Supporting Software Product Releases with Social Media Tools

March 20, 2011 //
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I’ve been sitting on this mind map for quite some time now but never got around to properly documenting my thoughts. Chances are that it will never happen so I’ll put it up for grabs.

The mind map is huge. In an ideal world, a new release would be supported by a whole team pushing buttons on all sorts of social networks. The world is unfortunately rarely ideal, so the team will have to prioritize depending on its size, audience and preference. The good news is that it will work just fine.

This is a humongous amount of work that will pay off nicely if done right but you certainly don’t want to plan with all of this for a patch release.

Supporting Software Product Releases with Social Media Tools

Supporting Software Product Releases with Social Media Tools (click for full size)

The social networking sites mentioned can of course be exchanged with sites that best meet your needs and your audience.

An important part of every release is obviously the announcement itself. Preparing and writing a release announcement – depending on the size of the project and the number of people involved – warrants a mind map of its own. However, some of the tasks outlined here overlap with preparations for the announcement. Coordination does make sense, as usual.

You can download the original XMind file here. If you’re looking for some best practices, check out this document written for the KDE 4.2 release.

Community: my first steps

March 7, 2011 //
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Time flies. 15 years ago I published my first community fuelled website. It’s long gone of course but I can still tell the story.

It all started with an anniversary

One of my all-time favourite children’s TV show went into it’s 25th year at the time. I still watched it on a regular basis and so I had an idea. Why not send a special greeting card? One that would be fun to make and a bit different?

There was the plan

I had been playing with HTML and spent a decent amount of time on mailing-lists and in usenet groups. So I sent out a call to action to some German groups and asked for small text contributions to the greeting card . And I asked people to spread the idea. I don’t remember how many people replied but in the end I had a nice collection. I charmed a friend to upload my orange page to the tiny webspace he had available at university.

Lesson learned

Looking back it appears to be a small thing but it taught me something important: if you have an idea, run with it. If others like it, run the whole way. The tools have changed and my approach to community has matured but at the heart of it, this lesson still stands.

(Thank you, Birte, for reminding me today!)

Career opportunities and YouTube videos

March 2, 2010 //
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Hum… I guess it’s been a while since I last blogged. This time however I have something to show off: Till’s and my presentation at CampKDE is on YouTube. And without further ado — enjoy the show.

The slides are quite visible in the video but I thought embedding them here wouldn’t hurt.

View more presentations from Alexandra Leisse.

If you are interested in the rest of the talks, head over to the KDE Promo channel on YouTube and take a look. Slides are available from here.

Organize a Booth and Keep Your Sanity

November 6, 2009 //
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After having a quick chat with Kévin Ottens on IRC we agreed that it would be useful to write up a small how-to explaining the Art of Booth Organization™ as a follow up on the how-to for sprints I posted earlier. He has been poking me about it repeatedly, so voilà, Monsieur, finalement, c’est fait.

While writing down all those steps I realized that organizing a booth is more complex than I thought. Chances are high that I have forgotten something more or less important. The comment section is yours!

KDE gives you light by funadium on Flickr

KDE gives you light by funadium on Flickr

Let’s say you come across an interesting event in your area or elsewhere and you think KDE should be present and have a stand in whatever shape and size. How do you proceed?

Register a booth

This is obviously the first step. Usually, the call for projects closes several weeks before the event takes place. As soon as it is open and you have decided that you’d like to be there send an email to the kde-promo list. Ask if anybody has already registered a booth and/or would be interested to organize one together with yourself.

Go to kde.org and copy and paste the usual about blurb on the front page for the registration or look for one of the translated versions. It keeps things consistent and saves you a lot of thinking. Read the rest of this entry »

Qt 4.6 Beta Program

October 2, 2009 //
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We are approaching the release of Qt 4.6. To make it rock as much as we can we have just started a beta program where we collect feedback. If you’re interested in joining, please read the details on Volker’s blog.

The program is open to everybody and and joining is not needed to test the beta.

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