[openbeos] On the new Haiku website
- From: "Jorge G. Mare (a.k.a. Koki)" <koki@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: openbeos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2006 16:05:06 -0700
Hi,
Being the website an important part of marcom, I would like to work
closely with the web team to make the best of it. I actually started
writing this message to Waldemar, but then I realized that it would be
beneficial to get feedback from others on the list, so here I go.
I still need to get up to speed on many things, but nevertheless would
like to make some comments about the new website from what I have seen
so far. I realize this is work in progress, so please take these
comments as food for thought. The idea behind them is primarily to help
us figure out how to best shape our message to what the needs of the
project are at this point in time. Note: these comments are not in any
particular order of importance or priority; they are just the things
that I have noticed so far.
# Focus
From the recent discussion on the Haiku list, it is clear that the
primary audience of the project should be developers (at least for the
time being). The content and its organization should reflect this focus.
If there is no opposition, I will present some specifics in the next few
days that could help achieve that focus.
# Separation of official and community maintained content
There is discussion on the list about what to do with forums and
community content. Should they be under the haiku-os.org umbrella? Or is
it better if they are moved to a different (and distinctive) domain?
This questions probably arrive from the concept of making a clear
distinction between officially sanctioned information and community
maintained content
While I advocate such separation, I am also aware of the benefits of
keeping everything under the same roof in terms of brand identity and
recognition. It's may be a bit tricky, but I feel that the benefits of
keeping community-driven content such as individual's blogs, forums,
etc., as well as eventually international chapters of the website
(Japanese, Spanish, etc.), under the same domain outweigh the potential
downsides.
Creative use of UI and web design combined with the use of subdomains
would be enough to provide the distinction that is needed between the
two types of content. I would like to discuss this with DarkWyrm to see
if we can contribute to the design of the new website to cope with this.
# Future vs. History
What excites/motivates engineers (our primary audience) more? The
history of the technology, or the future potential that said technology
has? I asked myself these questions in reaction to comments on the list
about the absolute need to include our heritage in the “What is Haiku”.
Maybe it's me, but among BeOS fans I see a marked tendency to focus on
the historic background of the OS. For example, the “What is Haiku”
introduction on the new website
(http://plonetest.haiku-os.org/introduction) dedicates about 30% to try
to describe what Haiku is (one sentence), and then the remaining 70% to
a historic background.
While there is nothing inherently wrong with that per se, and as BeOS
fans we will always feel strongly about BeOS, from the perspective of
generating interest among developers that are outside of the old BeOS
community (which is what I think we need, to paraphrase a comment by
Jonas Kirilla on OSNews.com), I strongly feel that we need to make a
conscious effort to stress the existing merits and the future potential
of Haiku. This would also, in the long run, help Haiku develop an
identity of its own.
# Being realistic about resources
Several people on this list have given great ideas on what could be done
on the website to make it better, such as BFS-like network file system
service, collaboration tools, etc.. While it would be cool to have many
of these features, we need to be realistic about our resources. It is
better to have a site that, while modest, it can be fully maintained, is
always up-to-date and provides a consistent message and information that
is useful to the audience that we are targeting, rather than a site with
a lot of information that may not be up to date (and therefore not
useful), due to lack of resources. In other words, let's not bite more
than we can chew, and take this one step at a time. :-)
Sorry for the long rant. Feel free to comment, criticize or refute any
of the concepts exposed here.
Koki
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