Re: [gentoo-dev] GLEP 42 "Critical News Reporting" Round Two

[Stuart Herbert]

On Fri, 2005-11-11 at 18:22 -0500, Chris Gianelloni wrote:
> It seems to be your own quest to have the news *only*
> delivered by portage.

I thought I'd been very clear in the email that you've replied to that I
support making the news available via other ways.  It's the timing that
I'm a bit worried about.

I've managed a few change programmes over the years, and I've had the
most success when a change happened in stages.  The issues centre on the
ability of a large body of people to understand the change that has been
introduced.  People find change itself confusing.  If something isn't
given time to bed in, people never quite understand the original change,
and this undermines the benefits of introducing the change.

We live and breathe Gentoo daily, and we understand this news thing
because we've invested time and effort to kick it back and forward here
on -dev.  The vast majority of our users haven't had that luxury, and
it'll take a while for them to "get it".

If the majority don't agree with me, not a problem; I'm not going to
stop you (like I could anyway!) from putting out multi-channel from day
one.  

But if it was my decision, I'd roll out one channel first, and the
others later.

> By your own admission, you want to reach 100% of
> the users.  The only effective way to do this is to essentially carpet
> bomb the information into several mediums, all containing the *same*
> information.  Think about how advertising works.  The idea is to put
> your "product", the news, in our case, in front of as many eyes as
> possible.  This is best done by utilizing all of the media available to
> us.

That's not my experience of how advertising works.  

My experience with advertising is that you place your product, service,
or message where your target audience is most likely to see it and be
affected by it.  Most bang for your buck, if you like.  The placement
creates the context for the advert.

Most advertising carries what the marketdroids term a "call to action" -
something that tells the reader how to buy the product, or whatever.
Some advertising is about raising general brand awareness (something
Orange was exceptional at), so that the reader will think of the firm
and its products at a point in the future.

Carpet-bombing, by comparison, goes against commonly observed human
psychology.  If you tell people the same thing too many times, they stop
listening to you.  Blitzing people just leaves them too shocked to
absorb the message.

But if you introduce something gradually, you can then turn up the
volume, so to speak, without people being unsettled by it.  There's two
great stories in R. V. Jones "Most Secret War" where Dr. Jones used this
principle to play practical jokes on people he knew during his Oxford
days, for example.

I hope that the technical solution will allow users to choose to see
news about packages that are not installed - so that we can deliver news
that isn't strictly package related, such as new Gentoo LiveCDs, or a
Gentoo event, or so that we can deliver news where the package isn't yet
in the tree (f.ex. announcing a new overlay, or Gentoo-hosted project).

I'm not hoping for a 100% perfect technical solution straight away.
Release early, release often is the F/OSS way.  Once we've agreed on
something that's fit for purpose, let's implement it, deploy it, get to
the tipping point, see how users react, and then improve it.

Best regards,
Stu
-- 
Stuart Herbert                                         stuart@g.o
Gentoo Developer                                  http://www.gentoo.org/
                                              http://stu.gnqs.org/diary/

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