Marketing/F11 cycle retrospect

Fedora Marketing F11 Cycle Retrospection Report

For the Fedora 11 cycle, the Marketing team saw many changes. Foremostly, we decided to switch from a task based workflow, which saw members of the team picking up seemingly random task assignments, to a release cycle based schedule. The new schedule allowed us, and will continue to, work within the release cycle and assign tasks based on time and priority. The schedule for Fedora 11 can be found here: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing_F11_schedule.

A majority of the related tasks for the cycle are noted there. That being said, it should be noted, that an overall area for improvement within the marketing project is to keep better track of tasks and update the schedule as there are still many things we did which are not noted.

The Marketing project was also able to participate in John Poelstra's pre-release meetings, which we have never done before. This is an important process which ensures that all parties are on the same page and working towards release readiness. For the future, and for F12, the goal should be to integrate into this more properly, by providing John a list of all tasks we need to perform in a cycle and due dates so that he can integrate them into his larger TaskJuggler schedule and help keep us coordinated and himself informed.

The Marketing team also standardized our meeting time and place to better coordinate our logistical efforts. Meetings are every Tuesday at 20.00 UTC. Meetings are held in #fedora-meeting on Freenode and logs are available within 24 hours, usually immediately after. The meetings information page is located here: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing_meetings. Meetings are still usually attended by the 5-6 most active people and it would optimal if we could get more broad participation.

Further, content production will become significantly more important to the the marketing team. The hope for the Fedora 12 cycle is to increased both the amount of breadth and depth of content that is produced for a variety of different reasons. For F11 marketing took upon itself responsibility to produce much content related to the release. The content is listed below too keep a record. After feedback from this document is gathered, this will be posted on the wiki and an email sent to the mailing list. They are:


 * Talking Points - Brief descriptions of the key highlights of the release geared to users and press. They are found here: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/F11_Talking_Points
 * In Depth Feature Profile - In depth coverage of certain key and interesting features with feature owners. They are found here: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/F11_in-depth_features
 * Release Slogan - A collaborative process to produce the release slogan. This is found here: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing/F11_Release_Slogan
 * Pre-release podcasts - A number of podcasts and print interviews which were done with feature owners. These are found here: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/F11_release_podcasts
 * The Release Tour Page - A page which ties in links to all relevant created content for the release which can be used as a one stop shop for users: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_11_tour

We do require more media to be produced and this requires a greater tie in with teams such as Translation, Design and Docs. There are meetings which will take place over the next few weeks to solidify this.

One great new project of the Marketing team was the Fedora News Distribution Network. There are plans to work more closely with Red Hat Intl PR to expand this project. More information can be found here: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing_news_distribution_network. For F11, we tracked this activity on the press archive which is here: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing/PressArchive/F11. This represent a total of 40 press reports in 10 languages. For the Fedora 11 cycle, the NDN didn't perform as well as expected, it was a first try after all. We can point out 3 principal problems:
 * Getting feedback from the NDN people.
 * The motivation of the NDN people, some languages did perform much better than others.
 * The translation process wasn't optimal at all for the release announcement.