Re: www.gnome.org

[Thilo Pfennig <tp pfennigsolutions de>]

(Cc goes to gnome web list)

Hi John, thanks for replying

john palmieri schrieb:
> There has been work on the new site though I'm not sure what the
> status is, I'm guessing it is in GNOME SVN.  I think the people
> involved just got overwhelmed with other things.  If you wanted to
> volunteer I bet the web team would welcome your help.
Its not that I do not know anything about the status.  As far as I
understand there are the old pages in SVN - and also somewhere is a new
Plone based website that will be release final at any date in the
future. The problem is rather, that some small fixes like bug #553529
get uncommented for a month, some things (like deleting gnome office
pages) even took 4 years. There is not at all a lack of volunteers - but
most do give up contributing as they are not able to really help or get
feedback on what they do, or what they like to do. Or if they get
feedback they get a NO.

Another fact will be, that even if the new Plone based site will be
ready in two years (and ahy everything other changes are stopped) it
could hardly suck up all pages that are there currently. There is an
endless count of pages. Many projects also do not update theirs any more
like the Epiphany guys.

As i said - its not so much a technical or a work problem - its a
problem of responsibility and organization. GNOME web teams sounds good,
but its impossible to get a definitive answer from anybody because
everybody only takes part of the responsibility and none of that is
official. In relation to a GNOME software project its like there is no
release management - and the SVN mechanism reduces possible help mostly
to those who are focusing on software development and not websites
(which is really a totally unrelated task).

The GNOME Germany web pages face similar problems and are offline since 
3 years. Same problem - nobody cares and nobody wants to be responsible
- but different effect - www.gnome.org still exists but its in very bad
shape.

I am not seeking for a short term solution but I like to see a longterm
organizational change which would be somebody who gets task to manage
the web sites from the GNOME  Foundation. This should be somebody who
has good connections to the developer community but rather comes from a
web background or at least has helped some web projects to get
(re)launched. It does not have to be the one who actually writes code or
works on the web server configs, but he should be able to do so if
nobody else does.

I would suggest to seek somebody who does just this. I guess there would
be some in the GNOME related community who could do that. And that would
be the one to contact, who also leads the web team and has the last word
on major changes, deadlines, etc.. I think that somebody like that is
missing for years. Until now things only changed if somebody with SVN
access was motivated to fix things. Thats not sufficient for managing
important web pages.

regards,
Thilo

-- 
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