Comments in line.
-Mikeal
On Feb 13, 2006, at 6:24 PM, Ted Leung wrote:
Hi Pieter,
Pieter Hartsook wrote:
Hi,
There have been some discussions regarding a "landing page" for the
Scooby project that we thought we should take to the maillists for
comments.
I'm confused about what you are asking for here, other than a high
level of visual polish.
When we left the meeting last week <http://wiki.osafoundation.org/
bin/view/Journal/MtgNotes0208>,
I thought that we had agreed on a plan for the landing page, which
called for incorporating elements
from the Chandler project page (the left side navigation) into the
Scooby project page.
When Scooby 0.1 is released we will have three major components of
the
Chandler ecosystem in place as official active OSAF projects;
Chandler, Cosmo, and Scooby. For each project we want to make it easy
for potential developers and others to quickly and effortlessly get
information about the project in order to encourage them to get
involved and begin to build an active community. This effort is in
keeping with Fogel's observations about packaging and presentation:
"A related mistake is that of skimping on presentation and packaging,
figuring that these can always be done later, when the project is
well
under way. Presentation and packaging comprise a wide range of tasks,
all revolving around the theme of reducing the barrier to entry.
Making the project inviting to the uninitiated means writing user and
developer documentation, setting up a project web site that's
informative to newcomers, automating as much of the software's
compilation and installation as possible, etc."
--- Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free
Software Project by Karl Fogel, p. 10
In the last meeting we had a lot of people concerned more than
excited that a lot of end users might be using scooby because we feel
it really isn't ready for that kind of use yet. It can't really
manage persistent data and it's not that practically usable yet, it's
a proof of concept, and impressive one, but still not a usable product.
"The overall goal of Scooby 0.1 is to put in place the major
application architecture pieces in order to provide enough of a basis
to generate interest and have serious volunteers start contributing
to the project. The target release date for Scooby 0.1 is February
14th, 2006." From http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Projects/
FirstScoobyRelease
Reducing the barrier to entry this early, 0.1, will give us more
users with the expectation that this is something they can use, not
just play with.
Our target for this release is mainly developers who may want to see
what we are doing, and I don't think that there is any real barrier
to their entry with the current page.
I think a more polished page will be amazing for a future release.
But I don't see the value in doing it for 0.1 .
When Chandler 0.6 was released we collected information from various
sources and created the Chandler landing page
<http://chandler.osafoundation.org> as visually appealing home page
for the project that organizes and clearly leads visitors to
appropriate pages for more information. Some of the links on the
landing page go to wiki pages, some to the OSAF website, some to the
group blog, and some to secondary html pages on the landing page site
itself. By creating the landing page site instead of using the
wiki we
had more control over the design of the page and made it more
attractive and easier to understand and navigate.
We of course want to provide those interested in Cosmo and Scooby
with
similar easy-of-entry access to information about those projects as
well. The question at hand is, What do we do over the next couple of
weeks to prepare a landing page for the initial 0.1 release of
Scooby?
There are a continuum of solutions:
1) At one end we can create a "landing page" on the wiki and simply
continue to provide a redirect from <http://scooby.osafoundation.org>
to the wiki.
2) We could make a simple html, mostly text-based page that would
free
the landing page from the wiki navigation and editing kruft and allow
a more appealing presentation of the content.
3) We could borrow from the work done on the Chandler landing page,
keeping much of the navigation aids and style the same but modifying
the content to target the Scooby 0.1 release.
At this point, I'll interject my opinion, that if time and resources
allow, I am in favor of option #3. I see the advantages that Fogel
pointed out in having good presentation in the project web site early
in the project in order to lower the barriers to entry. I also
believe
reusing similar design elements on the different project landing
pages
not only makes it easier for someone who is familiar with one project
to more easily find their way in a sister project, but it subtly
reiniforces the familial relationship among the projects.
There is some concern that a graphically polished landing page for
Scooby may inappropriately set expectations that the software is more
mature than the 0.1 release is. I think that we can set expectations
appropriately through the messaging/content on the page. And as the
project matures we can maintain the interface and change the
expectation messaging. Similarly, at this early stage in the Scooby
project some of the documentation (like some of the features and
functionality) may not have been created yet. Again, going back to
Fogel...
I agree that we do need to state very clearly on the demo page that
this is not in a state that people should start putting their real
life calendars in to this product.
The work that has been done makes this application look pretty damn
good for an 0.1, and I think additional packaging is only going to
attract the end user base that we just aren't ready for yet.
Was this end-user base the kind of users targeted in 0.1 releases of
Chandler or Cosmo, or for that matter any other successful open
source project?
If you look at the website for Subversion, which is the project
Fogel is currently working on, you'll see that our project pages
go way beyond the Subversion site in terms of graphics, etc. I'm
sure that Fogel finds the Subversion site adequate to the task. So
I don't really think that we need to spend a huge amount of effort
beyond the basic look of the Chandler project page.
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