On 8/17/06, Jorge G. Mare (a.k.a. Koki) <koki@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
# 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.
Just post them! ;)
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.
Well, I see a big problem with everyone sending unimportant content to the official website. This will make it harder to navigate and find important information. If we put it on a subdomain it must not be misunderstood as "official". I prefer what Mozilla did (spreadfirefox for the community) because the majority of our users will not be interested in all this community work. They will just download the latest release and wait for improvements. Probably, ATM our community mostly consists of people wanting to participate, but some day we will have a bigger user base and I want to be prepared with a website focusing on important content instead of blog rants and unofficial information. But I'll wait for your final suggestion.
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.
I'm eager to know what you have in mind.
# Future vs. History [...] 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.
100% agreed. I extended the "Goals" paragraph and I'll try to rework the history stuff, again.
# 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. :-)
Well, that site would have been an independent project for those who don't know what else to do. ;) Anyway, it was just a list of ideas.
Bye, Waldemar Kornewald
