Marketing FAD, Day 1.

People have already posted about much of the goings-on from Day 1 of the Marketing FAD, such as the draft of our new, low-drag marketing plan, and our approach to spins, but I wanted to call out a specific area for people to notice. Back in the fall the board talked a lot about expanding the user base of Fedora, and ultimately set out four points to describe a user base that represents a wide audience of people, yet includes our current contributor base. One way to think about this user base is as a minimum bar. If, at a minimum, you fit all of these four descriptions, you are someone Fedora can make very happy — or if we’re not, then we should:

1. Voluntary consumer — Someone who’s choosing Linux (even just to try it) for any of a large number of reasons, including stability, security, free of cost, free as in speech, and so forth
2. Computer-friendly — Someone who’s not necessarily a computer expert, yet not someone who’s never used a computer before
3. Likely collaborator — Someone who may not be using the communications channels that we rely on as experienced contributors, but would be willing to provide information on a problem if we provide the opportunity
4. General productivity user — Someone who regularly performs non-technical tasks with their computer as the primary tool

A lot of details about these descriptions are set out on the wiki and come directly out of the discussions from last fall. We spent a good deal of time at FAD day 1 describing the intersection of these very broad groups of people. I illustrated this on the board with a simple Venn diagram, with these criteria as four large circles that shared a very broad common area in the middle (the intersection).

That intersection is still a very large population of people, and we contributors are a small subgroup somewhere in the middle of that intersection. We all have particular interests in Fedora that can make it easy, if we’re not careful, to exclude a lot of people from that large population. And sometimes we may have to re-tune our own expectations or priorities to effectively serve them. (Providing a more stable update user experience is just one example.)

Does this mean that we don’t want people outside these areas to use Fedora? Let’s take some guy named Edward as an example. What if he’s not a likely collaborator, but still wants to switch to Fedora and be productive? We want him to be comfortable too. But when we make decisions about how to set up certain systems in Fedora, we want to make it easy for people to collaborate. We’ll make decisions to encourage them. Often that will have no bearing on Edward, and his experience will be no worse for it. On the other hand, there might be some tool installed that offers collaborators an opportunity in which he’s not interested. Who knows, one day Edward might change his mind and take advantage of the opportunity presented. If not, he’s welcome to ignore or uninstall that thing.

After talking about these concepts, John Poelstra popped out a nice pyramid-style graphic illustrating the concept without painful Venn diagrams. I’m hoping he’ll post it in his blog at some point. (Hint!) Mel Chua also brought up the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition and the four stages of competence. These are worth understanding as they affect our approach to users, and ability to look beyond our personal skill levels and understand how to properly on-ramp users into new contributors. It’s interesting to see how many of the conversations around change play directly into the pitfalls predicted by these models.

The beginnings of our new marketing plan are less scholastic than our previous attempt (seen for now on the wiki) but make a lot more sense in terms of broadening the user base, and more importantly, determining how future Fedora plays a part in helping more people get things done that are important to them. Getting out of our comfort zone may be difficult, but I believe it will be rewarding in the long run, and do nothing but increase Fedora’s relevance. Moreover, it will increase our ability to advance free software, pursuant to our philosophy of open collaboration.

We also collected post-mortem information about our F12 marketing efforts, where we were successful and where we were not, and everyone took back homework to complete, such as collating all the existing ideas for marketing tasks into a list we can prioritize and then assign or defer at the next couple of Marketing meetings. (That will help us ensure we’re not taking on too much and under-delivering, but rather picking the things that are really important to do, and exceeding expectations.) I drafted my homework, a general page on post-mortem information collection, after returning to the hotel.

Before that we watched the ‘Canes be outplayed by the Coyotes from the comfort of Red Hat’s swank private box at the RBC Center. We were joined by Russell Harrison’s lovely wife Doracy, and Greg DeKoenigsberg and his wife Mel stopped by as well. It would have been nice to see the home team make good, but we had fun anyway — especially Robyn and Ryan who are from Phoenix!

By the way, there’s a reason I called out open collaboration earlier. We have a great treat coming up for Day 2 — we’re being visited by Chris Grams (of New Kind), Jonathan Opp, and John Adams to talk about evaluation, growth, and spread of brand, and how to expand our opportunities to do those things in a community. Our agenda continues on the wiki today, and we’ll again be on IRC Freenode at #fedora-fad.