All great answers, Peter.
And very reassuring answers.
Post them almost verbatim!
I suggest you put it in the Introduction page, with the subtitle "Who are we?",
right below "What does it do?".
I offer a couple of edits here:
What is our business model?
We accept donations to cover expenses, but we are not trying to turn a
profit.
We enjoy building useful apps that satisfy people's needs. Period.
We are not trying to capture a protocol, a format, a platform, a
traffic stream,
or any other element of the IT environment.
What do we want out of you?
Nothing but your satisfaction.
We do not require you to sign up for anything.
We do not even run ads.
Please do tell us about bugs, though, if you find any.
Posting actual names of team members is also reassuring, because it exposes data
that wouldn't be volunteered if you were hatching some nefarious scam.
But don't confuse this motivation to make information overt with the
different but complimentary motivation to assign credit to the contributors.
The people who are trying to decide whether to use the product are usually
quite disjoint
from the people who want to find out exactly where the expertise and effort are
coming from.
sj
On 2011/05/25, at 10:35 PM, Peter Hosey wrote:
> On May 25, 2011, at 17:09:53, Stephen wrote:
>> Foremost, I have a suggestion...
>> The second most important thing potential new users of a software system
>> need to know is: Who made this thing? That question stands as proxy for
>> several other questions:
>> What is their business model?
>> What are they likely to want out of me?
>> What are their motivations?
>> Why should I trust their product to not be malicious?
>> Why should I trust their product to not be accidentally damaging?
>>
>> Your webpage is slick and beautifully constructed, and its Table of Contents
>> lays out most of things I might want to know about:
>> Download|About|Applications|Styles|Documentation|Screenshots|Contact|Donate
>> However! Notice that none of my questions above are answered anywhere in
>> those documents!
>>
>> There are some companies whose software I would not trust to install on my
>> machine no matter what it did. (Some are wildly famous, most are wildly
>> not.) And so I'm not going to invest the time to read all the information in
>> that Table of Contents. I need to gain some insight into who you are first.
>
> We're a bunch of volunteers, who work on Growl in our spare time as a hobby
> project.
>
>> What is their business model?
>
> We don't have one; we're not a business.
>
>> What are they likely to want out of me?
>
> Nothing. We accept donations, but we don't charge anything or run ads.
>
>> What are their motivations?
>
> Part fun; part working on a program that a lot of people (including us) find
> useful.
>
>> Why should I trust their product to not be malicious?
>
> Growl is open source (this one is addressed on the website by the
> availability of the source). Anybody can read our source code to see what
> we're doing, and build from that source themselves if they don't trust that
> we build it from unmodified source.
>
>> Why should I trust their product to not be accidentally damaging?
>
> You shouldn't. Everybody screws up. Always keep backups, especially when
> trying a program you've never tried before.
>
> But, we are competent, and nobody's lost data because of Growl yet (that we
> know of).
>
> If Growl or any other of our products does cause damage or any other problem,
> it is accidental, and we ask that please report it to us and be willing to
> answer our diagnostic questions so that we can fix it (if indeed it is a
> fault in our software).
>
>> Please lay it all out somewhere, and raise its profile right up to the level
>> of the ToC. I suspect you have good answers and it will do you a world of
>> good to be forthright about answering all those questions.
>
> There is a Team page listing our names (similarly to the credits list in the
> Growl preference pane), but it's a bit out of date and you're right that we
> should make it more prominent (I couldn't find a simple way to get to it from
> the front page).
>
> I like your idea of a more general “who are we?” page, too. We'll have to
> think some more about how best to do it.
>
>> Next a compliment...
>> Everyone's first question about a software product is: What does it do?
>> And that one you have answered.
>
> Thank you.
>
> You don't know how significant it is for someone to tell us that. We had
> problems for years making it clear what Growl does; it is very good to hear
> that we have done it.
>
>> (It is astonishing to survey the number of programs offered that assume you
>> know what it does without the builders ever saying. An echo of this
>> observation is in the number of programs on your computer right now whose
>> About menus do not explain the merest thing about the purpose of the
>> program.)
>
> Excellent point.
>
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