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

[Michael Bernstein <webmaven lvcm com>]

"rpmuldoon students wisc edu" wrote:
> 
> 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......
> 
> <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.

So, you're saying that all news areas need to be equally
active? I think it's fair to say that not all topics are
equally interesting to people, and some sub-topics may not
be very active. That's ok, if these less active sub-topics
are aggregated into more inclusive topics *automatically*.
People who are interested only in the sub-topic can view
that sub-topic's news page, and ignore the other topics. If
the particular page they're interested in isn't updated all
that frequently, well, let them submit a news item!


> > 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.

I'm sorry, I didn't make myself clear. Personalization
encourages people to *log in* to gnome.org. This makes it
easy to identify site members who are contribute to the site
(by adding an answer to an FAQ, for example) and promote
them. It also makes it easy for people to contribute by
adding material to 'their' folder (which they can only
manage while logged in), and other sorts of positive
feedback mechanisms. Personalization just makes it easier to
encourage people to log into the site *in the first place*.

HTH,

Michael Bernstein.