is also quite a bit of additional context built into the User Base Triangle draft I wrote.  For all I know, this may not be what the Board has in mind.  But the bottom line is that I think we shouldn’t think that these users are stagnant, and we shouldn’t think ourselves, internally, that we’re only targeting a certain group of people with a certain level of expertise.  That’s not the case at all.  We should be doing everything we can to move people who are reaching out from being Friends to Friends who know what Freedom is – and helping them use that Freedom to do New Things.

Anyway… HOLY CRAP, I’m tired.  Link to my fp.o page with my personal draft is here. I just realized that the “inexperienced computer users” box seems to span the triangle in a way that says, “I’m all of these groups,” and that’s not it at all; it’s more like… those guys are outside the triangle, and unlikely to move UP the triangle in their self-actualization of Fedoraness. I realize this picture is like… completely miniature / miniscule, but a larger version appears on the previously mentioned fp.o wiki page; also, I provided the Inkscape .svg file so that you can take what I’ve done and recraft your own version…. or alternately, you can take it, delete everything and create your VERY OWN! That’s right folks. I’m just -that generous-. So generous, I’ll link you to that .svg directly. (It actually seems, at least for me, that if you click on that link it will still open a picture; I’m not sure if you download it, that it will actually work in the magical ways that I sort of implied. I think it should, though, be able to be downloaded, opened in inkscape, and turned into further goodness. I’m sure someone who actually knows what they’re doing could inform us all of this!)

Speaking of generous: I would love your generous feedback. I love the nice kind, and mostly love the flame kind.  If anyone is thinking I may be on to something here (other than thinking that what I’m on is drugs, and it’s a bad idea, of course!) – I’ll refine this in a few days and throw out version 2.0, which could be new and improved with gradients, better colors, layers that are locked together, fonts that are slightly larger, and words that are more concise.  And if not – Believe Me, I have a little notebook brimming with ideas on all sorts of things, which I’m sure you’d love to read about in yet another one of my fabulous, rambling blog posts.

I may write / modify this blog post tomorrow as I clarify things more. Or as others clarify things for me. I say tomorrow; I mean later today, it’s 2am.  I’m completely wiped from the awesomeness that was Marketing FAD (thumbs up!) and the flight home yesterday from RDU to PHX next to the lady who barfed TWICE and also was a total space invader with her elbows crossing my personal space area… over the armrest… into my ribs (thumbs down!).

On a different note: I went from Inkscape Noob to Okay Inkscape Novice in a few hours this evening. Not bad! (Note to self: instead of spending 30 minutes trying to figure out how to do $simpletask, several times, CONSULT MANUAL ONLINE. Seriously. It’s all in there, Robyn.)

Fedora, in a word. (Actually: I’ll take multiple words, too. Paragraphs, even.)

Marketing FAD, Day 4: We’re going to be doing lots of videotaping today. Actually, I guess it’s probably not called videotaping these days; I wonder if people have started referring to it as “video-disking” or some such thing. We’ve got plans to pull together content for an F13-specific video, some along the lines of a “friends” video / individual profile highlight movie, and then, what we’re hoping will be… a more timeless video on “What is Fedora.”

One of the recurring themes that we’ve been discussing is how people outside the community – who are potential contributors, or even, potential users – perceive Fedora.  How would they describe it, in one word?

Turns out that asking people for just One Word is not a simple task.  We posted two large white sheets here on the Red Hat campus in the elevators of the building we’re in, with accompanying markers, and wrote, “What word do you think of when you think of Fedora?”

Hours later, we went to the elevator and discovered…. that people apparently don’t like brainstorming in elevators, because the pieces of paper were GONE, without a trace.  And the markers!

And so, in the hopes of gathering other results, I conducted a highly scientific poll of a group of friends I have on a mailing list. (By highly scientific, I mean a pool of sysadmins, programmer-types, geeks, tinkerers, experimenters, and awesomeness in general… mostly male, about 30 people…. realllllly scientific. I hope the readers are gathering my sarcasm here.)  To be a little more serious, though, most of these people are people who have used Fedora at some point, are familiar with multiple Linux distros, and in some cases, are more than just casually familiar with the Open Source Way.

The results were — and continue to be — interesting, surprising, and more than one word.  I originally asked for one word, and people started saying, “oops, that was a sentence….” — and eventually it evolved into me saying, “Okay, just dump your thoughts on me.”

One-word (or, “few word,” answers) —

Feature rich.  Green. Bleeding edge.  Unstable. “Yum”…ish. “Pain. Physical and emotional.” Fat. Incubator. Indy.

Another thing I discovered is that a lot of people have used Fedora — Many, Many years ago.  And that is their last impression of Fedora — and despite the fact that, obviously, Fedora (and other distros) has made significant improvements over the several years, they’re not interested in coming back.

This was my experience too (extensive RPM troubles) as a linux user.
I suppose I had one RPM difficulty as a linux administrator as well,
though the source was not RH (it was the annoying people @ Plesk).  I
was happy to settle on Ubuntu in 2005.  My last RH was RHEL 5.  Can’t
remember the version number of my last Fedora.

At least some people recognize that what’s gone on between now and then has probably changed things…

I don’t know how to describe fedora anymore because it wouldn’t be
fair. The last time I tried RHEL was 4 years ago, and fedora maybe 1
year before that.

last time I dealt with it was like release 8 or 9 and thinking ZOMG, 6
CDs…6!?!

And yeah.. I’ve recommended Ubuntu desktop for some of my friends
that are totally sick of Windows.  The feedback I’ve been getting
has been along the lines of “wow, why didn’t I do this years ago?”

The Ubuntu desktop gui environment is really quite nice.  Install
is super easy as well.  You don’t have to be a Linux-pro to move
around in it, do updates, copy files, install new hardware, etc..

That being said, I would never use Ubuntu as a server platform…

Sometimes, just HAVING the discussion does some good….

Ubuntu has the momentum and word of mouth.  I don’t know much about Fedora and have not been motivated to try it because Ubuntu makes me happy.  That being said I am downloading it now to get a feel for it.

And other times, people just get it (more or less):

Personally I don’t do Fedora because of the short support lifecycle.
When I install a box, I don’t want to have to reinstall it 1-2 years
from now just to keep getting security updates and fixes.  So, I use
centos…   If I want a sneak peek at the tech that may make it into
rhel next year, I install the latest Fedora and play with it.
However, that’s what Fedora is for — I don’t think it is something
that needs fixed by extending Fedora’s support lifecycle.

You shouldn’t pick Fedora for imporant shit that matters to an
enterprise — it’s not what it is for.  Fedora is the leading/bleeding
edge proving grounds and development grounds for RedHat Enterprise
Linux (RHEL), which is the slower, more stable, more robust, longer
support life option that is designed for your super important shit
that matters to your enterprise.

IMO, the reason to use Fedora (in places where it is appropriate, like
in R&D situations or a desktop env) is if your enterprise systems are
running RHEL/CentOS and you want something that is familiar and
similar to what you know and use already, but you want newer stuff for
a particular situation.  Also, as an added bonus, anything new you
learn in Fedora may apply to future versions of RHEL/CentOS.   less
crap to learn and remember ftw.

So, yeah.  Lots of input.  I think the one thing that is clear is that people aren’t necessarily getting the message – or that they’ve started elsewhere, and will never even try Fedora, simply because they’re Happy now.  How can we convince them to make the switch — or try Fedora as their first, or try it again?

How about you? If you ask people at your local LUG meeting what the one word is that comes to mind when they think about Fedora, what are you hearing? How about in a paragraph or less?

Marketing FAD Day 1: Midnight ADD Post-Hockey blogging at its finest.

Fedora view from a window.

Started reading a new book on the airplane en route to Raleigh for the Marketing FAD — Purple Cow, by Seth Godin.  There was a quote at the beginning of the book which I thought was particularly poignant:

“Create remarkable products that the right people seek out.” – Seth Godin, “Purple Cow”

Day 1 of Marketing-FAD-Goodness involved a number of things in terms of deliverables – but one of the most important things, at least in my humble opinion, that we’re working on is developing a solid marketing plan that we can use moving forward. We did a lot of talking – and writing, and typing, and hashing out, as well – today about… who are the Right People? What are the things that Marketing is doing – or perhaps, should be doing – to reach those people, and what are the qualities of Fedora that make it remarkable that we should be talking about, promoting, and so forth?  We came up with a solid of strategies to reach the Right People – and to go along with it, a tactical list of executable things to do.

Another thing we’ve been talking about a lot — which, actually, isn’t restricted to Marketing, btw — is the process of getting rid of the fear of doing things, and instead, just doing SOMETHING.  We started the afternoon today with a Marketing Plan that was a plan in the most traditional sense; i.e., something that one would actually look at and learn how to produce in a college-level marketing course.  Unfortunately, those marketing plans have been, for years and years, geared towards traditional companies, who do traditional things; Fedora is none of these.  So we are, in a sense, sort of re-writing how to do a Marketing plan, for an open source project, in an open fashion.  None of this comes easy.  And for a long time, it hasn’t come at all.  So I think it’s great that today, we took the first steps towards actually solidifying a Marketing plan that is actually actionable for the Fedora project as a whole; we are going Somewhere, which, frankly, is better than Nowhere.  Even if we start walking and we run into a wall, or some sort of blocker, at least we know that that route is bad.  And we can try, try again in a different direction.  It’s sort of like Wombat. 😀  Except, you know, with ponies. And the Right People. And a remarkable product.

Oh, how ’bout them Phoenix Coyotes? 🙂

Marketing FAD Day 0. Pickups, Ponies, Pickles, and, um, Pwaffles.

Marketing FAD is almost here. Woot! We’ll be meeting in the lobby around 9ish to head out around 9:15 to get to the Red Hat office in Raleigh around 9:30.

Ryan Rix and I had a fairly uneventful trip on de plane, de plane from PHX to RDU.  Minus the awesome turbulence as we flew into the Raleigh area, which I do believe rivaled some of the more awesome landings I’ve had at the Denver airport.  We’re talking the kind where your laptop actually hovers, momentarily, in the air, as the plane drops 75 feet like a rock.

We met up with Ben, grabbed my luggage (because I did bring 45 pairs of shoes… that’s the rumor, anyway), and picked up Mel from her terminal.  Headed over to our hotel, where Mel and I checked in to our room.

We got in our hotel room… and there is a bag on the table. Mel checked it out and said… “That’s weird. Someone left fried pickles. They are sooooooooooo gooooooood, but… really, who knows where these pickles came from???”

We found out later that Stickster and Ben had left them for us as a present.  Mel promptly went back to the room and grabbed the Pickles. Pickles!!

Then it was off to the Waffle House for… well, I had a BLT with a side of bacon. Ryan, Mel, David, Henrik, and myself got ourselves a cute little booth and ordered away.  Hash browns are popular.  We had a pleasant discussion about if one could possibly invent a waffle syrup that was infused with Red Bull, or some other energy drink, or just… the energy part of that equation.  I probably just gave away a billion dollar idea; if you make money on this, be sure to ask me for my address, so you know where to send the check. 🙂  Lots of waffles, at that Waffle House. Yum.

I was going to work Ponies into this story somehow, but unfortunately, the trip between the hotel and Waffle House (distance: maybe 200 feet?) did not involve a pony ride. Will work on figuring out the pony aspect tomorrow. For now, I need to get to bed.

Raleigh is lovely, at least from what I can see in the dark; this weekend should be awesome. I’ll see y’all in the morning!

Can you dig it?

I’m totally jazzed about the upcoming Marketing FAD which kicks off this weekend.  The Marketeers will be meeting in Raleigh, Friday (late-late Friday, probably starting at zee Waffle House!) and ending Tuesday; I’ll be headed out of town Wednesday.  We have a boatload of deliverables we plan on knocking out, and on top of that, well, FUN STUFF.  We’re going to a hockey game, for one – and, coincidentally, It will be the Carolina Hurricanes vs. Phoenix Coyotes.

So for background: Ryan Rix and I are both traveling to RDU from… you guessed it, Phoenix.  I am not exactly the world’s biggest sports nut, but of course I have to root for my hometown, so I’ve been cracking jokes about how I’m going to be decked out in my full Coyotes gear (which, of course, I don’t actually have).  Here’s a fun clip from the marketing meeting yesterday on IRC, where we were discussing any last-minute items we needed to wrap up before our FAD:

20:06:35 <spevack> so I think we're in pretty decent shape.
20:06:46 <spevack> That's really about it from my end.
20:06:47 <spevack> HOCKEY
20:06:48 <spevack> :)
20:06:48 <spevack> EOF
20:06:50 <rbergeron> oh
20:07:09 * rbergeron and rrix are bringin yotes gear
20:07:27 * rrix has a jersey :)
20:07:31 * mchua chuckles
20:07:35 <rbergeron> oh, you do? ergh
20:07:43 * rbergeron has... facepaint?

In any case: I’m somewhat packed, I’m only bringing 2 pairs of shoes (zomg, I know, right?!) because I have to make room for…

COOKIES!!

I’m up to my ears in promises. ke4qqq may be going home from the FAD with 10 boxes of girl scout cookies because of his limesurvey awesomeness (plz see my ongoing tale of luv for survey-goodness on the fp.o market research wiki page).

But seriously: I had a point to this blog post. And I’m getting to it…. right… now. 🙂

A Rockin’ New Slogan for Fedora 13

The countdown to liftoff for the Fedora 13 Alpha release is on. This means a flurry of fun marketing activities are going on, not the least of which is the selection of the F13 slogan.

Like everything else we do, the process for picking the the slogan is completely open, and anyone can join in with a proposal.  As some of you may already know, the release name for Fedora 13 is “Goddard,” named for Robert H. Goddard, one of the pioneers of modern rocketry. (If you’re interested in reading about how Fedora chooses a release name, you can check it out here.)

One of the great things about the “Goddard” name is that it opens Fedora up to a universe of awesome slogan and theme possibilities – space, rockets, science fiction, you name it. The call was put out to the Fedora community to propose slogan names, and the field of creative and amazing entries was narrowed down to one final slogan: “Rock It!”

The slogan, of course, says so much on its own; when you combine it with the pun on the word “rocket,” it gets even cooler.

Speaking of rockets… Fedora 13 Alpha launches very, very soon. (In fact, I believe it may have reached liftoff while I’ve been writing this entry.) Stay tuned!

Trac, Strategic Planning, and a Book Club!

I do have a part two to my thoughts on goals and target audience coming.  (And probably a part three, to respond a bit to what Greg and Paul wrote yesterday.)  In fact, I already have it written, I just need to edit it a little and actually POST it, which I’m going to do shortly.

But all this other awesomeness keeps getting in the way.

First: Marketing trac tickets! We’re trying to get in the habit of using Trac to keep track of the marketing team’s requests and deliverables.  I’m sure everyone knows that John Poelstra has a totally amazing schedule built out, so I’ve taken the Marketing portion of the deliverables and created tickets for each item.   (And if you haven’t seen the Master Plan before, it’s mind-bogglingly cool, so I recommend you check it out sometime!)  BUT HERE IS WHERE IT GETS AWESOME.  Well, if you’re me.  I actually went in a built a custom query for active tickets with F13 milestones.  Yes, I realize this is probably a cakewalk for some most probably everyone but me, but please indulge me in the OH YEAH I FIGURED IT OUT glory that follows. (It actually only took me a few minutes – Trac provides a bunch of pre-built queries that can be copied and edited fairly easily, even if the last coding you did was building a webpage in 1998…and your name is Robyn. 😀 Woot!)

Second: While on wikipedia today, I wandered on to one of their “come help wikipedia do xyz” banners, because it had the magic words that totally get my attention: Strategic Planning.  And holy moly, the Wikimedia Strategic Planning site is chock full of goodness and things to think about and I’m only on the tip of the iceberg in terms of reading it.  What it is about, in short, is (and I’m quoting directly from their page): “This is the workspace and community-gathering point for developing a five-year (2010–2015) strategic plan for the Wikimedia movement. (See background for more on this process.) The goal is to explore where we are now, where we should go, and how we should get there.”  Their strategic planning process page is particularly interesting and I really encourage everyone to take a look at it.  I’ll also plug Fedora’s own fabulous Strategic Working Group (yay!) and say that I hope everyone is reading about what they are discussing in their meetings since it’s mondo-important stuff.  I also saw that John put together a wiki page on the importance of strategy, which is also worth your eyeball time!  Kudos to all. And cookies. Or bacon, if you prefer.

And last, but not least: After Greg’s reference yesterday to the book The Starfish and The Spider in his blog, I remembered that… once upon a time… in the midst of the holiday season… Mel Chua and I once talked about having a marketing book club, since we all have our own favorite informational books we’ve read that relate to marketing, branding, business, and the like.  And then, I probably had to go wrap presents, or shovel snow, or drive around to see 8 billion relatives, and the idea was lost. But only temporarily!

I’ve set up a book club wiki page – it’s not just for marketeers, but for anyone who wants to join in.  I’m hoping to start with our first book in March, so if you have any ideas, please contribute to the wiki page, or keep an eye on the fedora marketing mailing list for further announcements. It’s going to be a good time!

Marketing FAD 2010 – Ready to RUMMMMMMMMMMMBLE

(No, Michael Buffer won’t be in attendance. Although that would be pretty sweet, since we’re doing some audio and video production.)

In today’s marketing team meeting, we finalized the schedule and list of deliverables for the upcoming Marketing FAD in Raleigh, March 13 – 16.  I’m toooooooootally excited about all the stuff we are planning on getting done.  We’ve got 4 days blocked off for some serious marketing butt-kicking.

• Day 1: Research and Strategy Day.  Using this day to go over market research results from our upcoming Fedora survey — if we can get some help getting limesurvey up and running, that is (yes, I’m asking for help again with packaging!). I’m also confident that the Fedora Target Audience topic will be solidified by this time (thanks Board!) – and with that information, we can go forth and put together a solid Marketing plan, and goals for marketing – both short-term and long-term.  Along the way, I’m hoping to give a crash course in how limesurvey works – and if I don’t have time that day, we’ll be sure to do a Fedora Classroom session on it.  (Actually, that’s not a bad idea anyway. I’ll put that on my to-do list. Page 489 ;D)
• Day 2: Branding Day! We’re going to be spending the day looking through other brand books, talking with some brand folks from RH, and coming up with some solid branding guidelines – look and feel, standard fonts, colors, that kind of thing.  The goal here is to make sure that we’re all coming across with a consistent look – not to mention, reducing the load off of people who want things to look -nice-, but don’t want to spend all their time doing it.  Getting some open office templates out there and ready to use for people will really help with this.
• Day 3: Interviews and Filming.  We’ll be using this day for capturing wonderful things and people on film – moving or still – and also audio recordings.  We want to kick off the podcast interview chain, come up with, and i quote, a “massive amount of B-roll ready footage” (I had to actually look up b-roll) …. and maybe knock out some of the Feature Profile interviews / videos for F13.  Woot!
• Day 4: PR Day.  This day looks like it’s going to be jam-packed with funstuffs and people. Some crash courses in PR, coming up with a new, shiny, and possibly real-life-instead-of-electronic Press Kit, a concrete deliverables schedule for marketing content that addresses multiple audiences, and planning Fedora’s presence at the Red Hat Summit. (Don’t forget to do your proposals / fill out the CFP!)

So, yeah, as you can see…. a TOTALLY RELAXING TIME in Raleigh.  No, I’m kidding.  But I think we are going to have a great time and get a TON O STUFF done, which is awesome, and I’m looking forward to meeting everyone there! (Except for rrix. I’m looking forward to seeing you at the airport in Phoenix to fly to Raleigh!)

And for those who can’t make it – we’ll be broadcasting, LIVE, from IRC, on #fedora-mktg (or maybe #mktg-fad…. I guess that’s something to decide!) and would love participation.  And if you’re planning on being in Raleigh (or, perhaps, not planning on leaving Raleigh) during those dates – feel free to come on by and contribute.  Meeting room is not booked yet, but I’m sure you’ll be able to detect and follow the large vibes of energy  🙂

Also: We’re soliciting any Brand Books you have around for our perusal / brainstorming purposes.  If you collect that type of thing, ping us on the marketing mailing list so we can coordinate some sort of book-sharing-going-on.  Also soliciting ideas for eating places (nom nom nom), we like to eat, and stuff.