Change display name?

[bertob]

The current display name has a number of problems, including length, clunkiness, and the potential for trademark issues. Keeping "GTG" in e.g. the app ID is fine, but the user-facing instances of the name should at least not include "GNOME".

If you're interested in exploring some alternatives, I have a blog post on the subject that you might be interested in. Otherwise, one low-hanging fruit option could perhaps be just calling it "Getting Things Done" in UI?

[diegogangl]

Hey @bertob, yeah this is something we should look into now that 0.4 is done at last. "Getting things done" is also a registered trademark. Better not get on David Allen's bad side. Maybe we can find another acronym for GTG?

Pinging @nekohayo @ploum to weigh in on this.

[bertob]

"Getting things done" is also a registered trademark

Ah, didn't know that. So I guess it needs a totally new name?

Some random ideas:

• Done
• Doing
• Doable
• Checklist
• Checkmark
• Checkbox
• Productive
• Enumerate
• Inventory

[nekohayo]

For context, there are a couple of issues with changing the branding, hence why I didn't spend brain time on this so far:

• It was really, really not the most important thing to deal with some months ago (and in what I foresee as the short to medium term), because that's a complicated branding & marketing task that made no sense until the project is thriving again. It wouldn't help us move towards the singular goal of "getting releases out of the door" and "making the project self-sustainable". It's "nice to have", but I didn't allow myself to have that in my personal list of priorities.
• As I pointed out in GNOME's discourse forums, while some people might roll their eyes at the pun in GTG's (nick)name, not only do I find it reasonably funny, but more importantly it has a very long established presence and brand equity. People know and remember Getting Things GNOME, and it was pretty famous. I do take that into account.

I'm not against changing the name if there is an extremely good replacement proposed (and so far I haven't heard or come up with any), however any new proposed naming needs to meet criteria for proper high-quality branding:

• Not infringing any trademarks (good luck with that, see this and that), though even if you do find a "clean" name, unless we register a trademark for $$$, then anyone can come in and trademark our name post-facto and effectively lock us out of our own name...
• Unique
  • Striking and memorable: people can recognize and recall it
  • SEO friendly. This thing needs to land us at the top of search results every time, and allow registering a great domain name for it too.
  • Not a generic word, because that would go against the two previous points. Unfortunately, all of the naming ideas you mentioned fail the uniqueness test.
• Easy-enough to pronounce universally / in any language, ideally (until I put a pronounciation audio sample on the website, anglophones couldn't pronounce Pitivi)
• Not offensive to any major culture on earth (see: Fedora vs Pidora, GIMP, etc.)
• "Ideally" conducive to create a great matching visual brand identity (logo etc.) to reflect it the naming, if needed

One does not improvise such a major replacement. For corp clients, this is the kind of work for which I could spend weeks of research and charge thousands for :) but in the case at hand here, there are a hundred other bugs to fix before I can allow myself to spend significant time on a branding exercise wild goose chase, because while I can mess with the name as much as I want, at the end of the day it's not going to improve users' lives compared to usability improvements in the software itself.

So essentially I'm leaving the ticket open for people to propose/brainstorm names and such (and hey, this is a modern issue tracker, so onlookers can thumbs up/down proposed name ideas, too!), however—in my humble opinion—to be considered they would need to meet the criteria above, as anything less would be throwing away brand equity for little gain.

[ploum]

My take would be to call the software "GTG" without mentioning the meaning (nor that it's an acronym at all).

This would be unique (it's the only gtg in Debian), recognizable and has an established history.

[nekohayo]

I thought of that as well, in the absence of a "clearly superior" unique name proposal, GTG could remain the official name without a mention of the full meaning in the app itself, and only on the wiki as a "nickname" (and labelled as such).

[digitalethics]

I'm interested in joining this discussion but I think brainstorming is way more effective when we schedule an appointment for a video conference. See #430 for this.