[Live-demo] Marketing artefacts, subversion directories, and source formats

Cameron Shorter cameron.shorter at gmail.com
Sat May 15 15:04:11 PDT 2010


I've written our OSGeo's marketing requirements, and defined what I 
believe to be a list of marketing artefacts that each project should 
produce.

What I wish to do now is to write down very clear guidelines on what 
authors should include in the artefacts so that:
1. We see a level of consistency between projects
2. To make it easy for authors to write. (It is much easier to write to 
a template and with an example than to write free hand).

What I'd like to resolve now is:
a. What subversion directory we store artefacts in.
b. What format we store artefacts in.

svn directory location:
==============
To date, apart from the LiveDVD, there has not been a periodic updating 
of artefacts, fixed around a specific milestone. I'd like to see that 
change, so that we can know that at least once a year (at foss4g) all 
core marketing artefacts are brought up to date. I suggest that all 
marketing artefacts are updated at the same time as the LiveDVD, twice/year.
So I suggest that our marketing artefacts use the same release numbers 
as the LiveDVD and potentially are incorporated into the LiveDVD svn 
directory structure.
I understand that projects may wish to keep their docs with their 
projects, and I'm ok with that.
What I propose is that we initially set up
marketing/artefacts/{trunk,r4_0}/overview/{project}.doc
We will start by putting all overview docs into the above directory 
structure.
Projects may then move their documentation back into their own svn, and 
our scripts can be smart enough to look for them there. (We would need a 
google docs lookup spreadsheet or similar to point to the location of 
project documentation.

source doc format
============
For the 1 page project overview, our target media is both HTML and a 1 
page PDF, with an embedded image. Hence, layout is important, and 
therefore I believe the source format of this material needs to be in 
Word/OpenOffice/GoogleDocs or similar which provides this layout.

Similarly, Quick Starts and Tutorials need to be printed on PDF as well 
as HTML, and contain images.
I acknowledge Hamish's concern regarding inability to bulk change word 
docs, and I admit that is painful. One work around which may work is 
that we can export to HTML, bulk apply changes, then import back into 
word format. (I have done this once and while not ideal, it will 
probably work if we need to change templates or similar).

-- 
Cameron Shorter
Geospatial Director
Tel: +61 (0)2 8570 5050
Mob: +61 (0)419 142 254

Think Globally, Fix Locally
Geospatial Solutions enhanced with Open Standards and Open Source
http://www.lisasoft.com




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