Re: GNOME Foundation Elections - Preliminary results

[Claus Schwarm <c schwarm gmx net>]

On Wed, 14 Dec 2005 20:07:26 -0500
Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com> wrote:

> 
> Yeah. See my last post to foundation-list (forgot to Cc/Reply-To) here
> http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2005-December/msg00058.html
> 

Looking...

Owen Taylor wrote:

> It's not clear to me *why* people are coming to www.gnome.org (I think
> I said this on the web list a while ago...) we really don't have much
> end-user oriented content there. Are people coming because they heard
> about GNOME on some news media and want to learn more? Are they coming
> for tech support (and being disappointed?)

I find it no surprise we have lots of visitors: You'd need to read a
newspaper to find out its stories were boring.

However, www.gnome.org is not going to be a site with much content,
anymore; simply because there's too much potential content. We can just
help people to find the correct pages, and somehow try to sell he
impression that this makes sense.


> 
> One thing is clear is that we are getting a very low yield off of
> people clicking through on 'become a "Friend of GNOME"' ... while 
> Friends-of-GNOME contributions are not insignificant (thanks
> people!) if we got just one of the 30 people a day clicking through
> from the front page to that page a day to join as a friend, we'd
> be doing way better.
> 
> Of course, since Friends says basically *nothing* about what is done
> with the money, it's ineffectiveness isn't very surprising.
> 

It's a little bit more complex: First, would you like to be asked for
a donation when you just enter a church? Certainly not but this is what
a friends-of-gnome program on the front page does.

Now, if you're a regular visitor of the church, would you care about
the note beside their main entrance when you learnt to ignore it?
Probably not, and thus you will miss the hint about the donation, again.

There are some potential places where such a note about a
friends-of-gnome program makes more sense: After GNOME has done
something for the potential donator, for example, such as accepting a
bug report. The marketing list should be able to make more suggestions.


Cheers,
Claus