Eric Kow wrote:
Hi Max,
I'm very pleased that you're thinking about this stuff, and I'm
wondering if you would be interested in working with Guillaume in
forming some sort of darcs communications and marketing team.
http://wiki.darcs.net/index.html/DarcsTeam
In case I've asked you this before, I'm not trying to twist your
arm; I just thought maybe now you would be in a better position to
do this :-D
The last time you asked me to take on a role it was for Doc Manager just
before Trent stepped up to do it.
It certainly is easier to commit to being a designated opinionated
blowhard a few times a month. :P I might be up for some variation of
that role... Is it too early to ask about some sort of Marketing Budget
stipend? :)
For what it's worth, one idea I've been kicking around is to publish a
"tip of the month" on http://blog.darcs.net, the idea being that we need
to increase the general level of darcs expertise in the world and
working awareness of what makes darcs especially useful. This is kind
of thing we need somebody to declare themselves responsible for, i.e.
worrier-in-chief-about-X.
I could see that being an interesting series. I was just now thinking
perhaps something along the lines of a "Darcs Myths" series to touch
upon common complaints against darcs (and patch theory and Haskell, to a
lesser degree, and what have you).
Quoting Karl Fogel's /Producing Open Source Software/:
As for users, one of the worst things a project can do is attract
users before the software is ready for them. A reputation for
instability or bugginess is very hard to shake, once acquired.
Conservativism pays off in the long run; it's always better for the
software to be more stable than the user expected than less, and
pleasant surprises produce the best kind of word-of-mouth.
Of course, some have said that darcs already blew its chance with darcs
1 conflict fights... That actually segues into the "demographics" that
need to be considered by marketing efforts:
1. Retaining existing darcs 1 users; pushing them through kindness to
move to darcs 2 (issue 1040 may be a critical need here)
2. Re-attracting disheartened darcs 1 users that have moved on to hg/git
due to issues that may be/are fixed/mitigated in darcs 2.
3. Attracting new users (and subsequently insuring ease of on-ramping
and working to keep them long-ish term).
The order here is actually somewhat important. To some extent you can't
hope to get back group 2 without good words from group 1. Good stories
of "I was there, dude, I had those same problems you had, but Darcs 2
format fixed all of my issues and just about made me breakfast in bed"
go a long way to showing that progress is made and it isn't a case of
"same as it ever was".
And you can't expect to go hard after group 3 if the web is full of
group 2 members complaining about problems that no longer exist or bad
experiences that are much rarer, if not gone. It may be an angle of
attack, as you suggest Eric, to try to convince groups 2 and 3 to play
the "sometimes darcs is the best tool for the job" game. That's a tough
game to play; how many people wish to learn more than one tool for the
job? Making sure that some darcs-related tool has good support for
fast-import and fast-export would help with that sort of thing by
helping to ease minds that history shan't be lost if a tool switch is
needed...
I think that plan might be one in a small set of plans, but I'm
unconvinced it has much room to convince users. Particularly because you
are trying to get people to use (and learn) more than one similar tool
and that's somewhat against human nature.
--
--Max Battcher--
http://worldmaker.net
_______________________________________________
darcs-users mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/darcs-users
