Followups from Council phone call monday — Budget discussion for this year and beyond
by Matthew Miller
Here's the rough notes from the call:
- Inside Red Hat, budget is due _way_ early now. We'll need to
adjust our planning around that. (Specifically, we need it in by
October.)
- This year's budget request is set as same as last year's; we
won't know for sure until possibly as late as March what we
actually get.
- In the future, we need to do our request planning in the Flock
timeframe. (Discussion before Flock, high-bandwidth in-person
session at Flock, followup and ratification after.)
- Council (and specifically Remy as community action/impact lead)
will work to thoroughly understand budget request, and then act
as contact for the finance people. Remy will also help maintain
an overall "state of the budget" document as we go through the
year.
- Given the long period between request and actual budget, makes
sense to also have a second round of planning at the start of the
fiscal year (which is March, and years are named after the one in
which they end, so we're in FY16 right now, and the upcoming
budget is FY17.)
- Right now, all money is allocated to ambassadors through regions,
including Flock and FUDCons, and except for FADs. We want to do
that differently for FY18 — probably split out at least Flock,
and have non-regional budget for marketing and other centralized
community activities.
- If we want to do more with our money, and request more as needed,
we need to make sure we're spending what we have already — the
Council should do a quarterly budget review with ambassadors (and
in future any other groups). In the future, "no budget" should
mean "no spending".
- NA ambassadors in particular need to get a budget organized. APAC
and LATAM need to get better at spending the money that's
budgeted.
- We want to ask for more money to grow Fedora. In order to do
that, we need to demostrate that the money we do have is being
spent well. Need ambassadors to connect spending to results in a
a way that _we_ can take to the budget people.
Not mentioned at the meeting, but a thing I'm concerned with and have
mentioned before: having a Fedora presence at conferences is good, but
is it the best use of Fedora money? Do we grow new users at Linux fests
in the 21st century? What things could we do instead?
--
Matthew Miller
<mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org>
Fedora Project Leader
7 years, 11 months
In which Matthew goes to Training (and comes back with Ideas about Marketing)
by Matthew Miller
In which Matthew Goes to Training
---------------------------------
Like many of you, I come from a mostly-technical career background, and
ain't got one of them there fancy big city business degrees. But, I know
there's a real actual discipline in all this stuff, and I try to pick up
things that I think will be useful for Fedora. Last week, I went to
training which in part described a model for the overall endeavor of
marketing tech products, and I think there might be some ideas we can
benefit from.
The model itself is the proprietary product of the training company, and
some of it, of course, isn't really relevant ("Setting prices!"), so what
follows isn't a copy of the training materials, but kind of a
generalization of some of the concepts I took away.
Basically, there's a whole bunch of activities under the general heading
"Marketing", and they can be mapped on one axis from conceptual to more
technical, and on another axis from strategic to... you know, actually
doing stuff. Something like this:
A Model of Marketing
--------------------
Finding Defining /----------\ Marketing Plan
User Problems Our Market |Conceptual|
\-----v----/ Getting New Users
Identify Product |
Strengths Portfolio | User Keeping Existing Users
| Personas
"Why/why not Business |
Fedora?" Plan | Measuring Program
/---------\ | Effectiveness /--------\
|Strategic >-----------------------+------------------------< Tactical|
\---------/ Requirements | Finding References \--------/
Product | & Testimonials
Assess Roadmap Use Cases | Collateral
Competition | Finding Leads
Project | "Sales" Events
Assess Our Here Status | Launch Plan Training
Own Tech Is Literally A /----^----\ Demos
Box That Just |Technical| Show Leadership
Says Innovation \---------/ Through Blogs & Speaking
Punchline
---------
The core takeaway — and, basically, this is Spoiler Alert for the
training — is that the essential activity of Marketing is _finding
problems in the market_ and helping the organization create and
distribute solutions to them.
Current Fedora Marketing
------------------------
I think it's fair to say that right now, Fedora Marketing, together with
Fedora Ambassadors, is very focused on the bottom right quadrant. More
technical, more tactical. Specifically, we work on trumpeting new
releases and the launch plan (Go/No-Go meeting), we work on collateral
(brochures, websites, swag), we do events. And, Marketing/CommOps is
planning to do demo material and provide better event support for
Ambassadors.
And the Magazine fits pretty nicely here, too — there's a whole category
basically about demonstrating your organization's leadership in an area,
and that's blogs and press outreach and speaking at conferences and
social media and so on.
Who Does the Rest?
------------------
The training presented several concepts for how this landscape might be
divided among different parts of an organization. One would be to have
someone focus on the strategic side and someone else on the tactical;
another is to divide top and bottom. And then they had another chart
which has the left side split top and bottom and the right side as a
third bigger oval. This last, most complicated one I think matches most
closely what we already have in Fedora —
a. I think, for the most part, the Fedora Council and FESCo have worked
on that top-left quadrant — at least, in defining the Cloud, Server,
Workstation portfolio and the target markets for this, and I hope in
identifying strengths.
b. And, reasonably well, the the bottom-left corresponds to the Cloud,
Server, Workstation edition Working Groups.
c. And then, the right side basically falls under Fedora Marketing and
Ambassadors.
However...
----------
As noted above, Marketing and Ambassadors are really focused on the
"below the line" activites on the right side. That leaves a big weak area
in the more conceptual but action-oriented side. This is a big hole, and
it seems like improving this could make a difference.
But, Bigger Picture Problem!
----------------------------
Refer back up to the punchline, and notice something I left out —
identifying user problems that we want to target. This is something we
did in very broad strokes with the three editions, but which we aren't so
great at doing continually.
I'm working on the Fedora 23 release annoucement right now, and this
really hit home. Rather than going out, finding things our users are
having trouble with, and coming back with "There! We fixed it for you!",
we're working on "The widget set number has been incremented. There are
fewer bugs in most of the things, while others have new bugs. Some of the
parts have been moved to better places."
Now, some of that is just the nature of open source — it's not like we
have a management team that can tell everyone what they ought to be
working on. But, as a project, we certainly have the ability to look at
what we can _find_ in the world of open source, figure out what we need
to do to connect it together, and thereby solve actual user problems. If
we had a bigger emphasis on doing this systematically, the marketing
_materials_ would basically write themselves.
Call for Help
-------------
At Flock this year, Joe Brockmeier suggested that Improved Marketing
might make a good 12-18 month Fedora Objective. I've been reflecting on
that for a while, and, given the kick from the above, I'm thinking that
it's a good idea. But, going back to my first line here, it'd be most
awesome if we had the objective captained by someone with an actual
background in this area. Someone for whom all of this is _obvious
101-level stuff_, not new material. Maybe that's already someone here.
Maybe it's someone you know. What do you think?
--
Matthew Miller
<mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org>
Fedora Project Leader
7 years, 11 months
meeting today (open floor) + near-future schedule (nov 2: design team!)
by Matthew Miller
Let's do an open floor meeting today, and then proceed like this:
Oct 26: Open floor (today)
Nov 2: Subproject report from Design Team
Nov 9: Tickets/Ongoing ("Closing loops", as Remy likes to say
Nov 16: Open Floor
Nov 23: Skip for Thanksgiving week
Nov 30/Dec 7: Subproject report from __________ (Tickets/Ongoing other week)
Dec 14: Open Floor
Dec 21: Skip for Holidays
Dec 28: Skip for Holidays
Jan 4: Open Floor
Jan 11: Tickets/Ongoing
--
Matthew Miller
<mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org>
Fedora Project Leader
7 years, 11 months
propose skipping meeting today
by Matthew Miller
Because I was out for training on Thursday/Friday with no time for
email, not only did I not prepare an agenda, but I've got a big backlog
of email. Remy's at the All Things Open conference, and there's plenty
to do for the imminent F23 release.
*After* the release at some point, we have Fedora Design Team on deck
for an update, by the way.
--
Matthew Miller
<mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org>
Fedora Project Leader
7 years, 11 months
Where In The World is Decause - WITWID
by Remy DeCausemaker
FYI, I will be traveling to Raleigh tomorrow 10/16 through next Friday 10/23 to attend the Opensource.com Community Moderator Summit, AllThingsOpen.org, and some face-to-face meetings at RHT HQ.
I will likely be unavailable (or at the very least very divided in attention) during the 10/19 Council Meeting on Monday.
I will likely be unavailable during the OSAS all-hands calls on Mon/Tues as well, but I will be seeing most of you at ATO in person.
I will likely have some time available on Thursday afternoon to meet in the Tower. If folks would like to get onto my calendar, just send me a calendar invite.
Looking Forward,
--RemyD.
--
Remy DeCausemaker
<decause(a)redhat.com>
Fedora Community Lead & Council Member
http://whatcanidoforfedora.org
308C A504 0B47 1503 C9D9 E670 E633 A79B 0BB0 F6D9
7 years, 11 months