Re: Gnome Office updates

[Charles Goodwin <charlie xwt org>]

Dom Lachowicz wrote:
> The Gnome Office portal should focus on Gnome Office and Gnome Office 
> alone. If a program is "office related" and otherwise meets our 
> criteria, it should be in Gnome Office. If it isn't, I don't believe 
> that it should be listed on the Gnome Office website.

I'll come back to this one... :P

> I loathe the mess that is the GO page right now. There's no sense of 
> unity or cohesion. Quite simply, it's a mess. What I see discussed here 
> is a furtherance of this existing mess, and see that as only causing 
> confusion for our users.

Yes!  It is!  That's why I brought up this whole debate in the first 
place!  (/me gets happy that others feel the same way.)

However...

> We need to put forward a clear and united front to the community.

Aha.

> We're the late-comer to this party, and everyone ... knows it.

Aha.

> We're a running joke, a punchline to some sorry OSS gag.

Oh dear, that's quite a sad state of affairs.  I didn't think it was 
quite _that_ bad but then again, I'm a bit of a newcomer myself.

> The solution to straigthen up this mess is not to add heaps of 
> more stuff onto it, no matter how pretty and shiny that stuff might be. 
> The solution is to take stock of our inventory, to set some 
> hard-and-fast criteria for inclusion and to set some short and long term 
> goals for our individual projects and our group as a whole. We need to 
> pluck out the weeds. We don't need two copies of the same DVD. We need 
> the one with fewer scratches on it.

The solution is to get organised.  Weeding out the non-core apps makes 
that easier, but IMHO it also lets us down for the future:

 o  If we ignore projects now, who is to say they'll want to be included
    some time down the line?

 o  A project might flourish given the appropriate influence under an
    umbrella Gnome Office portal that encourages usage of the various
    GO components.  Excluding / ignoring those projects may well drive
    them down a direction that strays away from being a GO candidate by
    no properly working with other GO software.

> "Lassie-faire" and reluctantness to exclude (or over-willingness to 
> include) have gotten us where we are today. I don't like where we are. 
> And I don't think the "cure like with like" mantra will solve this problem.

I'll have to disagree there.  GO was originally simply some loosely 
associated projects.  It has never aspired to properly be an integrated, 
fully functional office suite.  Lack of ambition has been GOs downfall, 
it has nothing to do with including "unecessary" software.

*But* I do agree that we need to get the weeds out.  First things first, 
identify what is todays GO software and focus on it.  The whole portal / 
umbrella thing can wait and be discussed further.  The important thing 
is to "present a unified front" and be quick about doing so.

Can we:

 o  Identify the GO suite of software (let's agree on a list)

 o  Procure the gnomeoffice.org domain

 o  Revamp the website (I'll knock some mockups together)

 o  Identify a GO suite and a GO portal roadmap

 o  Be more ambitious :P

- Charlie