Re: Re: Taking a step back for a moment......

["rpmuldoon students wisc edu" <rpmuldoon students wisc edu>]

Original Message:
-----------------
From: Michael Bernstein webmaven lvcm com
Date: Wed, 22 Nov 2000 09:43:25 -0800
Subject: Re: Taking a step back for a moment......


Ryan Muldoon wrote:
>
> 1. Navigation
> we don't need to plan out elaborate schemas for navigation.  Just a
> simple one that works.  I think that we have basically all agreed that
> we should organize navigation by task.  This makes sense, as this is how
> people want to use websites.

Task oriented navigation is a wonderful thing, but it is
hardly an all encompassing categorization schema. There is
easily going to be a lot of information that either does not
conform to a particular task, or applies to more than one
task. Therefore task oriented navigation should be
supplementary, not primary.

I can see how this may be necessary....but I think that a focus on
breaking up the contents of the navigation by user makes a lot of sense.

<snipped>
> 3. Maintenence
> We need to remember that everything that we add to the site, we are
> going to have to maintain.  That means that multiple news sections, or
> anything that requires fresh content will have to be "owned" by someone
> to keep up maintenence.  I've seen a lot of projects fall by the wayside
> for this very reason.

If all news items have appropriate meta-information attached
to them, they can appear in whatever news sections are
appropriate. Therefore you only need to worry about
maintaining the news submissions as a whole, and let the
classification system do the work of 'maintaining' the
individual news sections.

You aren't addressing the real issue - keeping enough content flowing in for all the various sections.  It is obviously simple to make it easy to add news.  But to actually have all the information, we need people adding it regularly.  That is the problem that I was trying to address.

> 4. Stress Involvement
> We should try and gear the site towards pushing the GNOME platform.  To
> do that well, we need to offer ways for people to get involved.
> [snip excellent suggestions]

I feel that the best way to get people involved is to let
them join the gnome.org site as a member, and allow them to
personalize the site to some degree. This makes it easier to
promote members who contribute to GNOME, and could also alow
members to more easily keep track of projects that interest
them.

I don't really agree here.  Personalizing gnome.org doesn't encourage involvement at all.  How can you promote members who contribute to gnome by personalizing gnome.org?  It isn't a matter of keeping track of projects - that is what mailing lists are for, really.  I am interested in encouraging people to get their hands dirty with actively helping out with the various projects.  That, I think, should be one of the main goals of the gnome sites.

     --Ryan



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