Hi, we had this discussion lately where we talked about attracting new contributors for commons [1]. Over the past few days I've been thinking about this topic again and I've come to the conclusion that there are several things we could do to improve our "public relations".
Here is a list of things that I would like to change (and by this I mean, that I volunteer to do the work ;-) 1. Make commons more visible in coding social media - request git mirrors for every proper component, so that everything is also at github - add all proper components to Ohloh (and clean up the existing ones) - create a Twitter account where we can post news from commons. The Mesos project already has such an account. [2] 2. Make the website more attractive - Use a modern design - I don't know who said it, but I loved it when someone said "our website looks like we're java 1.3 users". Well, this is true. Simone made several attempts to make commons switch to the maven fluido skin [3,4,5]. I think the time has come to finally do something about the website. - include a news section on the main page - Having all the components listed on the home page is a good thing for navigation, but what I'm really interested in, are news about the development. A new git mirror has been created? Cool, thanks for telling me. Collections 4 alpha1 has been released? Good to know, I'll download it right away. No need for a big fat list that contains all components when most people probably only use a few. WDYT? Benedikt [1] http://markmail.org/message/o7ef6o4ahe23k5iu [2] https://twitter.com/ApacheMesos [3] http://markmail.org/message/tkh4yqfcqg5i444g [4] http://markmail.org/message/jnlyhbh5yq3zp54t [5] http://markmail.org/message/jk4addjqw67476bk -- http://people.apache.org/~britter/ http://www.systemoutprintln.de/ http://twitter.com/BenediktRitter http://github.com/britter
