Release event information and a healthy dose of ranting too!

[Troy Unrau]

(this message is for the kde-ev-marketing mailing list members, and is
CC'ed to the release-team and kde-promo mailing list for information
purposes only)

So guys, I figured I'd keep those of you not directly involved in
planning the release event know a little of what's going on. this is
the current situation, although I'm thinking we might want to change
tracks on this a little.

Wade and I have reserved the email address release-event at kde.org for
invitation responses. Right now emails to that address are going
directly to Wade and Myself - but there's no traffic there yet as we
haven't sent out the invitations...

We do have the invitation text prepared already, and have a fairly
extensive list of people we would like to be there. This list includes
just about anyone remotely involved with KDE that lives in North
America (and south america too, if they want to come), the promo
people from the major KDE projects (like KOffice, for example), the
e.V. board, distro and industry partners, Trolltech people, press, and
a few others that we feel would benefit from this event. However, we
have 200 rooms available and we don't have 200 people on our list (nor
would we expect 100% of those invited to attend).

Our plan is to send the official invites to those on the list as of
October the 1st, giving them a few weeks to RSVP, after which we'll
open up the invitation to 'anyone else that wants to come' on a
first-come, first-served basis. We will have BoF's and micro-talks at
this event, so we hope to get a lot of people coming in to talk about
their projects, so it's not going to be just a party and keynote.

We still have no budget from the KDE e.V., so we have no idea about
travel considerations. Nor do we have any official sponsors for this
event other than Google (sponsoring the hotels and catering, which is
worth a lot of money when you think about it).  I don't know if there
was ever a conscious decision not to pursue other sponsors, but that
is our current situation.

[beat]

Okay, so that's what we're working with so far. When at Akademy, Aaron
was talking about his vision for this event - the whole 'wow factor',
and giving them an apple style keynote where people are actually
excited about 4.0. That vision is nice, except that our release will
not be that good in spite of everyone's best efforts.  Right now, from
my experience with trying to use KDE 4 on a day-to-day basis, we are
looking at a serious lack of 'wow factor' and while I anticipate some
improvement between now and december, we're not going to have people
convinced.

I've been thinking that we need to adopt a new press strategy
altogether.  We cannot market KDE 4.0 to the users if their distros
are not willing to ship it, and with the state of KDE in 4.0, they
probably will not be using it. We ought to be pimping Sebas'
Development Platform to the distros, to ensure that it gets included
in distros being released in the next 6 months.  At the same time, we
really should be playing down 4.0 as a sort of early KDE 4, and treat
it almost like a beta, after all, plasma will still be having
'monthly' releases in the post-4.0 world, just like a beta would.

I'd even go as far as to cancel the 4.0 release party and just turn it
into a KDE developers meeting to help get the polish on 4.0.x if it
meant we didn't get negative backlash about 4.0 which will do more
damage to KDE than I'd like to deal with. Call it a micro-akademy,
with a few talks and some hacking and planning sessions. *shrug*

Anyway, we need to talk about expectations for this release - we
should arrange a time for a meeting in #kde-promo or something...

Cheers for now folks

-- 
Troy Unrau
Geophysics Student - University of Manitoba
KDE Gearhead