Alright folks, so the KDE marketing juggernaut (subtle laughter) is meeting this weekend in Stuttgart. All 15 of us present are hard at work, bikeshedding with the best of them. Fortunately, when we take a break from discussion what shade of blue the bikeshed should be (because, obviously, it must be blue), we're actually getting some decent work done.
First and foremost, we had some food, providing a venue for pre-sprint arguments (purpose of marketing, targets for promotion materials, etc.) and learning of some Gerglish.
After a good night's sleep, and recovery from jet lag, we set to work this morning at 9AM, starting with some boilerplate work, like scheduling our work schedule for the sprint. Then the fun began:
First topic: branding meeting this morning, including the future nomenclature for KDE. More on this will be announced on the dot as soon as we discover a word that we like enough to describe the current state of affairs. Essentially, KDE will be defined as follows in official marketing materials:
"KDE is an international team co-operating on development and distribution of Free, Open Source Software for desktop and portable computing. Our community has developed a wide variety of applications for communication, work, education and entertainment. We have a strong focus on finding innovative solutions to old and new problems, creating a vibrant, open atmosphere for experimentation."
Notice how we don't describe KDE as an application, or a software package, or similar. We've been doing this transparently in the release announcements for a while, but we'll be moving even further down this road. KDE is the organization, and the software we produce as a community are the products. So KDE makes software -- it isn't the software.
These results end up affecting much of our other work: we're currently updating the kde.org website source materials (and a prototype version will be online in the next few days), and Jos and friends in the next room are working on a multipage brochure for use at conferences and elsewhere (FOSS.in comes to mind).
By the end of this event, we hope to have most of the website materials fixed (even if they aren't live yet) and have some concise booth materials designed (lacking artwork to be added), as well as a number of other docs written, such as the 4.4 release announcement (freeze is soon!)
Anyway, more updates to follow (here, and more formally via the dot.)
Cheers folks
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