Possibly. Another thing I think the community needs (I think I put this in the survey) is a structured set of video tutorials that take you through learning WO and Wonder. I'm hanging in there, but there is so much stuff, half the time I tell myself I know someone must have made doing this easier, but I don't know where to start looking. If we have video instruction, people would be able to get most of the major WO/Wonder ideas in a few days and have broader overview. The way things stand now, there's a lot of basic tutorials and all the other videos let you drink from the fire hose. Most of the time unless you know something about the topic in the video, you're already lost. If you look at a video learning site like vtc.com, I think short 5 min. self-paced tutorials made against a structured learning path would be hugely beneficial to the community. The next step after that needs to be some kind of marketing campaign. Get the word out there about all the great stuff that WO has to offer modern day developers and see if we can get posts on places like slashdot, macrumors, etc. That's the way modern technologies gain traction. Someone posts a blurb, people look into out of curiosity and if it's good, it catches on. Everyone today thinks WO is dead and that needs to change. Companies and independent consultants don't want to take a chance on technology they don't think they can get help for because the community is small and shrinking. That's why I think this membership fee could be really great for the community as it could fund wocommunity as a knowledge depot/public face of modern WO.
My 2 cents as a recent outsider looking in. Feel free to flame me. :) There's a lot of great stuff working for the community here. We just need to lower the barrier to entry and point people toward the door. -Mike On Nov 17, 2010, at 12:34 AM, Chuck Hill wrote: > > On Nov 16, 2010, at 8:43 PM, Michael Gargano wrote: > >> Definitely not wasted time. I pushed really hard and got my company to give >> us the go ahead on WO this year. It was a hard enough sell to begin with, >> but if there was no one updating anything, it would be even worse. The more >> active the community is, the more alive WO stays. By letting things go you >> signal defeat. I look forward to helping more as soon as I know what I'm >> talking about. :) > > Not knowing what you are talking about can be helpful too. Let's say you go > to the Wiki to see how to run your app through Apache. You find 3 or 4 pages > of contradictory, confusing, and overlapping information. Having that > documented somewhere as a To Fix is more valuable than 10 people finding the > same situation and doing nothing. Once you know something well enough, it is > easier to ignore or overlook problems like this. > > > Maybe we need a Jira space setup for the Wiki? > > > Chuck > > >> On Nov 16, 2010, at 9:33 PM, Pascal Robert wrote: >> >>> >>> Le 2010-11-16 à 20:55, Chuck Hill a écrit : >>> >>>> On Nov 16, 2010, at 5:16 PM, Ian Joyner wrote: >>>>> On 17 Nov 2010, at 11:43, Chuck Hill wrote: >>>>>> On Nov 15, 2010, at 8:43 PM, Ian Joyner wrote: >>>>>>> >>>>>>> One student in his experience report mentioned that professional >>>>>>> programmers should spend extra time on making their stuff usable and >>>>>>> easily installable if they are going to expect people to use their >>>>>>> systems. Salient advice all around and I think he scored 100%. >>>>>> >>>>>> I think an important distinction here is between "expect people to use >>>>>> their systems" and "allow people to use their systems". Wonder largely >>>>>> falls in the second category. "I made this because I found it >>>>>> interesting and you can use it if you want." Neither WO nor Wonder are >>>>>> now marketed products and there is little incentive to make them appear >>>>>> like they are. >>>>> >>>>> Well I meant expect more in the sense of (cmd-ctrl-d) "regarding >>>>> something as likely to happen" and from the Thesaurus in the anticipate >>>>> sense, not the require or insist on sense. >>>> >>>> I understood what you meant. But it seems to me that most of what is in >>>> Wonder was really added from a perspective of "you can use this if you >>>> want, if you don't then I don't care". Which explains the lack of >>>> documentation and tutorials. People are willing to share, but they don't >>>> have the time and resources to go out of their way to make it easy for >>>> you. "If you want to know, read the code." A major reason for this is >>>> that most contributions come from a single person's efforts (meaning >>>> someone working alone). Everyone like to complain about documentation, >>>> but no one likes to write it. >>>> >>>> >>>>> People use Rails, Django, and Pylons because they think they're cool. >>>>> Don't know how to get that cool factor into WO. But removing each hurdle >>>>> would help. Perhaps development on different platforms would help - if we >>>>> wanted to teach WO, we couldn't because that would require students to go >>>>> out and buy Macs (something we subtly encourage but don't 'expect'). >>>> >>>> >>>> I suspect that most people using WO don't care about the cool factor so >>>> they don't spend a lot of time trying to push it. Most of us have been >>>> around long enough to know to disbelieve stories of Technology X being a >>>> Silver Bullet. It seems to me that the driving forces behind technologies >>>> like Rails, Django, and Pylons tend to be younger or more idealistic (or >>>> is that fanatical?). I just don't have the energy for that. I don't know >>>> what the answer is. Maybe we are all too busy and too tired to go out and >>>> evangelize beyond adding to Wonder and presenting at WOWODC. >>> >>> And maybe because it's only a very small group of people who try to do some >>> marketing. Counting the time I took to cleanup the wiki, WOWODC >>> organization, WOWODC presentations, wocommunity.org, mailing lists, etc., I >>> have spent more than 250 hours this year on community stuff. And I'm >>> starting to think that those 250 hours were wasted... >>> >>> >>> -- >>> Pascal Robert >>> prob...@macti.ca >>> >>> AIM/iChat : MacTICanada >>> LinkedIn : http://www.linkedin.com/in/macti >>> Twitter : pascal_robert >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. >>> Webobjects-dev mailing list (Webobjects-dev@lists.apple.com) >>> Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: >>> http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/webobjects-dev/mgargano%40me.com >>> >>> This email sent to mgarg...@me.com >> > > -- > Chuck Hill Senior Consultant / VP Development > > Practical WebObjects - for developers who want to increase their overall > knowledge of WebObjects or who are trying to solve specific problems. > http://www.global-village.net/products/practical_webobjects > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Webobjects-dev mailing list (Webobjects-dev@lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/webobjects-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
