Hi, I just want to share some random thoughts. I have read some archives and also some web page. I might repeat some points but I think some things may not have been discussed yet or have not had enough focus. This is a long email and I promise that future mails will be a lot shorter...
1.) Channels: 1.1.) Too many channels I think one problem we have is having many channels for users and developers to communicate. This is only partially a web problem. I think this has also a dependency to IRC and mailing lists. IRC and lists are not considered to be part of the web discussion, are they? This would be more the popular meaning of "Web" that many people are using for what most of us would call the internet and usenet and email. I would suggest to integrate these channels into a web strategy because in fact people (users, developers,...) are using all kinds of services to a) get their information out and b) get the information they want. And in fact people can get answers from WWW, IRC, ML, Jabber or whatever channel/service they are using that is or is not GNOME related. They might even get a good GNOME hint from reading about a GNOME app in Wikipedia! BUT- I think we have a problem in the sense that we communicate too many different channels for use but a) the quality of one service is not always good - this means that you might as a question on IRC and do not get any answerm although generally GNOME people would be able to help you b) People have to choose what service to use and they might stop on the first level like: They go to http://www.gnome.org/contact/ and want to ask a question but do not have a IRC client installed (see also http://live.gnome.org/GnomeWeb/GoalChatClient for discussion) or even know what this is. In Germany I have watched our IRC channel for about a week only to find out that nothing is going on there. But we still communicate this channel as one prefferred way to communicate with us. In the many years maybe many people have tested the channel only to find out that nobody is answering questions. This is no good PR (so this is an aspect for GNOME Marketing) [ On this point I like to make an excursion in discussing double structures in having wiki pages and discussion lists with the same topics. If we consider the number of channels to grow this will result in a general information overload or at least trouble in having to deal with all that channels. We should really think about if we should not rather have an asynchronous and not a n:n relations. For instance have a list that discusses many issues like web and marketing but then have pages for each topic.] 1.2) The right channel I had similar troubles discussing issues inside the Fedora project where you often make the experience on beeing on the wrong channel. I think communicating right in a project like GNOME is a task that requires a realtively high knowledge of organisation structure and long-year knowledge of "not-so-transparent" structures. So maybe the most important problem is transparency - I think that pages like http://live.gnome.org/GnomeWeb/GnomeSubsites in this relation are very important because often knowing what does exist is more important than having the cool brand-new solution - or if you look at it from a different perspective: Something nobody knows of does not exist, really. (BTW: good job Quim! ;-) ) I do not hesitate to admit that I could not say that I have a good overview of that does exist, nor would I be able to recommend a german speaking user a good starting point as a GNOME user (We are working on it!) 2.) The live.gnome.org (LGO) and other wikis I am a big fan of wikis, although they tend to get messy. I think Ward Cunningham the wiki inventor has some good views on it. If you have the time you could view an interview on http://video.google.de/videoplay?docid=-7739076742312910146. As a summary Ward says that maing errors in a wiki is sometimes better than no content or perfect content, because people start to participate when they see: Yes this is somehow right but needs correction. In GNOME Germany we are switching from a MediaWiki only site to a split of Drupal and Moin Wiki, because it was obvious that a wiki that gets too much perfect structure will be dying or lose its wikiness/sexyness. Thats one thing I fear might happen to LGO if we start to clean up some messes. I personally tend to present a mix of good structured pages (that might even be write protected) and pages that have a relation to that structure. This is because it is important that a wiki page has a relation and is no dead-end. Another aspect is that we must encourage wiki users to be courageous and not too respectful (better protect important content from unintentional edits). The other aspect are other websites and wikis. I think some redundancy is good, but we also should consider beeing effective. So we also should consider banning some content. But we must be careful not to act with DisagreeByDeleting (http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?DisagreeByDeleting) - meaning that if we are deleting we should considering either archiving "bad" content or take the time telling people why a page is empty ot what and why they should not add. And to a more general point I think wikis are very different because they often allow anonymous users to start contributing. This is very different to a given administrative structure with passwords and so on. So I do not recommend wikis as a primary website or for representational purposes. This is because they tned to be more chaotic. But I would like to suggest the ability for anonymous users to add content to some pages in LGO. I think there is no need to protect every page to 100%. We could do this by adding an ACL line like: #acl All:read,write to a page. ---- I stop here although I could continue. But first like to here some feedback/comments One thing I practically would like to start with is some kind of commented site map for the LGO wiki because it is hard to find many contents. Thilo ---- http://vinci.wordpress.com Linked In: http://www.linkedin.com/in/tpfennig _______________________________________________ gnome-web-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-web-list
