Semantic Desktop communication strategy

Positioning the semantic desktop is not easy. It's a big topic with all kinds of potential but it takes a while to explain all the benefits. Making it more challenging yet, we still don't know what all the benefits will end up being, either.

This leads to understandable skepticism often being voiced in reader comments when the semantic desktop comes up due to this. By providing updated information on resource usage, offering "poster boy" examples of Nepomuk in action and showing how we will be using Nepomuk to do things we already do now (only better) we can turn this around.

Poster Boy Features

Talking Points

If you tag an image in your image viewer, the tag becomes visible in your desktop search. That's how it should be, right?

Meme

There are fun and useful things you can do with Nepomuk today.

Purpose

Spread awareness of how Nepomuk is actually useful to people in their day-to-day lives, justifying it's existence on their computers.

Implementation Strategy

Use a set of "poster boy" features for the semantic desktop as examples whenever discussing Nepomuk and repeat them in every interview / article we do where the semantic desktop comes up. We should have three good examples of new such features for each major KDE release.

You Won't Even Know Your Using It

Talking Points

Akonadi is using Nepomuk to power search and information retrieval features we take for granted such as contact lists. When Kontact is fully Akonadi powered,, you'll end up using the semantic desktop tools without even knowing it whenever you use Kontact. The result is your email/contacts/calendaring system will work better, thanks in part to the semantic desktop framework.

Meme

Nepomuk bring not only new features, it is also helping improve things we already use and rely on all the time as a "behind the scenes" technology. Often you won't even know you're using it, other than it making the software experience better.

Purpose

The goal is to provide counterpoints to "I don't want to tag all my stuff manually" and "I don't care for this new fancy stuff, I am happy with the current functionality I have as it is".

Functionality Challenges Are Being Addressed

Talking Points

Due to being a new kind of technology being brought into mainstream use for the first time, tools for the technologies that underpin Nepomuk were few and mostly academic in nature: they worked, but performance was not a goal. Nepomuk is using more and more infrastructure that has been written with production use and performance in mind. The new Virtuoso storage backend is an important step in this.

As a new kind of technology, KDE packagers were not familiar with it or all the techniques to deliver it in a well functioning manner to their (and our) users. As packagers are gaining experience with Nepomuk, the quality of system integration is improving and a higher quality user experience is resulting due to improved packaging and out-of-the-box configuration.

Meme

The foundations of Nepomuk are maturing.

Purpose

As a new technology, Nepomuk has been shipped in various broken states by some of our downstreams and has historically used technologies that are new and even immature. This is improving, and we need to spread the word so that Nepomuk's reputation can be rid of these "early days" hiccups.