Community Team Announcements (was: Sponsorship deadline)

[Paul Sladen]

On Thu, 24 Sep 2009, Jorge O. Castro wrote:
> a reminder that ...

Occasionally I see a phrase appear in XKCD, Free Software, et al:

  "You're doing it wrong"

Ubuntu has been doing things /mostly right/ for five years now; what works:

  1. The Funky Fairy release name is Mark's, lets hear it from him.[1]
  2. Use email [mailing lists] as the primary announcement forum.[2]
  3. Send announcements _before_ reminders.[3]
  4. Figure out the location of the conference in advance.[4]

Blogs and Twitters and Planets and Forums and what-nots are probably all
thrilling and exciting in their own autoerotic ways, but each one has a
limited, self-selected readership and less longevity and uptime than the
archive at lists.ubuntu.com.

  5. "Ubuntu Does Dallas" trips off the tongue so much better than 'UDS-L'!

	-Paul

[1] It gets picked up by the technical press better and acts as a rallying cry.
[2] Asynchronous, buffered, pushed, distributed and almost universally read.
[3] It helps, and ideally bump the deadline back by a week in response.
[4] Less chance of a person based in Dallas applying for travel sponsorship
    ...to what turns out to be Dallas.
-- 
Why do one side of a triangle when you can do all three.  Somewhere, GB.