Re: What is GNOME?

[sankarshan <foss mailinglists gmail com>]

On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 10:54 PM, Stormy Peters<stormy gnome org> wrote:

> It's very hard to tell what GNOME is from our web pages. If you don't know
> when you land on gnome.org, you aren't likely to figure it out. An "easy to
> understand desktop" doesn't really mean anything to non desktop/OS
> developers. When you go to About GNOME, you get a list of our
> values/features but not a definition, screenshot or list of projects.

> From the (now infrequent) "Introduction to GNOME" sessions that I did,
a standard query has been "is GNOME a product". This is further
complicated when one lands on gnome.org and, reads the "easy to
understand desktop" bit. Admittedly, there isn't an easy way (at
least, it was not evident to me) around this paradox. I understand
that the "definition" is more of a vision statement and, not a
technical definition per se.

> It's very hard to find a list of projects in GNOME.

This is somewhat linked to the "what is GNOME" problem I'd guess. And,
would projects mean projects that use the gnome.org infrastructure for
hosting or, ones that constitute pretty boxes when tries to visualize
the GNOME "ecosystem" (another cliched word *sigh*) ?

> No where do we say what GNOME stands for.
> No where do we say why we have a foot print as a logo. (There's mention of
> how it came about in a history here,
> http://primates.ximian.com/~miguel/gnome-history.html, but no mention of why
> we/they/he thought the foot was representative.)

The above is an interesting catch :)

> Our current web pages are pretty much for people that already know what
> GNOME is, but we might want to rethink that as we roll out the new webpage.
>
> I think it's a marketing problem. Thoughts?

I have been reading up on the Fedora Community pages and, thoughts
behind the designs. Being an ignorant chap myself, I do get amazed at
how simple tweaks can change the end-user perception of a project
entry page. <https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Website_redesign_2009> has
a bunch of links that can help when discussing a redesign for the
gnome.org page.



-- 
sankarshan mukhopadhyay
<http://sankarshan.randomink.org/blog>