Dear Engagement, I'm writing this email out of general concern that messaging isn't being coordinated very well. It seems that GNOME hit's these extremely positive breakthrough moments that get little press. At the same time, despite these positive moments you have blog articles that just cause anxiety and have negative social media impacts.
For example Dell just updated Ubuntu to 18.04 LTS on the XPS 13 meaning that GNOME is now the face of Dell's commercial developer machines. This is a hugely positive moment but I didn't see any major press releases anywhere about this. This should have been presented as a major milestone. Maybe some outreach to Dell's desktop team to coordinate on these things would inspire a huge amount of confidence in GNOME in general and generate interest. Then you have these technical blogs. And I understand that GNOME developers are free to express their opinions. But many of these articles cause a huge amount of anxiety and just end up stirring up the same old social media reactions we've seen a million times. GNOME is unreliable, performs poorly and is not a stable project. This reinforces all the wrong assumptions about GNOME. Many of these articles create the impression that GNOME developers are going to introduce some disruptive change to the codebase. In the community and among users a sense of impending doom surrounds the project. Linux on the desktop already has a reputation for being high-risk, this increases that perception further. This even leads me an engineer who more or less understands how GNOME operates to have doubts about it's direction. It would be really great if these various independent GNOME technical blogs were coordinated somehow with the engagement team. That way you could have consistent messaging. Maybe social media training or resources could help as well. It could be as simple as having a review process prior to publishing articles so that the engagement team can provide feedback. If something could potentially have a high impact on the end user this is especially important. In my opinion your message is stronger if you keep things open ended and ask for feedback from the community when discussing these topics. That way the community feels they're being heard and have a stake in project and it's direction. Hopefully you find this feedback useful as a constructive critique. Best regards, Alex GS
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