Hi,
A suggestion which may or may not be feasible, but which would
perhaps help, is to add an extra tab labelled "Developers" and link
it to the same page as the "Contributing" page.....
If I'm not mistaken, these "tabs" are part of the initial site setup,
and can only be setup by the Courcecast folks. This may have changed
-- I admit I haven't been keeping up with these kinds of things all
that well.
The tab-items are not more than links in an unsorted list stored in some
in header.vm linked file, but...
I think this would be redundancy we could probably do without however.
Agree completely.
I personally feel "Contributing" is a good/friendly term catch all
term for all sorts of contributions, which is what the page itself
indicates. However, maybe we could also think about the term
"Participating" instead?
I also like contributing since it's more generic. Whether participating
is better... I'm not so good in choosing on such linguistic issues, the
more since my native language is not English. Participating sounds to me
like having a slightly lower treshold, but maybe also less like getting
things done... I would prefer leaving it as is, since having
participating link to contributing.openoffice.org makes not much sense,
or we should create a new subdomain participating. Too much hassle.
On Maarten's suggestions...yes, more discussion here on this list is
appropriate. And, some of the "virtual" sub-domains like "development"
are not controlled by members of the general dev-website list.
Who is responsible for contributing.oo.o? And is Erwin Tenhumberg (the
development maintainer) reading this list?
Re updating the Contributing page, style-wise, itself. Well...my
feeling is that it has a nice friendly look-and-feel, and when it was
redesigned about two years ago, this was felt to be a good thing. It
was purposely kept light in feel as opposed to some of other pages. I
don't think the goal/focus of this page has changed really.
I wouldn't change its goal but it could use some improvments, both
content and stylewise. First content should be minimalized imho.
Contributing acts like a portal to the important projects of OOo. But
now features too much text to my taste. To name a few issues I have
with the content:
- the programming page can be much shorter when things are combined a
bit (maybe removing some of the detailed stuff).
- writing e.g. FAQ's is also about helping users, but not mentioned
there... and writing source-documentation is soo much different than
writing end-user faq's.
- quality assurance is rather abstract
...
A suggestion could be:
I would like to contribute using my...
Technicall skills (programming/writing code documentation)
Creative skills (art/marketing/website)
Communicative skills (marketing/help/end user contact)
Eye for details (qa/marketing)
And of course:
Money is always helping.
And maybe it's also good to present a very simple way of how one could
start contributing by finding the appropriate project and outline the
basic workflow (first announce you'll want to change/start on one of the
mailinglists and generate feedback... etc.
Also, all the links could use a short summary of what's behind it, to
reduce needless clicks... Or to help finding the right place.
When referring to the style I commented mostly on the icons used, they
aren't very consistent stylewise, and those who are are to my taste too
cartoonesque (not looking very professional) to my taste. Also header's
are kind of inconsistently with the default's style (they are not even
headers in a symantical sense), which to me is inappropriate.
This discussion started out with the problem of having more C++
developer participation. Again, *finding* the development page is not
a problem. It's what's on THAT page that needs improvement, and
maintainers of the main website areas do not have access to that.
You are right, first things first. But I think, even though issuezilla
is well accessible using the my pages, the questions about where to find
issuezilla are related to somewhat a similar problem... and people who
ask at the art mailinglist how to help out the website, and the other
way around... And then the people who dare to ask could be only the tip
of the iceberg of people who once intended to help (at least that's what
I would think).
What I'm suggesting at this point is that these comments be forwarded
to whoever is maintaining that area -- this is not clear to me at the
moment but I'm sure we can find out.
The development page is maintained by Erwin Tenhumberg, at least that's
what that page says... maybe one of us should contact him, and ask him
if he could join this discussion? Or...
Yours,
Maarten
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