Arne and I had an extensive discussion about this off-list which I'll try to summarize here.
I believe that one of our biggest problems is that the current website, even though a significant improvement on what we had before, is still not up to the standards of contemporary open source projects <http://beautifulopen.com/>. For example, I was chatting with the developers of Lantern <https://getlantern.org/> last week, and the first thing they said when they saw freenetproject.org is that the white-on-black design communicates that there is something dark, surrupticious, perhaps even evil about Freenet, which is precisely the opposite of the message we want our website to send. Contrast it with the Lantern website I've linked above, which I think sends a message of openness and friendliness. Since Arne and I have already debated it, let me preemptively respond to some of what people might say :) *We just redesigned the website, and you're telling us we need to redesign it again?!* I believe this to be an example of the sunk-cost fallacy <http://www.logicallyfallacious.com/index.php/logical-fallacies/174-sunk-cost-fallacy>. Decisions about where to spend resources should depend on the current and future needs of the project, but should not be influenced by where we've spent resources in the past. This might be difficult and painful because it goes somewhat against human nature, but I think we need to be logical about it. *You're insulting the work of everyone that worked on the last redesign!* I am not. As I mentioned in my last email on this thread, we need to be able to have an honest conversation about problems without people taking it personally. I said that the redesign was a bit improvement, and it was, and my understanding is also that the underlying infrastructure of the site was improved quite a bit too which should hopefully make any changes to the overall template much easier. *Redesigning the website will take months!* I don't see why it should. The website is fairly simple, mostly just text - modifying the template shouldn't require more than a few days of work for someone with the appropriate skills. *What gives you the right to demand that volunteers spend time on fixing the website?* I don't claim that right, but I do have the right to state my opinion about what is blocking Freenet adoption in the hope that I will persuade someone with the appropriate skills to spend time on it. *Why didn't you say all this 6 months ago when we were working on the redesign?* The honest answer is because I was distracted, at the time I was in the process of departing the company I had co-founded. Regardless, similar to my point about sunk-cost, debating the past doesn't get us anywhere - we need to focus on what is blocking adoption today and what we can do about it. *Why don't you redesign the site if you think it's such a good idea?* Because I'm currently in the process of starting a new company which leaves me with no spare time. If I could set aside a few days then I probably would do it, although I worry that people would then be angry that I've replaced some of the recent work on the site. Thoughts? Ian. -- Ian Clarke Blog: http://blog.locut.us/ _______________________________________________ Devl mailing list [email protected] https://emu.freenetproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/devl
