Re: Lilypond lobbying?

[Graham Percival]

On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 12:01:32PM +0200, address@hidden wrote:
> My question is: what can we do, as a community, to overcome this
> type of hurdle?

There is a lot we could do to "spread the word".
- send release announcements to more places.  I've only ever
  announced things to lilypond-info; not even people on the
  linux-audio-developers mailing list know that 2.14 is out!
  There simply isn't anybody currently involved in development
  who has any interest in sharing our news.
  (if you do, we have a few google tracker issues for you to
  work on!)

- we could make a concerted effort to blog / facebook post /
  google plus post / twitter about lilypond.  Say, pick one
  week to be "publicity week".

- etc.

At the moment, I think such efforts are premature.  We don't have
regular releases; in fact, we can't make *any* releases at the
moment.  Any open-source person who wants to help out will quickly
discover that we don't offer any easy way to get involved (since
the lilydev iso is unavailable, but the CG pushes that fairly
heavily as *the* way to help out).  etc.


Now, I *am* aware that I have a cognitive bias towards perfection
(and against publicity), so I can't honestly claim that I think we
would ever be "ready" for a big publicity push.  But as long as I
can point out major flaws (i.e. type-Critical), I don't think we
should be pushing forward on this.

That said, anybody could tackle the google tracker items about
announcements/publicity/etc.  Those are probably a prerequisite
before any kind of "unified" publicity push, anyway.

> So, is it appropriate for a representative from the development
> team to contact competitions like this on the behalf of the user
> community to signal non-understanding and/or outrage?

No.  You can express your own personal outrage as a Dr. Composer,
but I see no reason to bring the development team into it.

Cheers,
- Graham