Re: Marketing Materials in git

[Dave Neary <dneary gnome org>]

Hi,

Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier wrote:
> More pain on our side, less pain on the side of the contributors who
> aren't developer tool friendly.

Yes and no... one more account to create, or moderation request to wait
for - one more bottleneck to get through before you're productive. For
reference, see how long it has taken some of the members of the
marketing team to go from volunteering to help maintain the web pages to
actually getting access to the resources (in one case, there's still a
request in a queue somewhere awaiting an SSH key).

> You outlined 6 steps that a new
> contributor would go through in order to participate.

Well, really the 6 steps contains 2 really important ones - getting git
& getting the marketing resources. As I said, it's a cheat sheet - the
other commands you only need from time to time, and the git problem is
memorising everything.

> Some may be that
> motivated, others are likely to quietly decide that another project
> might be better suited to their free time.

So be it.

As I say
here:http://blogs.gnome.org/bolsh/2009/04/08/copyright-assignment-and-other-barriers-to-entry/

some barriers to entry are desirable. Others aren't.

In general, I would say that for any task where the commandline isn't
otherwise necessary, avoid the command line. So a natural graphic way to
get git and download & update files from git is probably useful, but
there's no inherent reason why we'd need Alfresco.

We could also use the Ubuntu One cloud, or DropBox... obviously, I
prefer we don't, because they're proprietary software, but at least
there the "hard to use" argument is less evident.

> Not disagreeing that wiki attachments are sub-optimal, but I'm not
> sure git is any better for sharing something like an OpenOffice.org
> document.

Sharing a document is probably best done as a wiki page, or in Google
Docs or Zoho. Sharing the actual .odt doesn't make any sense to me, any
more than it made sense to me back in the day, when project specs were
sent as .doc attachments by email.

If documents need regular revision, then you need something which allows
collaborative editing & has version control. A wiki, a BaseCamp
writeboard, or Google Docs (or an equivalent), or (if it ever gets
released) the rumored web-hosted OOo would all fit the bill.

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary
GNOME Foundation member
dneary gnome org