Tobin: FWIW, I applaud your efforts. OSS is built on the backs of volunteers -- people who give of themselves to contribute what they can where they can. One of the very real challenges of OSS is that its often difficult to say to any volunteer "I would prefer you volunteer your free time doing X instead of Y".
I really think that ALL of these efforts -- coding, designing, testing, documenting, teaching, and -- yes -- organizing content in NHForge too are all needed around NHibernate in order to help keep its larger ecosystem alive and healthy. No one task is more important, more valuable, or more needed than the others IMHO; instead they all contribute to the life of the project. I say this to any volunteer in just about any context: as long as you aren't doing active HARM to anything, feel free to pick up a hammer, a saw, a paint brush, an ink pen or whatever tools you like and offer up some value to the project. The essence of satisfaction as a volunteer is in pouring your passion for action into a concrete result that others can appreciate for what it is. And whether thats a new feature, a closed bug, a new article or blog post, or even an improved, more professional-looking NHForge that helps to increase the sense of professionalism visitors perceive around the participants in the project, I say: have at it -- all comers are equally welcome because all contributions are equally valued~! -Steve B. On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 8:30 PM, Tobes <[email protected]> wrote: > > > My main point is that I think this is a far bigger barrier to adoption > than lack of personability of the NH dev team. > > -Michael > > Putting photos + bios on the home page will help win trust with new > visitors. It gives the message that NHibernate is a team of seasoned > developers, not some rabble of spurious open source hackers (decision > makers often fear the worst!). By winning trust, it will also increase > adoption. That's my thinking at least. > > The failing links, duplicate forums and stale content might be solved > by creating gravity around the latest resources. Creating gravity > means doing things that pull visitors back time and time again (google > forum, nhforge.org etc). > > One thing we could do to give nhforge.org gravity would be to make the > home page as official as possible. This would leave no room for > confusion, so people know it's the place to come to. My hope is that > putting developer faces on nhforge.org home page will help to make it > more official, and therefore reduce the confusion, and ensure visitors > keep coming back. > > Tobin
