Re: Linux Journal Awards

["c. schwarm" <c schwarm gmx net>]

> <quote who="Jeff Waugh">
>
> We may joke about geeks voting on website polls, but these are our 
> padawan proto-hackers, the footsoldiers of guerilla marketing, and 
> sirens of word of mouth recommendation. We would do well to have 
> them on our side. I would rate this as our highest marketing (and
> development!) priority of the year.

I agree.

On the other hand, I see no way of doing this. The main way of communication
is the internet and the GNOME web team blocked nearly every way to
communicate, and ways to get to know each other.

1.) Users don't want to participate in mailing lists - there's no preview,
you can't edit your own posts, and you can't integrate pictures. A lot of
new users in the next years probably never heard of "mailing-lists".

2.) The GNOME forum is slowly dying because none of the well known names
from planet.gnome.org participates - you have better chances to get a reply
from them on osnews. Additionally, it allows anonymous postings.

3.) I was told that there should be no dynamic languages used on the GNOME
web server. Funny enought I found out it's no problem to integrate a
different server as *.gnome.org. As a result, "our" apps page is looking
completely different from the rest of the pages - it basically screams:
GNOME doesn't bother about third-party app developers or users.

4.) Due to the policy of art.gnome.org to just show "high quality content"
we saw the "fork" of gnome-art.org - KDE shows us here how to set
up a livid community: users can even upload their own hacker heads for their
posts!

5.) Even the reimplementation of the planet pages by galactic.osnews.com
shows us again what we do wrong: no comments possible, for example. But
planet users are expected to filter GNOME stuff from Non-GNOME stuff.

6.) Our main page is confusing (click on "users" to get redirected to where
you came from), and it's boring (no changes or news except a new image every
three month). Even if we could direct users to it by a sort of web
advertising campaign, most would simply go away after a few clicks.

To summerize:
 - The most interesting pages are either outsite of the gnome pages, or
 - they have no way to participate in a fun way, and 
 - those that do, allow guest or anonymous posting - no a good way to build
a community.

Basically, a community grows because people usually want to "please the
leaders". Our "leaders" hide behinds their blogs, don't talk to you if you
have no plan of their preferred means of communication, and when you find
out how, they complain about the "low signal to noise ratio" on their
mailing list - no surprise when you think that only the most frustrated (or
motivated) users take their time to find out how to communicate. Even the
gnome-love mailing list suffers from missing participation of well-known
hacker heads.

Additionally, a community grows because participants are able to recognise
each other. When I first have to google to find out who, for example,
uranus, is, we'll remain an anonymous mass of geeks. Unfortunatly, an
anonymous mass usually doesn't start to be padawans, foot-soldiers, or
sirens of word of month recommendation.

As usual, everything is IMHO. But my impression is that all our pages say:
"Shut up! We don't wanna talk to you!". How should the marketing list change
that?

Sorry, 

Claus

-- 
Sparen beginnt mit GMX DSL: http://www.gmx.net/de/go/dsl