Open Stack

Hello PTL's, release liaisons, and all those interested.

The changes on our side to support a release cycle highlights page have been
completed, and things have settled a bit from the Summit activies, so I think
now is a good time to get things going again for this.

See below for the background, but if you missed it or have forgotten by now, we
plan to have an easier way to collect significant "highlights" for each release
cycle in order to collect "key features" flagged by each team that marketing
teams can use during release communication times. The goal is to reduce the
number of times PTL's get asked by various groups to "tell us what changed in
this release."

The way we are approaching this is by adding a "cycle-highlights" key to the
deliverable file for your project [1]. This field will take RST formatted text
that will then be rendered into the highlights page we will share with
marketing.

Our goal is to have roughly three "highlights" per team for each release, but
this will vary based on the needs of the team and the amount of work done
during the cycle. If there is only one significant change to share, that is
fine. If there are five, that's OK too. Just keep in mind that these should be
limited to only the significant changes that you feel are worth communicating
to the marketing, sales, and end users out there that need to know what to
expect.

We will want to start collecting this information as we near RC releases, but
feel free to start adding items of interest with the upcoming Queens-2 release
if you already have changes worth noting.

And please ask here or in the #openstack-release channel if you have any
questions about how this works.

Thanks,
Sean

[1] http://git.openstack.org/cgit/openstack/releases/tree/README.rst#n466

P.S. This is for cycle_* deliverables only. If you see a need for this with the
independent releases, let me know and we can talk about how that might look.


On Tue, Sep 26, 2017 at 02:33:09PM -0700, Anne Bertucio wrote:
> Release marketing is a critical part of sharing what’s new in each release, and we want to rework how the marketing community and projects work together to make the release communications happen. 
> 
> Having multiple, repetetive demands to summarize "top features" during release time can be pestering and having to recollect the information each time isn't an effective use of time. Being asked to make polished, "press-friendly" messages out of release notes can feel too far outside of the PTL's focus areas or skills. At the same time, for technical content marketers, attempting to find the key features from release notes, ML posts, specs, Roadmap, etc., means interesting features are sometimes overlooked. Marketing teams don't have the latest on what features landed and with what caveats.
> 
> To address this gap, the Release team and Foundation marketing team propose collecting information as part of the release tagging process. Similar to the existing (unused) "highlights" field for an individual tag, we will collect some text in the deliverable file to provide highlights for the series (about 3 items). That text will then be used to build a landing page on release.openstack.org that shows the "key features" flagged by PTLs that marketing teams should be looking at during release communication times. The page will link to the release notes, so marketers can start there to gather additional information, eliminating repetitive asks of PTLs. The "pre selection" of features means marketers can spend more time diving into release note details and less sifting through them.
> 
> To supplement the written information, the marketing community is also going to work together to consolidate follow up questions and deliver them in "press corps" style (i.e. a single phone call to be asked questions from multiple parties vs. multiple phone calls from individuals).
> 
> We will provide more details about the implementation for the highlights page when that is ready, but want to gather feedback about both aspects of the plan early.
> 
> Thanks for your input,
> Anne Bertucio and Sean McGinnis
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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