This change has been a long time coming, and I’m excited to tell you about it. The Marketing SIG is now the Promo SIG!
If you haven’t run into us before, the Marketing SIG is one of the many SIGs (Special Interest Groups) that make the AlmaLinux project do all the cool things it does. We started it in the project’s early days, and it’s grown to manage a lot of important things related to the project. What we do isn’t changing. We’re only changing the name.
What does the Promo SIG do?
We keep AlmaLinux branding consistent, handle outreach, and look after AlmaLinux’s public presence. Our goal is to make it easy for the people who need a free enterprise Linux distribution to find us. I sat down with one of our members a little bit ago and we talked about the Promo SIG and what we do in this Q&A video.
Here are some examples of what the Promo SIG does:
- Planning and staffing events
- Creating content (writing, graphics, videos, and more)
- Maintaining the website
- Managing translations of the website
- Public relations (PR), which means talking to reporters and sharing the news when something exciting happens in the project
- Managing our social media accounts
Many of you care a lot about your privacy, and we respect that. We collect as little information as we can, and we choose less invasive open source tools for the work. For example, we use Matomo, an open source analytics tool, to understand trends in website traffic, and host our own event management system.
Why the new name?
In the open source world, “marketing” is a loaded word, and a lot of people tune it out or avoid it altogether. “Promo” is a better fit for what we do, which is spreading the word about AlmaLinux and helping more people find out it exists. Our focus is awareness. We don’t do ad targeting, and we don’t collect data to sell you anything, so “marketing” never quite fit.
How does the Promo SIG’s work help the community?
Website maintenance and translations keep accurate, helpful information about AlmaLinux available to everyone, in more languages. Events, PR, and social media help us share news and updates with current community members and reach people who haven’t found us yet. That same work helps us find new sponsors and thank the ones we already have, and sponsor support plays a huge role in keeping the AlmaLinux project running.
What’s changing for you
Only a few things really impact the general community with this change:
- Our channel on chat.almalinux.org has a new name to match.
- You can now reach us by email at promo-sig@almalinux.org.
- Our wiki page now lives at wiki.almalinux.org/sigs/Promo.html, and the old address redirects there.
How to get involved
Contributions come in all shapes and sizes, and everyone is welcome. If you have some expertise or time to share, here’s where we could use your help. For any of these, the easiest place to start is the Promo SIG channel on chat.almalinux.org.
- Event staffing: We attend 30 to 40 events a year, and you can help us join more events by staffing the ones near you.
- Content writing: We’re always looking for blog posts, how-to guides, and fun ideas for social media.
- Video: We’d love new participants for our Q&A video series. You can suggest questions or volunteer on the forums.
- Website maintenance: The site is built with Hugo, a static site generator, and there’s plenty of cleanup and addition work to pick up.
- Graphic design: We have stickers, but they aren’t nearly as pretty as they could be! We have ideas, but our execution is… lacking. 😄 If you have an eye for design, throw some ideas at us in the channel!
- Website translation: Translations go through Weblate and are sent to the website repository automatically. To get started, read the Help translating site guide.
We also track lots of ideas and bugs in the website repository and on our GitHub project board. The Promo SIG wiki page has more about how we work and when we meet.
Thank you to everyone who’s been part of this SIG over the years, whether you staffed a booth, wrote a post, translated a page, or fixed a typo on the website. Please come say hi in the channel, pick up an issue, or tell us what you’d like to see from us. We’d love to work with you!
