[UbuntuWomen] WKOW News story on young woman missing classes due to Ubuntu being shipped on her Dell

[Arc Riley]

It's important to note that Ubuntu *users* are *human*.  The response this
story got is human nature.

Consider a news story was about a man ordering a winter jacket, then
realizing that the Carhartt jacket he ordered isn't very warm, and the
company he ordered it from not doing a replacement for a warmer jacket.
There are people very passionate about Carhartt products, men and women, and
if it hit certain mailing lists many of those people would swamp the news
station calling the person a "pussy", "wimp", etc.  Of course this isn't a
response from Carhartt or the retail outlet he bought the jacket from, these
are just people really passionate about Carhartt products who perceive the
news story as an attack.

Most of the people responding were not part of the Ubuntu project.  Most
have not read, much less agreed to the CoC.  Unless we're going to start
only promoting Ubuntu to people who hold themselves to a higher standard, we
should expect no different from what happened here.

Instead I think we need to develop a proper response protocol to handle
these sorts of situations.  A person from the local community team of the
Ubuntu project contacting the news station could have gone a long way to
turning this bad PR around.

Educational material or workshops on dealing with mainstream media can be
developed to make sure at least one person in each LoCo can be delegated as
local media spokesperson.  I suggest this through LoCos because to local
media a local rep is usually more effective than a global spokesperson and
would be able to respond more quickly.
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