Akonadi communication strategy

Communicating to users what Akonadi is and is supposed to do is rather dificult. Akonadi is fairly low-level, and does not bring immediate benefits or features not available before like Nepomuk - at first. As with Nepomuk, we don't know what the future benefits will turn out to be.

However, we need to communicate better about Akonadi as it can lead to issues, is seen as another 'piece of bloath' and another big promise with little result. By providing clear information and good examples of what Akonadi will do for the user, we can counter these issues.

Poster Boy Features

Meme

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

Purpose

Spread awareness of how Akonadi 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 Akonadi and repeat them in every interview / article we do where PIM comes up. We should have three good examples of new such features for each major KDE release.

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?

You Won't Even Know Your Using It

Meme

Akonadi 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".

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.

Functionality Challenges Are Being Addressed

Meme

The foundations of Akonadi are maturing.

Purpose

As a new technology, Akonadi 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 Akonadi's reputation can be rid of these "early days" hiccups.

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 Akonadi were few and mostly academic in nature: they worked, but performance was not a goal. Akonadi is using more and more infrastructure that has been written with production use and performance in mind.

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 Akonadi, 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.