Re: 9.5 Release press coverage

On Wed, Jan 13, 2016 at 1:01 PM, Simon Riggs <simon(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:

> On 12 January 2016 at 14:58, Josh Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> wrote:
>
> Yes, it's worth discussing "how can we do better next time". But
>> EnterpriseDB is, as a company, a big contributor to the PostgreSQL
>> project, so please let's treat the EDB folks as contributors and stop
>> with the shit-fests.
>
>
> If we are to consider EDB's contributions, would it not also be reasonable
> to consider other people's contributions as well, since those have been
> obscured?
>
>
That makes a good point, and we should probably be careful about that in
*our* press release (not the one EDB posted). This time, Heroku, NEC and
Crunchy got singled out to be mentioned in the press release. Neither
2ndQudrant *or* EDB got mentioned for example, and I'm pretty sure those
two were still the biggest contributors. Whether intentional obscuring or
not (my guess is is't not intentional but a sideeffect), that doesn't look
too good. I think we should have a general policy that the community press
release simply not include the name of the companies that sponsored the
development at all.

We have typically not mentioned the individual developers either in the
press release, and I think that's a good practice. They are credited in the
release notes where we have space to credit *everybody*, and do so in a
fair way. So I think we should go back to not doing that.

As for the EDB press release, the *biggest* problem was that it was sent to
-announce and approved there. Those were two mistakes in a row. Mistakes
happen, let's just try not to do that again.

The wording itself wasn't very good, with the way the "announced" verb was
used. We certainly can't prevent them from doing that, but we should
forward that feedback and ask that they be more careful about that wording
the next time. I see no problem doing that, that's treating them as part of
the community. That their press release focuses on features that were
written by their employees makes perfect sense -- so I see no problem with
the rest of it. They also called out a number of features written by other
companies without mentioning them - I think that's fair game as well. It's
really the headline that's bad with it, and that's the one we should give
them feedback on. That and possibly the reference at the bottom to email
sales(at)enterprisedb(dot)com to get more information about PostgreSQL.

I think we should clearly give Renee and her team that feedback. In my
experience, they are pretty good at listening to such feedback.

If EDB alone generated 60% of the readers (I can't comment on whether that
is true or not), then I think we can say that the rest of the community PR
effort failed. The fact that they are the ones that got into papers that
wanted to interview someone in person and called them makes a round of
sense - the community doesn't really offer that up (other than a list of
phone numbers -- but that's pull rather than push). But if their written
press release hit that many more target than *our* written press release
did, then our written press release failed.

And to be clear - those are my personal statements, and not a "coordinated
response from -core". Others there may disagree.

--
Magnus Hagander
Me: http://www.hagander.net/
Work: http://www.redpill-linpro.com/