Re: Pre-release marketing and community management [Was: getting www.gnome3.org]

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me>]

On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 3:19 PM, Stormy Peters <stormy gnome org> wrote:

On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 12:14 PM, Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me> wrote:

OK, point taken. Let's modify that argument instead to "people who are worried as there isn't any documented evidence that this design is going to work".  We do not have official Gnome usability studies to back up our  design of shell.  We need something that we can point to that says that we thought of all possibilities.  When there is a lack of evidence then indeed people do fear change.  I know Jon and others are using research material, books and what not to back up their design and they have done some internal testing.  None of which is public.

I've heard this again and again. That there were design decisions made that were supposedly based on research and supposedly that information is public but supposedly nobody can find it. (I personally haven't looked hard for it online.)

I hear it on and off.  I have tried to look but I don't think there is anything on l.g.o.  So, they need to document something otherwise this cycle will continue.
 

I think it would be a huge help if someone could go through and document the "Design principles behind GNOME 3.0". And talk about the major features, changes and why they are good for users with pointers to any discussions or supporting research. We could make it a subpage of gnome3.org. I think having it all on one page, clearly laid out by features with rationale would be great.

We didn't do this for 2.0 which fed into a lot of rage on a number of forums.  Nobody could understand why we were removing features or the philosophy behind it.  Because of that history, Gnome 3.0 will fall into the same cycle.  Let's hope we can avoid doing it this time with a little forethought now that we are a lot more mature project. :-)

I think your idea is exactly where this was heading, that's why I was interested in gnome3.org is to get people to focus on an easy to remember site where they can get all the information about gnome 3.0 they need.  Keep people off the developer forums and hopefully also create something that we can get users into developers or something like that.
 

No matter what we write, people will argue, but at least we can point to something and say this is what and why.

And we should do that continually until people get it.

sri