Re: "What is GNOME?"

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me>]

On Fri, May 15, 2015 at 3:33 PM, Jeff Fortin Tam <nekohayo gmail com> wrote:
> Le vendredi 15 mai 2015 à 10:18 +0100, Allan Day a écrit :
> > Jeff Fortin Tam <nekohayo gmail com> wrote:
> > ...
> > > 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 :)
> >
> > I think it's important to provide an overview of the actual UX that we
> > provide. We never had that in the GNOME 2 days, and the lack of
> > user-facing information was something that people frequently
> > complained about.
> [...]
>
> Ah, I think I was a bit unclear. Let me distill my thoughts:
>
> - The current contents of the GNOME3 page are great, shouldn't go away;

I disagree.  I think it's time to retire it.  In fact, I'm much more
interested in focusing on our mission and less on the UX.  To make
that emotional connection with people, I'd like to see more about the
things we do, and the things we support.  I like to showcase our
support for privacy, our support for software freedom, and our support
for equality and ethics.  Those are things that we have in common with
so many other organizations and people.  Using GNOME means not only
using utilitarian and ethical software, but you're joining a community
that has the same values as you.

> - That page's contents should be expanded to introduce what GNOME *is*;

That depends on what you are interested in.  GNOME the desktop, GNOME
the components of the stack, and so forth.  First you identify the
audience then you say what is GNOME for the identified audience.  I
prefer we first address the social mission before we go into the
technological presentation.

> - The resulting page might as well be renamed "What is GNOME" because it
> wouldn't be strictly about GNOME3 anymore, but GNOME3 and GNOME in
> general. May be more future-proof that way (my argument of "It's been
> 4-5 years, GNOME3 is not a 'new' thing anymore").

Sure.

> So yes present the UX, but introduce the thing before doing that! :) and
> take the opportunity of that intro paragraph to link to other aspects
> like the upcoming "Technologies" page, the charitable mission, etc.
>
> Hope that makes sense.

I actually want to focus more on community on the front page than the
desktop.  In the end, we have to explain how you get GNOME and that
always seems to be a wierd thing because now you have to introduce
your partnes, the distros who have created different experiences of
GNOME.  Some is pure, like Arch, others like Ubuntu is modified, and
then there is Suse and Fedora that have a lot of value add.

Anyways, good discussion.  I had talked with the web team about a new
front page, but I all of htem are engaged in GUADEC and I did not want
to interfere with that.  So realize that nothing can be done until
after GUADEC on the web page, but we should definitely work on some
mockups and have some discussions on what is the purpose of the front
page today.  What is the face of GNOME today.  We the engagement team
owns it, let's figure out how to make something interesting and fun.

sri