The brand that is Fedora

There is a nice mail (currently seems to be more of a tentative push) from Mike McGrath about “the brand that is Fedora“. The emphasis is mine.

For a long time now, Fedora folks have not really been talking about the changes in the infrastructure, look-n-feel, the user space focus, the investments into desktop and laptop improvements that has been taking place save the infrequent LWN article. Given that Moonshine has been a sort of the other side of the flex point release this is as good a time as any to get some brand love in place. This would at the end of the day also enable all to arrive at a set of guidelines into:

  • Fedora values
  • How to use the name Fedora
  • The design elements that make up the Fedora Project and are reflected in the artwork, wiki, doc stylesheets etc
  • User Interface guidelines
  • Grammar guidelines
  • Abbreviations
  • Trademarks
  • Typefaces
  • Colors (color palette)

A brand style guide does go a long way in making a project messaging and context “sticky”

Time to form a body for Open Source within India …

This cutesy mail about “organizational reflex” set me thinking whether one should strive towards creation of a national level industry driven body for Free and Open Source within India. Right now, the ones who shoe horn this function include MAIT, NASSCOM and a few scattered bodies including NRCFOSS. The problem in the current scenario is more of communication rather than coordination. What would be well served in terms of functional goals if such a body was formed might include (but not limit itself to):

  • being the primary point of contact for consultation related to standards, industry information. This would enable Government, companies and the media to be what in cliche-speak is called be on the same page
  • be the national coordinator of events around FOSS especially those related to business advocacy
  • align with other FOSS organisations locally and/or globally to increase the quantum of FOSS contributions from India
  • to help in preparation of reports, guidelines and processes that would facilitate migration to FOSS
  • to help improve local businesses around FOSS

Such a thing has been discussed threadbare in the past and most of the times I guess it has ended in failure with splinter groups working towards a select menu of the above possibilities. I tend to think that given the quantum of commercial uptake of FOSS products and services in the corporate and especially in the government segments, this would be as good a time as any to take some steps in this direction.

I pushed a few tentative mails to a select few folks about this – would blog about the responses or the thought processes as and when they decide to respond 🙂