Hey Kai --
Kai Backman wrote:
We need to keep talking about the name of the tab because it does IMHO
illustrate something pretty fundamental about the site. To start, I
agree that according to the dictionary "Contribution" is probably the
correct term. However, in this case, the dictionary does not help us.
The key is that the tab represents our marketing to a person who might
be potentially interested in getting involved with the project. As
with all marketing, it is not about what -we- think, but what the
other person thinks. If all potential contributors think yellow sites
have the good projects and all other sites are not worth their time,
we better make our site yellow .. :-)
You make some EXCELLENT points...this "wrong" marketing/focus can kill
any web site.
This is a question of principle, do you listen to the other person and
try to understand them, or do you shout your own opinion and demand
they put up with it?
I'm with you! We can not/should not dictate OUR philosophy to our site
visitors.
On the internet you better listen, some other
site is only a single click away.
So I did a quick unscientific sampling of some open source project
sites to see what -they- put in their tab. We want to make the site
easy to use so looking at other sites should give us an idea about
what people are familiar with:
www.mozilla.org: "Developers"
www.gnome.org: "Developers"
www.kde.org: "Develop"
www.opensuse.org: "Participate"
www.debian.org: "Developer's corner"
www.gimp.org "Getting Involved"
www.freebsd.org "Developers"
www.ubuntu.org: "Community"
gcc.gnu.org: "Development"
kernel.org: -
www.apache.org "Get Involved"
So the votes are:
"Develop*" 6 votes
"Get* involved" 2 votes
"Participate" and "Community" 1 vote each
1 blank
I applaud your efforts! :) Maybe "Contributing" doesn't imply to the
user base what it does/might to us. Maybe it's too fiscally oriented.
Given what our Contributing page is attempting to accomplish, however, I
would favor more "Get Involved" (very friendly). I like "Participate"
and even suggested it, but it doesn't really do much for folks wanting
to contribute monetarily now that I'm thinking about it more.
ps. I sent one of the e-mails we had yesterday directly to Louis. I
still have NO idea who is actually maintaining the main
development.openoffice.org index page.
On 8/25/06, Christian Lohmaier <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Well - newbies shouldn't start with CVS but get the source-tarball
instead. But if you want to download using cvs, then click on either
Sure, we would love that to be so. However, the tarball of 2.0.3 does
rarely build. And nobody else builds the tarballs so newbies get no
help when they inevitably have problems. Just scan [EMAIL PROTECTED] and count
the number of successes where someone built 2.0.3 from the tarball
..IMHO. the source tarball download is detrimental and should probably
be removed or hidden somewhere as deep as the CVS is currently.. :-)
[cloph is talking about kernel.org]
There is a link to a page that apparently lists some instructions
on how to access it using git, but it is inaccessible.
All the links labelled "git" on kernel.org work for me. If this was an
issue it was temporary. I still maintain my thesis that the number of
external developers correlates directly with the ease of finding the
source..
Excercise: Order the following projects by the number of external
developers: kernel, mozilla, OO.o. Then order the projects by number
of clicks from homepage to find working source. Find the inverse
correlation. ;-)
--
===========================================================
Kay Schenk
"One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the
belief that one's work is terribly important."
-- Bertrand Russell
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