[openbeos] Re: the new website

Hi Stephan,

Stephan Assmus wrote: 
Oliver Tappe <openbeos@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I tend to agree with Koki: The developer articles will be personal views that reflect the daily life of us haiku-slaves, won't they? >;o) Pretty much like Axel's blog was when he got paid by haiku, some of his entries were real articles, others were quick updates.
Newsletter articles, on the other side, have a specific aim, which is to "build value" (as Koki put it), ideally giving insight as well as contributing to the overall public image of the project. They will tend to be longish and each of them will hopefully have a clear, specific topic (which in my experience is only rarely true for personal articles).

Furthermore, I see the personal articles as being in the domain of the individual developer, while any newsletter articles (that may or may not be written by developers) are in the domain of marketing, i.e. this is where the marcom team may insist on change of wording, etc. While this may sound like PR-machinery-hell, it is merely the basic principle that will allow marcom to keep control over the official view project haiku will present to the outside.

If we can agree on that separation, it should be easier to avoid those highly emotional discussions between developers and marcom about the effect of the PR-machinery: it should simply be obvious for any newsletter article author that marcom has the final say on the article. And it should be obvious to the marcom team that they have nothing to complain about any developer article.

It might even be the case that marcom may explicitly request articles about certain topics to be written within a certain timeframe, in order to achieve any goal. This, of course, is totally opposed to the self-motivated notion of developer "blogs".

You guys keep discussing the idealistic way... what you seem to completely forget is that the new website was designed to fix a specific problem. And if your view on the new site would be fully implemented, we would have that same problem again/still! Which is that "official news letters" will be released once every three quarters of a year.
There is your visions on the one side, but the real Haiku project (the people behind it with their limited resources) on the other side. Where is the content going to come from that goes into official news letters? Will you have three or four articles all at once every month? Our website is going to look _again_ like their is no progress.

Maybe I did not explain myself properly, so let me try again. :-)

The newsletter is an *additional* channel of communication. It does NOT replace anything of what you had originally planned, but rather complements it. Even if we have only one newsletter a year (which would well be the case at the beginning), it would still be additional material, so there is really no need to be concerned about giving the impression of no progress.

With regards to where the material would come from, I envision many opportunities for articles from people beyond the core developers (I hope this is not a problem); the content will also go just beyond coding (I hope this is not a problem either). Specifically, there is WalterCon to report about; there can be interviews, so that the outside world starts knowing a little bit about the people inside the Haiku project; we will also pursue contributed articles; at some point in time, there will be other Haiku-related projects (and hopefully products!) that we can report on. I envision that we can have contributions from overseas too, and/or report on regional events where Haiku takes place in one form or another (like when JPBE.net had Haiku at the last Open Source Conference in Tokyo).

I hope this clarifies your concerns. If you have any other specific concerns, issues or questions, let me know, and I will try to address them the best I can. :-)

Koki


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