I'll be blogging my homework assignment (F12 Marketing postmortem) in a moment, but wanted to take a few quick minutes to recap Day 1 of the Marketing FAD.

My "recaps" generally consist of TL;DR data overload, so here are the complete logs from the day - I'm very proud that we transcribed everything (just about) that went on. Mel standpoints also acknowledge that complete logs don't get read, so here's a summary of Robyn describing the morning (capped off by Max making a lovely wastebasket basket from across the room).

Deliverables from the FAD's first day are trickling across Planet (and mailing lists), so I'll just do my top-three list of things we accomplished and learned...

  1. WE HAZ A MARKETING PLAN! (draft. wiki link coming shortly) The remarkable thing about this is not so much "we haz a plan," but in the manner we are going about doing it - there's a lot of open debate, as much transparency as we can muster, all our rationales and arguments are logged, etc - so nobody will have to look at this plan later and go "um, where did this come from? What were they thinking?" This is particularly important because we're figuring out this "open marketing" thing as we go along, and are inevitably Getting Things Wrong - so this is our equivalent of "here's the source code, patches welcome."
  2. That we are figuring out this "open marketing" thing as we go along. We're not just marketing open source products (or even a community), we're also going about this in a very open source way. The mix of backgrounds in the room helps; people with formal marketing background explain terms to those who don't, and vice versa. We're constantly checking each other's assumptions of what people "should" understand by default.
  3. We have a better grasp of what we don't know. We have empty spaces and questions in our deliverables that point out our blind spots - so it's less and less a "we don't know that we don't know" and more and more a "we know this is somewhere but that we do not know it," which is usually a precursor to... well, knowing

And things we could do better on today.

  1. Conversation balance - if you're talking, listen more; if you're listening, speak up more. If you're transcribing, call for help more; if you're not, help out.
  2. Infrastructure - hopefully the phone does not drop quite so much today as it did yesterday...
  3. Remotee participation - we did a heroic job of trying to keep remote folks in the loop, but sometimes we forget that it's hard for listeners not in the room to get a word in edgewise. They can't raise their hand to remind us of their presence. So we made signs - now on 3 of the 4 walls of the room, so everyone can see one at all times. (adapted from a photo by Ryan Rix)

The sign says: "REMEMBER THE REMOTEES!" - then the three speech bubbles on the three people-figures say "#fedora-fad," "Fedora Talk," and "asynch on wiki and lists" (to remind us of where people are), and then instructions to "Transcribe! Slow down, speak up. Describe with your words, not just your hands. Solicit participation. LISTEN." (This is 1 of 3 posters; the others are variants on the same theme.) Thanks to Karsten (who is a remotee, yay!) for the poster text, and for the reminder.

Remotees, what were your impressions? How can we help you participate better? (Is that last sentence even grammatically correct?)