I’m overdue in recapping some of my thoughts of the Marketing Hackfest. Overall, the hackfest was a success and now we begin the hard work in recapping everything we talked about, making it actionable and doing the work!

One of the best things about the hackfest, in my opinion, was the cross-section of people who attended. Each individual had different strengths and views of GNOME and it served to remind me of the different groups who use GNOME and how they use it.

I spent a lot of time at the whiteboard helping facilitate and I’m still sorting through all the notes we discussed. Somewhere Shaun has some video as well.

A lot of our discussion was centered on GNOME 3.0 and how we can communicate to our users and our downstream partners of the features and benefits of GNOME 3.0. If you think back to the email Vincent Untz sent this past April on behalf of the Release Team, GNOME 3.0 has three goals:

• Revamp our User Experience
• Streamlining of the Platform
• Promotion of GNOME

That third goal is why we got together and the bulk of what we discussed. We touched on what GNOME 3.0 is; GNOME’s overall branding; marketing GNOME to users and how to improve our partnerships with downstream distributions such as Fedora, OpenSolaris, openSUSE and Ubuntu.

But it wasn’t all just discussion ’round the campfire! We did a lot of work on creating materials for volunteers who host a GNOME booth at a conference. We wrote the copy for a new brochure explaining what GNOME is; created a Frequently Asked Questions for those hosting a booth with answers to questions they should expect from conference attendees; and wrote core messages and speaking points when talking to attendees.

We also discussed in detail the Friends of GNOME program and did some work on an upcoming fundraising drive.

And lastly we’ve started to work on presentation materials for volunteers who may want to give a presentation on GNOME. We still have a ways to go to finish this work, but using the awesome template Vinicius created, we envision having a number of presentations available that can be used as building blocks for someone who wants to give a presentation on GNOME. Some of these include:

• GNOME History (5 minutes)
• GNOME 3.0 (5 minutes)
• Getting started using GNOME (5 minutes)
• Getting started developing GNOME (5 minutes)
• GNOME 3.0 (45 minutes)

And lots of others – the above are just examples of templates with content someone could take and mix and match together to put together the bulk of a presentation they might want to give.

Lastly, we also spent some time talking about the GNOME Marketing community and how we can work together, communicate effectively, mentor new members and tackle some of our action items. We’ll start by having IRC Meetings where we can recap some of the discussion topics from the hackfest, discuss ideas from the community on improving how we market GNOME and hopefully have some of the community members volunteer to tackle some of the action items and next steps in creating marketing materials for GNOME. Look for the announcement in the next couple of days to help pick a time for that meeting, and similar to the Bug Squad, we’ll use Doodle.com to try and find a time that works for as many people as possible.

More to come!