Luke, As a teacher/technology facilitator managing a deployment of about 140 XOs and Dell netbooks with SOAS, I completely agree with your assessment about the site's usefulness.
I think your strawman is a good start. I am willing to help with the teaching resources piece. Best, Gerald On 12/27/09, Luke Faraone <l...@faraone.cc> wrote: > Recently, I attended a presentation along with Walter, Bernie, and Dogi in > which students from Babson College discussed the deployability challenges > faced by Sugar and SugarLabs in the United States. > > One of the things mentioned was the distributed nature of our project. We > have a extensive wiki, a variety of high-traffic mailing lists, and doezens > of blogs. For a teacher or administrator looking into the viability of > Sugar, it can be quite a daunting task to process and synthesize all these > disparate sources into a cohesive message. > > They specifically mentioned the front page of our community, > www.SugarLabs.org, as an example of our failure to communicate. While the > design is visually appealing and graphically stunning, it suffers from being > *too* simplistic in my opinion. In terms of conveying actionable > information, it performs poorly. Most people come to an organization's front > page with specific goals in mind, and it should be our goal to make it as > easy as possible for people to accomplish those goals. > > As Bernie commented during the meeting, "one of the first things as > developers we jump for is the link to the wiki". But this link dumps the > user to a large, disorganized mass of content in which one can easily get > lost. Wiki-gardening is definately a full-time job, probably for more than > one person, but as it is, what we have isn't working. > > Therefore, my proposal is simple: redesign www.SugarLabs.org. As a strawman, > lets say we were to offer, on the main page, jumping off points to the rest > of our community. > > This would include things like: > > - Download Sugar (Sends them off to the [[Try Sugar]] wikipage) > - Explore teaching resources (needs authoring) > - Solve a problem ([[Sugar help]]) > - Get involved > > Of course, we'd need to have these all link to supporting pages, either on > the wiki or elsewhere, but deciding *how* to organize something is a large > part of actually producing *usable* content. > > We can also find a place to put the current SL.o explanation text, but I > don't think it should be the sole, central focus of the page. > > Comments, criticism, and alternative proposals welcome. > > Thanks, > Luke Faraone > http://luke.faraone.cc > _______________________________________________ Marketing mailing list Marketing@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/marketing