[openbeos] Re: The importance of good communications (LONG)

Everyone,

What I see from all this discussion from this list is that Haiku has a 
serious need for better PR. The problem is that the people on the 
project are primarily developers. Overall, developers as a group have 
distinct stengths and weaknesses. They tend not to be overly 
communicative -- but there are exceptions -- and when asked, you tend 
to get a status report which is pretty technical. They are, in general, 
task-oriented people. A lot of managers, sales, and marketing people in 
my experience are people-oriented. Two groups of significantly 
different people. As a result, it takes a lot of effort to really 
connect with someone from the other group and there tends to be a lot 
of moaning and complaining instead of building on each other's 
strengths.

There are quite a few people without coding skills which have talent in 
other areas but still want to help. I actually asked Michael Phipps 
about a Marketing / PR Team and the official Haiku take on it is that 
if there is someone out there with real world marketing / PR 
experience, then we're interested in having that kind of help. Back 
when the whole Creative Design Team was created, this is what I 
actually thought it was for. It still can be.

As a core Haiku developer, I've become much more acutely aware of the 
whole business aspect of software development with working on the whole 
commercial software development thing with Capital Be -- hours spent 
studying lots of stuff I might never have even looked at before. While 
this does not make me an expert (nor would I claim to be), I am at 
least beginning to understand the basics and the value of all the non-
coding aspects and how much we really are missing. The vast majority of 
my coding time has been devoted to getting Capital Be out the door, so 
as much as I'm trying to work my way back into being able to contribute 
code the way I did years ago, I can easily see my own job changing into 
more of the jack-of-all-trades that is really who I am. 

Koki, if this is something that you know how to do, I'd be willing to 
work with you to help get this whole other area for Haiku off the 
ground and sort-of organized. Michael Phipps has a lot of both Real 
Life work and Haiku work on his plate. Time is at a premium for him and 
I'd like to see if some of us can help him with that.

Here's where I can see needs:

Something similar to Haiku weekly.
The guy who does it just doesn't have much time to devote to it, but it 
is an exceedingly important task. It probably could be handled by 
someone who took some computer classes at university but needs a brush-
up on their C/C++ skills and/or doesn't know the Be API very well. It 
could be both productive, good for PR, and a learning opportunity all 
at once. FWIW, someone could just talk to the guy who does Haiku Weekly 
and volunteer to help him. While not officially part of Haiku, I doubt 
there would be much resistance, if any, to changing that.

Website work. 
There's a lot of room for help from non-coders here because Haiku while 
it might be difficult to coordinate all the different people in the 
community to handle different things considering that it's a mish-mash 
ATM, it wouldn't be difficult to help keep an index of major Haiku-
related sites, like the various blogs and Flickr collections and the 
downloadable builds made by our build factory and others. There has 
been a little discussion on bringing old content from the current site 
(like the newsletters) over to Drupal. While there is a technical way 
to do this en-masse, I'm sure a few non-technical people could do it a 
newsletter at a time in an acceptable way. 

User Support
This is mostly being responsible for the forums and the wiki. Urias, 
ar1000, and some other guys have been quite good at handling this and 
while it needs some reorganization (like doing away with the individual 
team forums, for example), it is still a good means for handling a lot 
of support-related issues that would just confuse discussions on the 
main mailing list.

Documentation
This has been pretty badly neglected, but now that an alpha release 
isn't that far off, this really needs to be given some attention. The 
wiki seems like a good place to start for this. Documentation is 
something that anyone new to Haiku and/or BeOS in general will need to 
understand how things work and how to get answers. It needs to be 
organized in a way that streamlines finding information. All that would 
be required would be some knowledge and experience with the OS and 
decent English skills. **No coding required.** It seems like a 
thankless task, but it is a very important one and it could be fun, 
too. It is also a way for creative people to make eye-catching 
diagrams, add goofy bits about the project and its people, and so 
forth. If you've read the BeOS Bible by PeachPit press, you probably 
know what I'm talking about.

Administrative support.
This is not a shot at Michael, by any means, but there needs to be a 
person to help coordinate a lot of it and keep the lines of 
communication open between all the efforts going on. I'm willing to 
volunteer for this one -- I know a little bit of everything so I can 
cause lots of different kinds of headaches. :D

Branding-related items.
Stephan has been mostly working on this one, but it needs to be 
organized in a way that others can contribute their own creations. I'm 
talking about things like wallpapers, different forms of the logo, and 
so forth. We already have an official logo for official Haiku stuff, 
but why not allow others for unofficial use, like on other peoples' web 
pages and such?

--DarkWyrm

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