21 March, 2010

help KDE promo!

Hi all,
For those of you who always wanted to be part of the coolness that is KDE promo, I have compiled a few simple and short tasks below.

Organize a good set of booth boxes.
The current boothbox page I think makes clear what is needed. The things in the list need to be checked with other promo ppl and the booth team (just mail kde-promo) and then a list needs to be made where to get the items and what it would cost. Then the e.V. needs to be asked for money, the stuff needs to be bought, and a meeting set up at the Berlin office to assemble the boxes and celebrate. Get started by putting your name behind the tasks (and update them, add & remove stuff) on the kde promo Tasks page and introducing yourself and your good intentions on kde-promo at kde.org.

Needed skills: being stubborn and persistent.

You will learn: how to push people, make decisions, plan, and how nice Berlin is when going out with KDE promo people. And I'll buy you a pint there ;-)

Write about cool things.
There is plenty of very cool stuff going on in the KDE community. For example, a while ago there was this nice blog by Mogger about a new Klassroom on the KDE forums. Those guys & girls there are doing an amazing job helping people learn nice new tricks, and they deserve some advertisement. So why not do an interview and write something? You'll enter the ranks of elite dot publishers! It takes some time, for sure, but it is not as difficult as you might think. If you do an interview most of the writing is often done by the person being interviewed and the dot editors will make sure no weird language makes it to the dot ;-)

Something else would be writing about numbers. The idea is to take some statistics about our community and write an article about it, and doing so (on different numbers) regularly to turn it into a small series. An example would be Growth Metrics for KDE Contributors by Troy Unrau. There are people on the promo mailinglist who are capable of generating such numbers, you just have to annoy them enough to make them do it just to get rid of you. In other words, big fun ;-)

Or take a look at this blog by Money Master Alvaro. He talks about an usability review done by Pallavi and Grace Chang for KMyMoney. I'd love to know more! Why did they do that, how did they get in contact, are they going to do more reviews? Doing an interview with them gives them the exposure they deserve (they did great work) and might even motivate them to do an review of another application - a very nice side effect I would say ;-)

If you want more writing ideas, look at the page for dot article ideas on the community wiki promo corner. Feel free to add ideas ;-)

Promote Bugsquad
The kde promo Tasks page lists some more things to do, including the excellent idea to promote our bugsquad a bit more. Having an article detailing what those girls and guys are doing would be very nice. Maybe it's time for an interview with the top bug triagers, or a nice explanation of what they are doing on the dot!

More
I could of course go on and on, I think the picture is clear: join us, there is plenty to do and it's fun! Pic something, send an email to kde-promo saying what you're gonna do, ask for help if you need to, and get crackin'!

PS as soon as I see the kitten again, I'll post more pics, OK?

4 comments:

  1. KDE promo? but KDE SC is very buggy :(
    Is there any possibility to stabilise this first?

    ReplyDelete
  2. @anon: Your post implies that if time is not spend on promo work this would be spend on fixing bugs. This is in general _not_ the case, as this very much depends on the person's skills and motivation (not everyone promoting KDE is a C++ developer).

    On the other hand: increasing the developer or the bug triagers base _is_ extremely helpful for fixing bugs. Thus, some good promotion (like Jos is doing) has probably the best leverage, i.e., "time that is spend on bugs" / "time spend on promo".

    On a side note: KDE SC is extremely stable for me.

    ReplyDelete
  3. @anonymous
    surely KDE SC isn't as good as we want it to be, but considering our high standards, it never will. So that shouldn't be a reason not to promote it and the work our many great contributors have done. Read the second half of this post by Aaron: http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2010/03/semi-random-thoughts-for-day.html

    ReplyDelete
  4. "KDE promo? but KDE SC is very buggy :(
    Is there any possibility to stabilise this first?"

    It's rock stable and solid. However, Konqueror crashes from time to time, but maybe it's flash problem. Give some examples and stop trolling.

    ReplyDelete

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