We are assembled at Google Chicago to begin the Marketing Hackfest! Six of us are assembled so far and we're looking forward to being joined by another half-dozen, or so.

We will be tweeting and identic-ing all day and tomorrow as we proceed through our long list of discussion topics and working sessions.

Watch this space for the blog-by-blog.

Sponsored by GNOME Foundation

Update: Before we began, we discussed our target audience—an overarching theme for the two-day hackfest.

Paul pulled opened the discussion by saying that for the next two day, he wanted to talk about end users. Stormy said that she wanted to make sure that we partner with downstream partners as well as go directly to end users; she was also concerned about focusing on either technical users or "all" users. There was agreement among everyone that we can target "all" users effectively.

We are not targeting developers for this two day hackfest.

Stormy pointed out that we haven't had success targeting office and business users. Only when the netbook market broke out, did we and our downstream partners get a lot of traction.

Shaun was worried about sending a message that we aren't good for office users in inadvertently. Paul and Stormy thought we could stay on message without giving people that impression.

Jason was concerned about not advertising for office and profession photography users when the software isn't there yet. There was agreement that those users would be at the outer edges of the bell curve.

Everyone agreed again that we would focus on home users for the two day session.