[darcs-users] marketing, darcs-2 bugs and a tiny bit about darcs 3

[Eric Kow]

On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 22:18:14 -0400, Max Battcher wrote:
> It certainly is easier to commit to being a designated opinionated  
> blowhard a few times a month. :P

Excellent.  I've added you to the wiki, and will be looking forward to
whatever schemes the two of you (and whoever you recruit) cook up.

Please imagine me drumming my fingers as I say this.  I'm in favour of
being opinionated blowhards so long as they are aware of their being
opinionated blowhards and putting it to good use.

> I might be up for some variation of  that role...  Is it too early to
> ask about some sort of Marketing Budget  stipend? :)

:-)

I think it would be good to think (perhaps a little aloud) about what
you would use a marketing budget for.  But I do suspect it is a bit
early.

Anyway, in our first fundraising effort, we've explicitly said that
we'll be spending this on travel and that any surplus will go into the
"summer" project fund (by 'summer' I either mean the period in which
Google hold their Summer of Code programme; or two periods in the year
which correspond to the seasonal summer on both hemispheres).  So this
is what people are giving us money for and we should show that we can
put it to good use.  If we do spend our first moneys successfully, then
it might make sense to start a new fundraising call, this time saying
explicitly that we intend to set aside some $X for our Education
Campaign.

>> For what it's worth, one idea I've been kicking around is to publish a
>> "tip of the month" on http://blog.darcs.net, the idea being that we need
>> to increase the general level of darcs expertise in the world and
>> working awareness of what makes darcs especially useful.  This is kind
>> of thing we need somebody to declare themselves responsible for, i.e.
>> worrier-in-chief-about-X.
>
> I could see that being an interesting series.  I was just now thinking  
> perhaps something along the lines of a "Darcs Myths" series to touch  
> upon common complaints against darcs (and patch theory and Haskell, to a  
> lesser degree, and what have you).

Just be careful not to follow the "state the myth; refute the myth"
pattern (which apparently serves only to reinforce the myth)

> Of course, some have said that darcs already blew its chance with darcs  
> 1 conflict fights... That actually segues into the "demographics" that  
> need to be considered by marketing efforts:

This is the kind of thinking I need Somebody Else to do (so yes,
welcome!).

I should add that I concur with Stephen on being careful not to bash git
(especially when we still have so much to learn), and also focusing less
on selling darcs and more on giving people the information they need to
make good choices.  Just the facts, so to speak.  There's a lot of
unknowns in the darcs world, like what repository sizes can darcs really
handle?  How true are the GHC experiences today?  If we could shed light
on these questions (is it time to launch the Darcs Users Survey?), I
think it would add to everybody's confidence about darcs.  Need more
data!  I guess I'm suggesting for the Darcs Marketing and Intelligence
Bureaus to be one and the same :-)

-- 
Eric Kow <http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/home/Eric.Kow>
PGP Key ID: 08AC04F9
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