[osol-mktg] Mascot Contest

[Tim Foster]

Hey Sara & All.

On Tue, 2005-09-06 at 17:43, Sara Dornsife wrote:
> Option 2 (aka Mascot Creation)

That's the one I'd be inclined to go for.

As regards mascots, given the choice, I'd actually be more inclined to
/not/ have a mascot. Most of them I've seen in other projects tend to
come across as either childish, or sinister - OpenSolaris is clearly
neither !

If we had to have a mascot, I'd prefer to go for something that looks
more professional (more along the lines of the thunderbird or firefox
icons)

I'd rather see a lot more brand-imagery, posters, stickers and that sort
of thing to help capture developer mind-share, rather than cartoon
characters, but I think there may be other more important stuff to look
at first.

(and maybe I'm being a killjoy here, I don't know - sorry :-)

> I have a few questions.
> Which way would you like to go?

Yep, so I'd go for option 2, I think.

> Is now the time to do this?

Well, as I mentioned before, there's a wodge of marketing stuff I'd like
to help with, before spending our time on things like mascots (or
posters, stickers, etc.) But always, we should be focusing on
developers, right ?


Stuff like :  (and sorry for straying wildly off-topic here - probably
worth changing the subject line if you feel like replying to this
stuff!)

 * Elevator pitches
   - how to get people excited enough to look at OpenSolaris-based
     distros. Some of us probably have this in our heads already, but
     it'd be nice to have it written down somewhere too.

 * Code information/tutorials
   - Yeah we've got blogs already and the wicked fast code browser,
     but how do I persuade people to develop drivers/functionality
     for OpenSolaris, as well as, or opposed to, other free OSes.
     How do we teach new folks (like me!) about the code, apart
     from just telling them to dive in - the code comments
     are excellent, but perhaps there's more we can do ?

 * Newbie/Reviewer-assistance
   - Is there a single location where folks looking at
     OpenSolaris distros for the first time can get help, so we could
     hopefully make sure the reviewer gets to concentrate on
     the neat features (as opposed to, say, spending the entire
     review complaining about our installer... ) Apart from the dynamic
     forums & mailing lists, do we have anything static that people
     can look at ? Perhaps the answer is along the lines of
     "Google is your friend" - it'd be nice if we could have something
     official.

 * Newsletters ?
   - Again, we've got the blogs - and I see Dan Price writing excellent
     posts summarising the new features being put into the
     Solaris Express builds, but perhaps there's a case to be made for
     a more structured monthly newsletter targeted at developers :
     perhaps even constructed from blog entries, to help folks explore
     the code a bit.

     The articles you see on java.net or netbeans.org are excellent in
     this respect. I wonder could we start to write material like this
     as well ? ( check out http://today.java.net/pub/q/articles )
  
My point is, if we're marketing to developers, we should be asking what
sort of marketing information we need to be producing to help open the
door a bit more to these guys.

Hope this helps,

	cheers,
			tim

-- 
Tim Foster - Tools Engineer, Software Globalisation, Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Project Lead, Open Language Tools https://open-language-tools.dev.java.net/
http://blogs.sun.com/timf         http://www.netsoc.ucd.ie/~timf

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