I've send out short questions to the following communities to make "community focus" blog posts in the coming weeks:
- Design (Heiko)
- QA (Xisco)
- Documentation (Olivier)
- Development (Shinnok)
- Localisation (Sophie)
Meanwhile, here's my draft text for the post about marketing:
1. What has the marketing community been working on in preparation for LibreOffice 6.0?
Two of the biggest items are the press release (PR) and the new features video. The PR goes out to many thousands of people around the world, including journalists, so it's important to get it right! It should highlight the new features, without being too long. The same applies to the video as well - in the past, our videos have been embedded in news articles on various websites.
We prepare these items by examining the release notes and talking to developers about specific features. We also want to reach as many people as possible, which is why we're really grateful for translations of the PR and video subtitles from our worldwide community! One of the goals of LibreOffice is to bridge digital divides, making powerful productivity software accessible to everyone, regardless of their language.
2. What are your favourite new features in this release?
For me personally, the EPUB export feature is great to see. I'll certainly be using it myself, and I know many other people will too. (I monitor our social media channels such as Twitter, Google+ and Facebook, and I've seen many requests for EPUB export over the last couple of years.) The new table styles in Writer and templates in Impress are really welcome too, as they help to make documents look even more polished and professional.
3. What tools/services (eg websites) do you use in the marketing community?
Most of the content we work on is available on the wiki, although there's a lot of old content there that needs tidying up and archiving. We have a marketing mailing list, and we also have marketing calls roughly once a month. These calls typically bring together people from Italy, Germany, Taiwan, France and the UK, and sometimes from Albania and other places too. We'd like to have even more people involved, sharing ideas for marketing LibreOffice, so if you're reading this and want to join, sign up the mailing list and let us know when you can make it!
There are many other ways to help the marketing community as well. Attending events and talking about LibreOffice and free software is great for spreading the word - if you need materials like flyers or stickers that you want to give out, we can help you there. Or if you see a magazine or website article about office software that doesn't mention LibreOffice, and you think the author has never heard of our project and community, you could email him/her with a bit of information and a link to the website. Every little helps!