"What is GNOME?"

[Jeff Fortin Tam <nekohayo gmail com>]

While I'm on this mail frenzy, I might as well share this food for
thought: it occurred to me, when discussing with someone from a field
completely unrelated to Free Software and the circles we usually hang
around, that Joe Plumber visiting the GNOME website would never know
what GNOME actually is even if actively looking for it.

If you go to https://www.gnome.org you see "About Us", which talks about
the community (great!). You see "Applications" (which might be nuked at
some point and replaced by "Technologies"?), you see "Foundation", and
on the front page you see "GNOME 3", with a button that leads you to the
"Discover GNOME 3" page.

Now, the Discover GNOME 3 page is pretty good in itself, however it
reads more like a "release notes" page, a "here's what makes GNOME 3
cooler than GNOME 2" type of page. There is actually no explanation of
what GNOME *is*, so the only people who will easily understand that page
are those who know what a "Desktop environment" is, or what GNOME is, or
have some idea of what GNOME OS might mean, and so on. Joe Plumber will
read that page and think "that sounds shiny but... I still have no clue
what this is all about".

Methinks it might be time to retire the "discover GNOME 3" concept and
turn it into "What is GNOME?" page. It's not 2011 anymore, it's not like
we're still comparing ourselves to GNOME 2 :)


Throwing the idea out there.
Any takers?