Re: [PROPOSAL] Initiate a Contest for Branding of 4.0
On 10/26/2012 4:36 AM, Graham Lauder wrote: ... The proposal therefore is to initiate a contest to create this new branding, this would have multiple benefits in terms of community outreach, marketing and raising brand awareness. ... Several Apache projects have run logo contests in the past; some were quite successful both with wide participation and good designs to come out of them. As noted in many of the comments on this thread, there are a lot of details to work out, especially if the PMC is looking for a whole branding package of logos, icons, colors, etc. - Be clear in your request for submissions. Spend the time to go over the whole package you plan to put out, since it will get a lot of interest. Having a good experience for submitters with clear guidelines on what parts of branding are being sought, and if designs are expected to be used as-is, or if designs may be modified once selected is important. - I'd suggest having a preliminary voting round (primarily community based), and then a separate runoff round from the top X voted designs (primarily committer based, with the PMC making final decision). With a large number of original submissions, it's really hard to get a good sense of support for each one. Runoffs from the top designs are much simpler, plus the PMC can use the runoff selection process to promote or restrict designs the PMC has specific thoughts on. As I said in the earlier mail, voting is a really bad way to develop a brand and so that shouldn't be happening. Earlier I said to Rob that at the time I couldn't think of a better word than contest, but I'm going to change the title from contest to Brand Development Project. The committers and project members are a miniscule set of our users that don't count as a measurable fraction of a percent and are generally completely atypical relative to our normal customers. They are not the people we are trying to connect with. There was no vote when coca cola devised its brand but you can be sure there was a lot of research amongst customers. We have to get away from the Apache Mindset of Dev community same as Whole Community. We are in a consumer space. 99.% of the people who will directly interact with, download and use AOO are not devs they are consumers. Someone said that But http server has way more users arrant nonsense. The number of people who make the decision and then download and install Http Server is miniscule by comparison with those who do the same with OOo, Straw man. We will have no runoffs, please read my first mail. The PMCs decision has to be made on specific _objective_ criteria. The subjective will be left to the survey. Note I said survey not vote. The Survey will gauge the customers feelings and reactions and impressions about the various proposals. As part of the RFP we need to decide what those criteria are, such as: Target Market/s Image (That is how we want to be seen by clients: Professional, Friendly, innovative etc etc) Impact (Recognisability, uniqueness, attractiveness) Connection The Survey will not rank it will seek to gain an insight into the customers perceptions of various the branding concepts. Filtering at this end to be done objectively based on the data from the survey. The various points on this thread about the community here on ooo-dev@ versus the actual end-user community are spot on as well. Re-branding a product with this many millions of end users is important to do carefully and consistently. Indeed and you can't have both unless you have two brands, do we therefore brand the project and the product separately - From the legal standpoint, we will likely need the winning designer to donate all trademark rights in the design(s) to the ASF explicitly. Given that we may register new trademarks about AOO, we will need to be clear on this point. But the details can be handled later, and should not be difficult, so don't let that get in the way of running the contest! All of those elements will be necessarily covered in the RFP Cheers GL - Shane
Re: AOO.Next IBM Priorities
If I didn't know better I'd swear you had been spying on my wishlist. If IBM brought nothing else to the project it's customer focus is hugely valuable. Many thanks Rob, one marketing guy very happy. On 2/11/2012 8:52 AM, robert_w...@us.ibm.com wrote: A quick note, wearing my IBM hat. We (IBM) have consulted with customers, internal users, other IBM product teams, on what our (IBM's) development priorities should be for the next AOO release. Obviously, we're not the only ones with priorities or interests or opinions. We don't make AOO decisions by ourselves. But we want to be transparent about what our own priorities are, for our employees participating in the AOO community, and what they will be focusing on. As we did with AOO 3.4.0 and 3.4.1, we'll be putting the details onto the wiki over the next couple of weeks. You'll hear more at ApacheCon, but I wanted you to hear it hear first. Our top priorities: -- Improve the install and deployment experience, especially by supporting digital signatures on installs, and introducing a new incremental update feature, so users are not required to download and install a full image for just a minor update. -- A major UI enhancement, a sidebar framework for the editors, ported over from Symphony, and including an API. If you recall, Symphony won quite a lot of praise for its UI, and much of this was due to the sidebar panel. I think we can make a good argument that this approach, say compared to the MS Office ribbon is a better use of screen real-estate, especially as we see more frequent use of wide screen displays. -- Improved Table of Contents in Writer -- Improved system integration on Windows and MacOS, including possible adoption of gestures. -- IAccessible2 bridge, ported over from Symphony, to improve accessibility. This is a major effort, but very important. -- Closer integration of clipart and template libraries with user experience. -- Update branding and visual styling, contemporary and compelling, fresh and relevant. -- Social integration, allow our users to quickly and easily share their thoughts in a way that compliment their commercial social behavior. Explore the integration of consumer service-specific capabilities as well as generic Share... actions. -- And many other smaller items Obviously the release date for this cannot be pinned down so early, and releasing is PMC decision, not an IBM one. But we think that this work could be completed and tested for a release in the March/April 2013 time-frame. And the scope of the release might be significant enough to warrant a 4.0 designation. In any case, we'll soon set up a page on the wiki to collect these items. As always, I invite you to add your own priorities to the wiki, things that you would like to work on. This could be a new feature. Or, if one of the above items sound interesting to you, we always welcome help designing and implementing these features. Regards, -Rob
Re: [PROPOSAL] Initiate a Contest for Branding of 4.0
On Mon, Oct 29, 2012 at 11:19 PM, Kevin Grignon kevingrignon...@gmail.comwrote: KG01 - see comments inline. On Oct 27, 2012, at 7:16 PM, Andrea Pescetti pesce...@apache.org wrote: On 26/10/2012 Ian Lynch wrote: I arranged one for the OOo schools mascot ... The winner was clear-cut. A 16 year old Italian boy who aspired to be a graphic designer. Here he is (by chance, he's called Andrea too): http://www.openoffice.org/editorial/interview_andrea_maggioni.html (EN) http://www.openoffice.org/it/stampa/comunicati/avv12.html (IT) A quick web search shows that in the end he managed to become a graphic designer indeed! The mascot is at the end of http://www.openoffice.org/marketing/education/schools/ but it didn't have that much recognition in the end. Indeed, as Ian pointed out, the main value of that competition was in getting media exposure; KG - Wouldn't the value in the contest be the new branding elements? I'm not sure that this is the best way to hold a marketing event. Any marketing that raises the profile of the brand is good, so there is a double value, add to that the possible additional community members that will accrue and we have a triple benefit From a UX design perspective, this approach presents risk. The branding is bound to the UI, and other supporting visual elements. Agreed, which is why there needs to be extensive UX input into the RFP We are just starting to explore the AOO branding and UX enhancements for AOO 4.0. I'd prefer we explore this in house first. Our problem is that we don't have an in-house, while there has been some progress, it has been glacial in it's pace and we need to get things moving. We have no goals other than vague references to 4.0 and I don't want to get to the point where branding is holding up a major release. From my point of view I feel that the first release of the AOO TLP should be 4.0, but that's just me talking from a purely marketing POV. We don't have our full inventory of requirements yet. And that is what the discussion leading to the RFP will be about I prefer that we defer this proposal. Regards, Kevin It is of course your right to put a -1 on this proposal but I think that would a mistake. The UX input into the RFP is essential and I feel the RFP is just the impetus we need to closely study and discuss the branding needs. Cheers GL
Re: [PROPOSAL] Initiate a Contest for Branding of 4.0
On Friday 26 Oct 2012 11:04:46 Rob Weir wrote: On Fri, Oct 26, 2012 at 4:36 AM, Graham Lauder g.a.lau...@gmail.com wrote: The launch of 4.0 is a unique opportunity in the life of AOO both now and far into the future. The branding needs to position us in the market place, be distinctive and unique and makes a statement about the product. The creation of this requires a skillset that we do not have an over abundance of in the project. The proposal therefore is to initiate a contest to create this new branding, this would have multiple benefits in terms of community outreach, marketing and raising brand awareness. The contest would be source of the eventual branding of AOO 4.0 +1 The devil is in the details, but I think a contest can be a great way of getting many ideas, but also promoting AOO 4.0. It makes it an event. I think Dave mentioned that another Apache project had a logo contest and received a large number of entries. Which is why we go with Branding, it's much broader than just a graphic logo. there's color pallet, overall style, message, tenor, presentation. Those who just present a logo in isolation will be filtered early. Those that have a grasp of the full depth of the brand but without the whole package will show early which is why we go back to the responders for more detail later on. Initial proposals will to show understanding of the task first up. The process would be: Formulate a RFP with contest details and guidelines (these would include the product name and a reasonable outline of our target markets), timeframe, methodologies of presentation and breadth of branding elements. Perhaps sound out some sponsors for a prize Filter responses for eligibility according to the initial criteria Filter responses for global appropriateness Filter responses for target market relevance It will be important that this filtering is done in a way that everyone sees as fair. Who judges global appropriateness, for example? One way might be to appoint a judging panel. Indeed, although judging is probably not the best description, I just can't think of a better one. The initial filtering is done on purely objective criteria laid out in the RFP. Global appropriateness is a minefield I agree, but hopefully we have a broad enough cultural awareness on our L10n list to help us avoid any clumsy gaffs. Communicate with the creators of this first shortlist to get them to sell their idea Shortlist to a dozen or less based on function (ie usability across multiple media) For maximum impact we could have blog post and social media campaign to promote the short list of logos and drive traffic to the survey. +1 good plan, as Ian was saying initial target will be Design Colleges and oither such educational institutions. Any others that may be interested could be reached by community contact. The initial contact will ideally be concentrated, so we publicise that the RFP will be available on a specific date and the submissions will close on another date. Otherwise it will drag on. Experience shows however that logos will continue to come long past the closing as people seem to think that their new version is greater than anything that has come before and that the whole process will be dumped just so we can bathe in the light at the feet of the new Michaelangelo! :) Cheers GL Create a survey to gauge general public impressions/feelings with regard to certain branding criteria: Uniqueness, Impact, Impression and Representation. Reduce and Repeat. If no clear winner emerges then PMC becomes the tiebreaker Lazy consensus 5 days seeing as how the weekend is nearly upon us Cheers GL
Re: Need new logo for openoffice.apache.org
On Thu, Oct 25, 2012 at 9:46 AM, RGB ES rgb.m...@gmail.com wrote: 2012/10/24 Andrea Pescetti pesce...@apache.org Alexandro Colorado wrote: On 10/23/12, Andrea Pescetti wrote: Exactly. And this means we cannot use Alexandro's SVG since it is not a 100% reproduction of the bitmap by Michael Acevedo (the orb is perfectly Who made Michael Acevedo the offical artist of AOO? If we are going to have a 'new' logo that automatically disqualify using MA logo Nobody made Michael Acevedo the official artist, but a mailing list vote approved his logo as the Apache OpenOffice logo for the 3.4.x series (at that time, we believed that the version after 3.4.x would be 4.x). So, again: for 3.4 and all official communication in 3.4 the reference logo is that one, and not something that is 95% similar to it or that tweaks colors/fonts. We must be consistent. This is the reason why we cannot use your SVG version now. But it is understood, as Graham wrote, that this is a temporary solution. For future releases we are free to adopt any new logo, having a similarity to the current one anywhere between 0% and 100%, and since we are not under pressure at the moment we can explore possibilities for a full rebranding: logo, site, palette, icons... If we go for a full rebranding, it is good to make it coincident with the 4.0 release since it would be easier to communicate and less suspicious to users. +1. 4.0 is the time for a full rebranding, not before. Of course we need to start with this sooner than later, but IMO it is not urgent. Regards Ricardo Disagree completely, a rebrand is not a trivial matter, that can be knocked up in a weekend. We are marketing a consumer space product and therefore a lot of preparation needs to be done including researching our endusers. Right now the Marketing, Art and UX people in the project are a miniscule in number. It has been difficult to inspire people to join the project because it was seen as same old, same old. A whole lot of developers trying desperately not to change anything right down to keeping the old Oracle Logo. Whether this impression is right or wrong is not the point, to get people excited we need to get moving on the process so that people can see that there is something in the project worth putting some work into. Rob asked an excellent question some time back Where are the next 100 million users coming from I've asked the same question myself in the past, as have others. Ian Lynch took the bull by the horns and took it to the educationalists in the US and schools in the EU, Drew (IIRC, my memory is rubbish correct me if I'm wrong) went after Librarians. There are other avenues but at the end of the day we need the consumers talking about the product. Joe Brockmeier did a session on Marketing OSS at LCA a few years back, I asked him the same question or at least a variation on the theme. His short answer was You've got almost a monopoly in the Linux space, so what the hell are you doing here? But in any case you have get the great unwashed to talk about it, and to do that give 'em something shiny and new. We have something shiny and new! Now what we have to do is package it like it is shiny and new and that is not something that you do in five minutes. I would rather be ready months early for the launch of 4.0 than have a last minute panic that ends in a half baked result. We want people talking about the new brand not sniggering about a lost opportunity. The 4.0 branding will define this project and the product for years to come and should therefore be done with an effort that reflects that responsibility. The next 100 million will thank us for the effort or stay away in droves if we look as if we didn't bother too much. Cheers GL Regards, Andrea.
Re: Need new logo for openoffice.apache.org
On Thu, Oct 25, 2012 at 11:06 PM, Ian Lynch ianrly...@gmail.com wrote: Rob already suggested a competition. I think that is a good idea and I can help organise it but I don't want to put a lot of time into that if it is not going to be considered a likely way forward. Marketing should not distract code developers from their input as it is an inefficient use of resources. OK so let's put a proposal that we get a competition under way for complete branding package that will give us our 4.0 brand. If you like I'll frame something tonight after work unless you want to get something started before then. Cheers GL -- Ian Ofqual Accredited IT Qualifications (The Schools ITQ) www.theINGOTs.org +44 (0)1827 305940 The Learning Machine Limited, Reg Office, 36 Ashby Road, Tamworth, Staffordshire, B79 8AQ. Reg No: 05560797, Registered in England and Wales.
Re: Need new logo for openoffice.apache.org
On Thu, Oct 25, 2012 at 10:36 PM, RGB ES rgb.m...@gmail.com wrote: 2012/10/25 Graham Lauder g.a.lau...@gmail.com On Thu, Oct 25, 2012 at 9:46 AM, RGB ES rgb.m...@gmail.com wrote: Nobody made Michael Acevedo the official artist, but a mailing list vote approved his logo as the Apache OpenOffice logo for the 3.4.x series (at that time, we believed that the version after 3.4.x would be 4.x). So, again: for 3.4 and all official communication in 3.4 the reference logo is that one, and not something that is 95% similar to it or that tweaks colors/fonts. We must be consistent. This is the reason why we cannot use your SVG version now. But it is understood, as Graham wrote, that this is a temporary solution. For future releases we are free to adopt any new logo, having a similarity to the current one anywhere between 0% and 100%, and since we are not under pressure at the moment we can explore possibilities for a full rebranding: logo, site, palette, icons... If we go for a full rebranding, it is good to make it coincident with the 4.0 release since it would be easier to communicate and less suspicious to users. +1. 4.0 is the time for a full rebranding, not before. Of course we need to start with this sooner than later, but IMO it is not urgent. Regards Ricardo Disagree completely, a rebrand is not a trivial matter, that can be knocked up in a weekend. We are marketing a consumer space product and therefore a lot of preparation needs to be done including researching our endusers. I'm not saying that rebranding is a trivial matter: I'm just saying that 4.0 is the time for rebranding and not before. As Kevin noted, we can go on for now just updating what we have but of course we need to have everything in place before 4.0 is released. And the best way to have everything in place at the right time is to start *right now*... but without making a storm on a teacup: Usually, the sense of urgency goes against good creativity. Disagree, Panic goes against good creativity. You and I obviously have different definitions of urgent. I have had experience with the glacial speed that goes with making major design decisions in an OSS project. I don't know when the launch of 4.0 is due, do you have that info. If it is within the next six months then we are way behind the eight ball already. Cheers GL I too want a shiny and new package, and I prefer to have everything ready with plenty of time as you do. We fully agree on this. Let's see Kevin's (and other's!) proposal. Regards Ricardo Right now the Marketing, Art and UX people in the project are a miniscule in number. It has been difficult to inspire people to join the project because it was seen as same old, same old. A whole lot of developers trying desperately not to change anything right down to keeping the old Oracle Logo. Whether this impression is right or wrong is not the point, to get people excited we need to get moving on the process so that people can see that there is something in the project worth putting some work into. Rob asked an excellent question some time back Where are the next 100 million users coming from I've asked the same question myself in the past, as have others. Ian Lynch took the bull by the horns and took it to the educationalists in the US and schools in the EU, Drew (IIRC, my memory is rubbish correct me if I'm wrong) went after Librarians. There are other avenues but at the end of the day we need the consumers talking about the product. Joe Brockmeier did a session on Marketing OSS at LCA a few years back, I asked him the same question or at least a variation on the theme. His short answer was You've got almost a monopoly in the Linux space, so what the hell are you doing here? But in any case you have get the great unwashed to talk about it, and to do that give 'em something shiny and new. We have something shiny and new! Now what we have to do is package it like it is shiny and new and that is not something that you do in five minutes. I would rather be ready months early for the launch of 4.0 than have a last minute panic that ends in a half baked result. We want people talking about the new brand not sniggering about a lost opportunity. The 4.0 branding will define this project and the product for years to come and should therefore be done with an effort that reflects that responsibility. The next 100 million will thank us for the effort or stay away in droves if we look as if we didn't bother too much. Cheers GL Regards, Andrea.
Re: Need new logo for openoffice.apache.org
On Tue, Oct 23, 2012 at 9:07 PM, Kevin Grignon kevingrignon...@gmail.comwrote: On Tuesday, October 23, 2012, Graham Lauder wrote: On Tue, Oct 23, 2012 at 7:59 PM, Andrea Pescetti pesce...@apache.org javascript:; wrote: Alexandro Colorado wrote: On 10/22/12, Kay Schenk wrote: hmmm...well, OK. I think I remember something like this now. Should we use Alexandro's new one at: https://cwiki.apache.org/**confluence/download/**attachments/27834483/** ApacheOpenOfficeTM.svg https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/download/attachments/27834483/ApacheOpenOfficeTM.svg AFAIK there was no resolution on the fonts, the discussion ended on asking Michael Acevedo, but he never replied. Exactly. And this means we cannot use Alexandro's SVG since it is not a 100% reproduction of the bitmap by Michael Acevedo (the orb is perfectly done in SVG and it is the only SVG version of the orb we have available, since we never received one from Oracle; but the text has a slightly different formatting). The SVG was done by Alexandro from Michael's bitmap IIRC. Michael's was never official, it was just the one that happened to be available. There was never any consensus that Michael's was going to be anything other than a stop-gap for a first release from the ApacheOO podling. Going forward there needs to be proposals and discussion and a new branding that reflects the New OpenOffice. KG01 - agreed, lets start exploring design directions. I'll share my designs shortly. On training this week, just need some time at home office :) I've put up a graphical text first proposal on the wiki to explore the concept of a purely Graphical logo that doesn't use a particular font. This would avoid secondary licensing issues that could go with using a Typeface from a Forge. The graphic was created in Inkscape from scratch just using inkscape drawing tools with out recourse to using fonts even as a guide. https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OOOUSERS/AOO+4.x+-+Logo+Explorations Cheers GL
Re: Need new logo for openoffice.apache.org
On Tue, Oct 23, 2012 at 2:59 PM, Kevin Grignon kevingrignon...@gmail.comwrote: Let's move this insight into the wikis and document. Moving forward, we can prepare a visual identity style guide. I put some material up on the wiki back in January. https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OOOUSERS/Branding+Design and https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OOOUSERS/Branding+Style+Guide It is important that we have a fresh pallet and brand image for 4.0 and I don't think that we should necessarily be wedded to the past given that we are in a whole new ballgame, especially as now we have achieved graduation. cheers GL On Tuesday, October 23, 2012, Alexandro Colorado wrote: On 10/22/12, Kay Schenk kay.sch...@gmail.com javascript:; wrote: On 10/22/2012 03:42 PM, RGB ES wrote: 2012/10/23 Kay Schenk kay.sch...@gmail.com javascript:; On 10/22/2012 02:18 PM, Andrea Pescetti wrote: On 20/10/2012 imacat wrote: I happen to have a 300x100 logo at hand, so I updated it. Feel free to revise it if you feel my uploaded logo is ugly. I think that this was good as a temporary solution, but that we should delete it now, since it has different colors and we don't want variants (in fonts, colors) of the chosen logo around unless they are clearly marked as proposals. The reference logo is http://www.openoffice.org/**images/AOO_logos/AOO-logo-**hires.jpg http://www.openoffice.org/images/AOO_logos/AOO-logo-hires.jpg and apparently it was supplied as a JPG; PNG would be much better, SVG would be totally better, but the source so far is this one and it was contributed by Michael Acevedo. What we have in SVG and (possibly) PNG was derived from this one. svg should be: http://www.openoffice.org/**images/AOO_logos/svg/OOo_**Website_v2_copy.svg http://www.openoffice.org/images/AOO_logos/svg/OOo_Website_v2_copy.svg AFAIK, that svg is just a container for the raster image: it do not contain a vector image. Regards Ricardo hmmm...well, OK. I think I remember something like this now. Should we use Alexandro's new one at: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/download/attachments/27834483/ApacheOpenOfficeTM.svg AFAIK there was no resolution on the fonts, the discussion ended on asking Michael Acevedo, but he never replied. However since we are discussing this changes, it would be a good idea to jump to an open font type, like Nimbus or Liberation and have a deadline to reach a conclusion. From other discussions about the icons, there is a bit of a push back on accepting Oracle's impositions like the Orb and the Galaxy themes. Rob's idea is that we actually have a more Visual Design documentation that take advantage of the design elements we currently have, and maybe generate new ones. should we give it a better name? The logo at http://incubator.apache.org/**openofficeorg/images/300x100_**dj_trans.png http://incubator.apache.org/openofficeorg/images/300x100_dj_trans.png has different colors and different fonts so I would remove it now that it is no longer used at http://incubator.apache.org/**openofficeorg/ http://incubator.apache.org/openofficeorg/; or is it still being used somewhere? Regards, Andrea. -- --**--** MzK Anyone who considers protocol unimportant has never dealt with a cat. -- Robert Heinlein -- MzK Anyone who considers protocol unimportant has never dealt with a cat. -- Robert Heinlein -- Alexandro Colorado PPMC Apache OpenOffice http://es.openoffice.org
Re: Need new logo for openoffice.apache.org
On Tue, Oct 23, 2012 at 7:59 PM, Andrea Pescetti pesce...@apache.orgwrote: Alexandro Colorado wrote: On 10/22/12, Kay Schenk wrote: hmmm...well, OK. I think I remember something like this now. Should we use Alexandro's new one at: https://cwiki.apache.org/**confluence/download/**attachments/27834483/** ApacheOpenOfficeTM.svghttps://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/download/attachments/27834483/ApacheOpenOfficeTM.svg AFAIK there was no resolution on the fonts, the discussion ended on asking Michael Acevedo, but he never replied. Exactly. And this means we cannot use Alexandro's SVG since it is not a 100% reproduction of the bitmap by Michael Acevedo (the orb is perfectly done in SVG and it is the only SVG version of the orb we have available, since we never received one from Oracle; but the text has a slightly different formatting). The SVG was done by Alexandro from Michael's bitmap IIRC. Michael's was never official, it was just the one that happened to be available. There was never any consensus that Michael's was going to be anything other than a stop-gap for a first release from the ApacheOO podling. Going forward there needs to be proposals and discussion and a new branding that reflects the New OpenOffice. We have two separate issues here: that reflects this community 1) Collecting and consolidating all versions of the logo we are using; here a 95% accuracy is not acceptable. These versions should be placed under http://www.openoffice.org/**images/AOO_logos/http://www.openoffice.org/images/AOO_logos/or anyway under SVN. 2) Collecting proposals that can be useful as inspiration for a new visual identity; here it is of course acceptable to have variants of the official logos, but these should remain proposals and be placed in the wiki or such, possibly in pages that do not confuse a reader who types OpenOffice logo in a search engine. The new branding should have been discussed when I first brought it up last year. Any logos that are in use now, are stopgaps nothing more. They are simply rehashes of an old brand, we need shake off the Oracle detritus and make our own mark, one that is owned and created by the Apache OpenOffice community. Cheers GL Regards, Andrea.
Re: Need new logo for openoffice.apache.org
On Tue, Oct 23, 2012 at 9:07 PM, Kevin Grignon kevingrignon...@gmail.comwrote: On Tuesday, October 23, 2012, Graham Lauder wrote: On Tue, Oct 23, 2012 at 7:59 PM, Andrea Pescetti pesce...@apache.org javascript:; wrote: Alexandro Colorado wrote: On 10/22/12, Kay Schenk wrote: hmmm...well, OK. I think I remember something like this now. Should we use Alexandro's new one at: https://cwiki.apache.org/**confluence/download/**attachments/27834483/** ApacheOpenOfficeTM.svg https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/download/attachments/27834483/ApacheOpenOfficeTM.svg AFAIK there was no resolution on the fonts, the discussion ended on asking Michael Acevedo, but he never replied. Exactly. And this means we cannot use Alexandro's SVG since it is not a 100% reproduction of the bitmap by Michael Acevedo (the orb is perfectly done in SVG and it is the only SVG version of the orb we have available, since we never received one from Oracle; but the text has a slightly different formatting). The SVG was done by Alexandro from Michael's bitmap IIRC. Michael's was never official, it was just the one that happened to be available. There was never any consensus that Michael's was going to be anything other than a stop-gap for a first release from the ApacheOO podling. Going forward there needs to be proposals and discussion and a new branding that reflects the New OpenOffice. KG01 - agreed, lets start exploring design directions. I'll share my designs shortly. On training this week, just need some time at home office :) I like the Flying Page idea you proposed on the wiki, once we have a pallet I'd like to explore that further. I'm working on a graphic text for the logo, I'll post some ideas tonight my time. Cheers GL We have two separate issues here: that reflects this community 1) Collecting and consolidating all versions of the logo we are using; here a 95% accuracy is not acceptable. These versions should be placed under http://www.openoffice.org/**images/AOO_logos/ http://www.openoffice.org/images/AOO_logos/or anyway under SVN. 2) Collecting proposals that can be useful as inspiration for a new visual identity; here it is of course acceptable to have variants of the official logos, but these should remain proposals and be placed in the wiki or such, possibly in pages that do not confuse a reader who types OpenOffice logo in a search engine. The new branding should have been discussed when I first brought it up last year. Any logos that are in use now, are stopgaps nothing more. They are simply rehashes of an old brand, we need shake off the Oracle detritus and make our own mark, one that is owned and created by the Apache OpenOffice community. Cheers GL Regards, Andrea.
Re: OpenOffice SVG vector graphics
That's not verdana the bowl on the p is the wrong shape. Not sure what it is tho. Searching On 7/10/2012 11:58 PM, Andrea Pescetti pesce...@apache.org wrote: Alexandro Colorado wrote: On Sat, Oct 6, 2012 at 9:18 PM, Alexandro Colorado wrote: Here is the Liberation font with some Condensed Bitstream on the Os. http://imagebin.org/231157 please comment. Here is the proper but with using Nimbus: http://imagebin.org/231160 It's nice to see all these variants but remember that the current effort is about obtaining an exact SVG version of http://www.openoffice.org/**images/AOO_logos/AOO-logo-**hires.jpghttp://www.openoffice.org/images/AOO_logos/AOO-logo-hires.jpg (which is our official logo and uses, apparently, Verdana). That said, experimenting with other fonts, and especially with free fonts, will still be very useful for possible future discussions on tweaking the logo at a certain point in time, but in this moment priority should go to obtaining a perfect vector representation of the official logo, to have something we can point people at when we grant them permission to use our (current) logo. Regards, Andrea.
Re: OpenOffice SVG vector graphics
I'm Linux too but I have a win 7 instance on a vm. So I just pulled them across There is a package called installmsfonts in the suse repos. But the font in the logo jpg is definitely not verdana. It looks closer to sergo. On 8/10/2012 8:19 PM, Alexandro Colorado j...@oooes.org wrote: On 10/8/12, Graham Lauder g.a.lau...@gmail.com wrote: That's not verdana the bowl on the p is the wrong shape. Not sure what it is tho. Searching Since I dont use windows I dont have verdana on my Linux system so I manually went out and looked and download the Verdana font. If you have a ttf maybe I would be able to try it, or you can do it from your inkscape. On 7/10/2012 11:58 PM, Andrea Pescetti pesce...@apache.org wrote: Alexandro Colorado wrote: On Sat, Oct 6, 2012 at 9:18 PM, Alexandro Colorado wrote: Here is the Liberation font with some Condensed Bitstream on the Os. http://imagebin.org/231157 please comment. Here is the proper but with using Nimbus: http://imagebin.org/231160 It's nice to see all these variants but remember that the current effort is about obtaining an exact SVG version of http://www.openoffice.org/**images/AOO_logos/AOO-logo-**hires.jpg http://www.openoffice.org/images/AOO_logos/AOO-logo-hires.jpg (which is our official logo and uses, apparently, Verdana). That said, experimenting with other fonts, and especially with free fonts, will still be very useful for possible future discussions on tweaking the logo at a certain point in time, but in this moment priority should go to obtaining a perfect vector representation of the official logo, to have something we can point people at when we grant them permission to use our (current) logo. Regards, Andrea. -- Alexandro Colorado PPMC Apache OpenOffice http://es.openoffice.org
Re: OpenOffice SVG vector graphics
It doesn't look like nimbus either the terminal on the f is different. In the logo the terminal is slightly dipped whereas the terminal in the nimbus f is straight. Tis a conundrum indeed. Mind you he could have easily done that in Inkscape On 8/10/2012 8:40 PM, Alexandro Colorado j...@oooes.org wrote: On Mon, Oct 8, 2012 at 2:30 AM, Graham Lauder g.a.lau...@gmail.com wrote: I'm Linux too but I have a win 7 instance on a vm. So I just pulled them across There is a package called installmsfonts in the suse repos. But the font in the logo jpg is definitely not verdana. It looks closer to sergo. Michael Carrazo is the original author of the fonts, so maybe he could provide the right specs. Looking at this svg https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/download/attachments/27834483/aoo.svg It shows the following XML: text transform=scale(1.0235149,0.97702534) sodipodi:linespacing=125% id=text3053 y=184.74756 x=590.01324 style=font-size:97.06866455px;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:bold;font-stretch:normal;line-height:125%;letter-spacing:0px;word-spacing:0px;fill:#0e85cd;fill-opacity:1;stroke:none;font-family:Nimbus Sans L;-inkscape-font-specification:Nimbus Sans L Bold xml:space=preservetspan y=184.74756 x=590.01324 id=tspan3055 sodipodi:role=lineOpen/tspantspan id=tspan3057 y=306.08337 x=590.01324 sodipodi:role=line //text text transform=scale(1.0618886,0.94171839) sodipodi:linespacing=125% id=text3065 y=193.76079 x=805.81018 style=font-size:97.06999207px;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:bold;font-stretch:normal;line-height:125%;letter-spacing:0px;word-spacing:0px;fill:#00;fill-opacity:1;stroke:none;font-family:Nimbus Sans L;-inkscape-font-specification:Nimbus Sans L Bold xml:space=preservetspan y=193.76079 x=805.81018 id=tspan3067 sodipodi:role=lineOffice/tspan/text So Nimbus Sans L Bold is what shows on this one, which I already provided on an imagebin previously. On 8/10/2012 8:19 PM, Alexandro Colorado j...@oooes.org wrote: On 10/8/12, Graham Lauder g.a.lau...@gmail.com wrote: That's not verdana the bowl on the p is the wrong shape. Not sure what it is tho. Searching Since I dont use windows I dont have verdana on my Linux system so I manually went out and looked and download the Verdana font. If you have a ttf maybe I would be able to try it, or you can do it from your inkscape. On 7/10/2012 11:58 PM, Andrea Pescetti pesce...@apache.org wrote: Alexandro Colorado wrote: On Sat, Oct 6, 2012 at 9:18 PM, Alexandro Colorado wrote: Here is the Liberation font with some Condensed Bitstream on the Os. http://imagebin.org/231157 please comment. Here is the proper but with using Nimbus: http://imagebin.org/231160 It's nice to see all these variants but remember that the current effort is about obtaining an exact SVG version of http://www.openoffice.org/**images/AOO_logos/AOO-logo-**hires.jpg http://www.openoffice.org/images/AOO_logos/AOO-logo-hires.jpg (which is our official logo and uses, apparently, Verdana). That said, experimenting with other fonts, and especially with free fonts, will still be very useful for possible future discussions on tweaking the logo at a certain point in time, but in this moment priority should go to obtaining a perfect vector representation of the official logo, to have something we can point people at when we grant them permission to use our (current) logo. Regards, Andrea. -- Alexandro Colorado PPMC Apache OpenOffice http://es.openoffice.org -- Alexandro Colorado PPMC Apache OpenOffice http://es.openoffice.org
Re: OpenOffice SVG vector graphics
Oh and please excuse top posting I'm sending this from my non I-phone Cheers G On 8/10/2012 9:32 PM, Graham Lauder g.a.lau...@gmail.com wrote: It doesn't look like nimbus either the terminal on the f is different. In the logo the terminal is slightly dipped whereas the terminal in the nimbus f is straight. Tis a conundrum indeed. Mind you he could have easily done that in Inkscape On 8/10/2012 8:40 PM, Alexandro Colorado j...@oooes.org wrote: On Mon, Oct 8, 2012 at 2:30 AM, Graham Lauder g.a.lau...@gmail.com wrote: I'm Linux too but I have a win 7 instance on a vm. So I just pulled them across There is a package called installmsfonts in the suse repos. But the font in the logo jpg is definitely not verdana. It looks closer to sergo. Michael Carrazo is the original author of the fonts, so maybe he could provide the right specs. Looking at this svg https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/download/attachments/27834483/aoo.svg It shows the following XML: text transform=scale(1.0235149,0.97702534) sodipodi:linespacing=125% id=text3053 y=184.74756 x=590.01324 style=font-size:97.06866455px;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:bold;font-stretch:normal;line-height:125%;letter-spacing:0px;word-spacing:0px;fill:#0e85cd;fill-opacity:1;stroke:none;font-family:Nimbus Sans L;-inkscape-font-specification:Nimbus Sans L Bold xml:space=preservetspan y=184.74756 x=590.01324 id=tspan3055 sodipodi:role=lineOpen/tspantspan id=tspan3057 y=306.08337 x=590.01324 sodipodi:role=line //text text transform=scale(1.0618886,0.94171839) sodipodi:linespacing=125% id=text3065 y=193.76079 x=805.81018 style=font-size:97.06999207px;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:bold;font-stretch:normal;line-height:125%;letter-spacing:0px;word-spacing:0px;fill:#00;fill-opacity:1;stroke:none;font-family:Nimbus Sans L;-inkscape-font-specification:Nimbus Sans L Bold xml:space=preservetspan y=193.76079 x=805.81018 id=tspan3067 sodipodi:role=lineOffice/tspan/text So Nimbus Sans L Bold is what shows on this one, which I already provided on an imagebin previously. On 8/10/2012 8:19 PM, Alexandro Colorado j...@oooes.org wrote: On 10/8/12, Graham Lauder g.a.lau...@gmail.com wrote: That's not verdana the bowl on the p is the wrong shape. Not sure what it is tho. Searching Since I dont use windows I dont have verdana on my Linux system so I manually went out and looked and download the Verdana font. If you have a ttf maybe I would be able to try it, or you can do it from your inkscape. On 7/10/2012 11:58 PM, Andrea Pescetti pesce...@apache.org wrote: Alexandro Colorado wrote: On Sat, Oct 6, 2012 at 9:18 PM, Alexandro Colorado wrote: Here is the Liberation font with some Condensed Bitstream on the Os. http://imagebin.org/231157 please comment. Here is the proper but with using Nimbus: http://imagebin.org/231160 It's nice to see all these variants but remember that the current effort is about obtaining an exact SVG version of http://www.openoffice.org/**images/AOO_logos/AOO-logo-**hires.jpg http://www.openoffice.org/images/AOO_logos/AOO-logo-hires.jpg (which is our official logo and uses, apparently, Verdana). That said, experimenting with other fonts, and especially with free fonts, will still be very useful for possible future discussions on tweaking the logo at a certain point in time, but in this moment priority should go to obtaining a perfect vector representation of the official logo, to have something we can point people at when we grant them permission to use our (current) logo. Regards, Andrea. -- Alexandro Colorado PPMC Apache OpenOffice http://es.openoffice.org -- Alexandro Colorado PPMC Apache OpenOffice http://es.openoffice.org
Re: OpenOffice SVG vector graphics
Alexandro Colorado wrote: I upload the OpenOffice SVG logo on pure SVG, still needs some cleanup on the nodes, but this is a 100% SVG logo. The attachment is on the cWiki: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/download/attachments/27834483/ApacheO penOfficeTM.svg https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/pages/viewpageattachments.action?page Id=27834483sortBy=date The orb is really nice here, a flawless vectorization of what we have. The text appears a bit distorted, or maybe it's just my on-screen rendering: for example, the O seems a bit wider and the e seems to be cut on the right, at least comparing the last image at https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=27834483 with your version. You're right, that vector needs a little titivating Font was discussed in this thread http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.apache.incubator.ooo.devel/11468 and it looks like the discussion settled on Verdana despite some comments about it being non-free; anyway it is a very common font, so it might be possible to get it perfectly rendered to SVG too. That's not difficult, all fonts are vectors in any case and fontforge will export svg. I would definitely raise a -1 to using any proprietary fonts, especially one that is owned by our No1 competitor. There are plenty of good Free fonts about: Bitstream Vera, DejaVu and Liberation are probably the most mature familys and Luxi and Nimbus are good fonts as well and available on most Distros. However there is actually no need to use a given font in any case, the text can easily be created in Inkscape so that it is made up of letters that are unique to the OpenOffice Logo. It is completely unnecessary to use a prepackaged font. This is a very rough freehand demonstration of the concept knocked up in five minutes using Inkscape http://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/File:AOOLogoDemo.svg This is not a particular font family and so there are no licensing issues. Cheers GL
Re: OpenOffice SVG vector graphics
On 10/6/12, Graham Lauder y...@apache.org wrote: Alexandro Colorado wrote: I upload the OpenOffice SVG logo on pure SVG, still needs some cleanup on the nodes, but this is a 100% SVG logo. The attachment is on the cWiki: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/download/attachments/27834483/Apac heO penOfficeTM.svg https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/pages/viewpageattachments.action?p age Id=27834483sortBy=date The orb is really nice here, a flawless vectorization of what we have. The text appears a bit distorted, or maybe it's just my on-screen rendering: for example, the O seems a bit wider and the e seems to be cut on the right, at least comparing the last image at https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=2783448 3 with your version. You're right, that vector needs a little titivating Font was discussed in this thread http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.apache.incubator.ooo.devel/11468 and it looks like the discussion settled on Verdana despite some comments about it being non-free; anyway it is a very common font, so it might be possible to get it perfectly rendered to SVG too. That's not difficult, all fonts are vectors in any case and fontforge will export svg. I would definitely raise a -1 to using any proprietary fonts, especially one Here is a comparison between Bitstream, Nimbus and Liberation. http://imagebin.org/231102 Bitstream also was modified by reducing the width by 15%. That's right I remember doing that way back, the problem with that was/is that it made the font loo heavy in the wrong places. The most noticeable was in the O In the bitstream family, the arc and the stress in the O are the same width from top to bottom whereas in for instance Frutiger, the original OOo font, the widths of the arc (the top and bottom of the bowl) were half the width of the stress (the sides). This had the effect that when the font was compressed, the arc remained lighter than the stress, or at least until you got to 50%. With all of the Bitstream fonts (DejaVu, and Liberation are just variations on the original Bitstream) compressing the font results in the character looking top heavy with a fat butt because the arcs are now wider than the stresses. Of the three, I'd go with Nimbus. I like the the Liberation set, but for some reason they decided that the uppercase O wasn't wide enough??? Liberation uses some of the design cues of Frutiger, noticeable on the bowls of the c and e. And I never liked the terminal on the bitstream f. it looks unfinished, like the designer couldn't figure out what to do with it. Those subtle variations could be fixed in inkscape of course and because it's an open font we could modify it without issue. Cheers GL that is owned by our No1 competitor. There are plenty of good Free fonts about: Bitstream Vera, DejaVu and Liberation are probably the most mature familys and Luxi and Nimbus are good fonts as well and available on most Distros. However there is actually no need to use a given font in any case, the text can easily be created in Inkscape so that it is made up of letters that are unique to the OpenOffice Logo. It is completely unnecessary to use a prepackaged font. This is a very rough freehand demonstration of the concept knocked up in five minutes using Inkscape http://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/File:AOOLogoDemo.svg This is not a particular font family and so there are no licensing issues. Cheers GL
Re: OpenOffice SVG vector graphics
On Sat, Oct 6, 2012 at 9:18 PM, Alexandro Colorado j...@oooes.org wrote: On 10/6/12, Graham Lauder y...@apache.org wrote: On 10/6/12, Graham Lauder y...@apache.org wrote: Alexandro Colorado wrote: I upload the OpenOffice SVG logo on pure SVG, still needs some cleanup on the nodes, but this is a 100% SVG logo. [] Here is the Liberation font with some Condensed Bitstream on the Os. http://imagebin.org/231157 please comment. Here is the proper but with using Nimbus: http://imagebin.org/231160 I do like Nimbus, however if we are going to use a font rather than a graphic, we should look at Century School book. It has a much more finished and mature look. I think, if memory serves, it's the preferred font for the US courts... Not that that matters, however, more importantly, it does perform well if condensing. You could probably condense it 30 odd percent and it would still look good. It does give a bit more freedom in that way. Cheers GL
Re: OpenOffice SVG vector graphics
- Original Message - ... License? Not really sure how it apply here since is a derivative work but all 3 fonts are OFL OK, that's acceptable. but perhaps you should try Adobe's SourceSansPro? http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/2012/08/source-sans-pro.html Just trying to be modern ;). Pedro. Adobe Open Source Fonts!!! dang, I have been out of the font game too long and missed this completely. That is just wickedly cool. Well done Adobe Cheers GL
Re: [VOTE] [PMC] Starting Membership for Apache OpenOffice PMC
This is a call for vote on selecting the following list as the starting membership for the Apache OpenOffice PMC, to be listed in the TLP resolution. The voting is for the entire slate as listed. Apache OpenOffice PMC Starting Membership: Andre Fischer (af) Andrea Pescetti (pescetti) Andrew Rist (arist) Ariel Constenla-Haile (arielch) Armin Le Grand (alg) Dave Fisher (wave) Donald Harbison (dpharbison) Drew Jensen (atjensen) Ian Lynch (ingotian) Jürgen Schmidt (jsc) Kay Schenk (kschenk) Kazunari Hirano (khirano) Louis Suarez-Potts (louis) Marcus Lange (marcus) Oliver-Rainer Wittmann (orw) Pedro Giffuni (pfg) Peter Junge (pj) Raphael Bircher (rbircher) Regina Henschel (regina) RGB.ES (rgb-es) Roberto Galoppini (galoppini) Yang Shih-Ching (imacat) Yong Lin Ma (mayongl) The balloting will be until UTC midnight Thursday, 4 October: 2012-10-04T24:00Z. Approval requires a majority of +1 over -1 votes cast by members of the PPMC. [ ] +1 approve [ ] 0 abstain [ ] -1 disapprove, for the following reasons: Looks good, +1 Cheers GL
[UX][DISCUSS]Re: Change of 'soffice' name
There has been issues in installing LibreOffice and OpenOffice basically because they are derived from StarOffice, since the Oracle transfer StarOffice no longer exist however OOo still have it's roots on it's code and libraries. Issues however when trying to have LibreOffice and OpenOffice has causes clash between both soffice binaries on many of the Linux (and other) distributions. One example is the menu service where OOo/LibO hold the same XML definition. I wonder if there are any plans on ever modifying this branding issue. From a user experience POV this would be a good idea. The old Novell version of OOo used to use ooffice, oowriter, oocalc. Perhaps for 4.0 we should change to aoffice or aooffice, aowriter etc GL
Re: [UX] DISCUSS - Survey Tool Recommendation
KG01 - see comments inline On Aug 18, 2012, at 9:34 AM, Graham Lauder y...@apache.org wrote: On 16/08/2012 Rob Weir wrote: On Thu, Aug 16, 2012 at 12:47 AM, Kevin Grignon wrote: I've been looking at various survey tools and would like to recommend that we deploy the open source survey tool, *LimeSurvey.* Perfect. It is a good tool and it is in continuity with what the project used to use, see my old e-mail at http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-ooo-dev/201206.mbox/ %3 C4 feecc9a.3020...@apache.org%3E KG01 - Great news. Most gracious. 1) A volunteer hosts the survey outside of Apache at their existing domain name 2) A volunteer hosts the survey outside of Apache and some pays $15 or so to get a better domain name for it, like www.oosurvey.net 3) A volunteer hosts the survey outside of Apache but we redirect the subdomain survey.openoffice.org to point to the external server As I wrote in the same e-mail, Graham had written he had a working LimeSurvey installation that he could make available to the project: http://s.apache.org/wZ . So I'd try with that first, and I'd probably prefer option 3 to keep all services under one namespace. KG01 - yes, a natural language oriented name such as survey.openoffice.org would be great. Regards, Andrea. Just having long loud discussions with the host at the moment because the site is broken, looks like an update has gone bad. As soon as it's sorted we can be in to it. We should probably still do the survey design on the wiki however. KG01 - Indeed, I have been capturing the survey questions on the wiki. I will also start to build the survey groups (question collections) in LimeSurvey to be ready to import into our hosted instance, when available. Cheers G Good grief, server meltdown and they're talking about 72 hours before it's up again. KG01 - No worries, as long as we can get cracking by the end of the week. KG01 - Please share server details and user credentials when available. Hi Kevin, You should have had an email with access details and password for admin rights by now. Let's have at it. Cheers GL
Re: [DISCUSS]: I would like to propose a new conversion mode parameter
KG01 - see comments inline. On Aug 21, 2012, at 4:18 AM, Marcus (OOo) marcus.m...@wtnet.de wrote: Am 08/20/2012 04:54 PM, schrieb Jürgen Schmidt: OpenOffice is not only used as desktop application but also as hidden part of other software and often as a conversion engine in the backend. OpenOffice has very good filters for many file formats and the usage as a conversion engine is straight forward. And the conversion from one format into another can be improved and optimized by some special handling of parts of the document. For example external linked parts can be ignored and don't have to be loaded during conversion, embedded images can be simply copied etc. I would like to improve AOO for this kind of usage by introducing a new parameter -conversionmode. It's not comparable with the command line parameter -headless or the hidden property for loadComponentFromUrl(). The intention of this new global option is to have it available everywhere in the underlying code to optimize the performance of the conversion. Sounds reasonable. However, especially with the previous paragraph I don't know if I understood right. Do you want to simply make the import/export of docs faster when AOO isn't running in graphical mode? Would be great if you can fill this with some more details. This should have no influence/impact on the normal workflow but will help to make AOO potentially more attractive for backend usage. Means it will help to grow the broader eco-system around AOO. KG01 - Interesting. Does this mean future apps could present their own user experience and still leverage our framework? The Auustralia National Archive created a piece of software for preserving digital materials called XENA http://xena.sourceforge.net/ That uses OOo as a plugin. This would probably ease that connection.
Re: [DISCUSS]: I would like to propose a new conversion mode parameter
Hi, I get XENA's help page as below link, and it's using LibOffice as a plugin, not AOO. http://xena.sourceforge.net/help.php?page=setoffice.html The external tool for converting office documents to Open Document Format (ODF) is *LibreOffice*. Doesn't matter, it originally used OOo, it still relies on OOo code as an ODF editor, LO is still OOo code, if you want to use Xena you can use AOO as it's plugin. Cheers GL 2012/8/21 Graham Lauder y...@apache.org KG01 - see comments inline. On Aug 21, 2012, at 4:18 AM, Marcus (OOo) marcus.m...@wtnet.de wrote: Am 08/20/2012 04:54 PM, schrieb Jürgen Schmidt: OpenOffice is not only used as desktop application but also as hidden part of other software and often as a conversion engine in the backend. OpenOffice has very good filters for many file formats and the usage as a conversion engine is straight forward. And the conversion from one format into another can be improved and optimized by some special handling of parts of the document. For example external linked parts can be ignored and don't have to be loaded during conversion, embedded images can be simply copied etc. I would like to improve AOO for this kind of usage by introducing a new parameter -conversionmode. It's not comparable with the command line parameter -headless or the hidden property for loadComponentFromUrl(). The intention of this new global option is to have it available everywhere in the underlying code to optimize the performance of the conversion. Sounds reasonable. However, especially with the previous paragraph I don't know if I understood right. Do you want to simply make the import/export of docs faster when AOO isn't running in graphical mode? Would be great if you can fill this with some more details. This should have no influence/impact on the normal workflow but will help to make AOO potentially more attractive for backend usage. Means it will help to grow the broader eco-system around AOO. KG01 - Interesting. Does this mean future apps could present their own user experience and still leverage our framework? The Auustralia National Archive created a piece of software for preserving digital materials called XENA http://xena.sourceforge.net/ That uses OOo as a plugin. This would probably ease that connection.
Re: [VOTE] Apache OpenOffice Community Graduation Vote
Per the IPMC's Guide to Successful Graduation [1] this is the optional, but recommended, community vote for us to express our willingness/readiness to govern ourselves. If this vote passes then we continue by drafting a charter, submitting it for IPMC endorsement, and then to the ASF Board for final approval. Details can be found in the Guide to Successful Graduation. Everyone in the community is encouraged to vote. Votes from PPMC members and Mentors are binding. This vote will run 72-hours. [ ] +1 Apache OpenOffice community is ready to graduate from the Apache Incubator. [ ] +0 Don't care. [ ] -1 Apache OpenOffice community is not ready to graduate from the Apache Incubator because... Regards, -Rob +1 Let's get this party started Cheers GL
Re: [UX] DISCUSS - Survey Tool Recommendation
On 16/08/2012 Rob Weir wrote: On Thu, Aug 16, 2012 at 12:47 AM, Kevin Grignon wrote: I've been looking at various survey tools and would like to recommend that we deploy the open source survey tool, *LimeSurvey.* Perfect. It is a good tool and it is in continuity with what the project used to use, see my old e-mail at http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-ooo-dev/201206.mbox/%3C4 feecc9a.3020...@apache.org%3E 1) A volunteer hosts the survey outside of Apache at their existing domain name 2) A volunteer hosts the survey outside of Apache and some pays $15 or so to get a better domain name for it, like www.oosurvey.net 3) A volunteer hosts the survey outside of Apache but we redirect the subdomain survey.openoffice.org to point to the external server As I wrote in the same e-mail, Graham had written he had a working LimeSurvey installation that he could make available to the project: http://s.apache.org/wZ . So I'd try with that first, and I'd probably prefer option 3 to keep all services under one namespace. Regards, Andrea. Just having long loud discussions with the host at the moment because the site is broken, looks like an update has gone bad. As soon as it's sorted we can be in to it. We should probably still do the survey design on the wiki however. Cheers G
Re: [UX] DISCUSS - Survey Tool Recommendation
On 16/08/2012 Rob Weir wrote: On Thu, Aug 16, 2012 at 12:47 AM, Kevin Grignon wrote: I've been looking at various survey tools and would like to recommend that we deploy the open source survey tool, *LimeSurvey.* Perfect. It is a good tool and it is in continuity with what the project used to use, see my old e-mail at http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-ooo-dev/201206.mbox/%3 C4 feecc9a.3020...@apache.org%3E 1) A volunteer hosts the survey outside of Apache at their existing domain name 2) A volunteer hosts the survey outside of Apache and some pays $15 or so to get a better domain name for it, like www.oosurvey.net 3) A volunteer hosts the survey outside of Apache but we redirect the subdomain survey.openoffice.org to point to the external server As I wrote in the same e-mail, Graham had written he had a working LimeSurvey installation that he could make available to the project: http://s.apache.org/wZ . So I'd try with that first, and I'd probably prefer option 3 to keep all services under one namespace. Regards, Andrea. Just having long loud discussions with the host at the moment because the site is broken, looks like an update has gone bad. As soon as it's sorted we can be in to it. We should probably still do the survey design on the wiki however. Cheers G Good grief, server meltdown and they're talking about 72 hours before it's up again.
Re: [DISCUSS] AOO Ready to Graduate
Am Freitag, 17. August 2012 um 17:55 schrieb Rob Weir: We've had several prods from our mentors suggesting that we are ready to graduate. But I think there was general recognition that with graduation comes a little hump in extra work, both for the project as well as the IPMC and Infra, especially related to mailing list and website changes [1]. We wanted to avoid piling that on top of the already considerable work required to get AOO 3.4.1 released. The AOO 3.4.1 release is now being voted on. So I think it is a good time for us to start this process. I'd recommend everyone take a look at this timeline [2] for what the graduation process looks like. You can see it is three steps: 1) Optional Community vote [3] 2) Preparation of a Charter and Resolution [4] 3) Vote by the IPMC to recommend the Charter/Resolution to the ASF Board. 4) Approval by the ASF Board. As I understand it the ASF Board meeting on the 3rd Wednesday of each month. So the next meeting should be September 19th. If we start now, we should have plenty of time to work through this process in time for that meeting. I'd like to start the first step, with the optional, but highly recommended, community vote, stating our belief that we are ready to graduate. I agree and yes let us start with the process. Juergen Regards, -Rob [1] http://incubator.apache.org/guides/graduation.html#project-first-steps [2] http://incubator.apache.org/guides/graduation.html#process [3] http://incubator.apache.org/guides/graduation.html#tlp-community-vote [4] http://incubator.apache.org/guides/graduation.html#tlp-resolution +1, let's get it underway Cheers G
Re: OO Sold on eBay
On 13 August 2012 01:29, Rob Weir robw...@apache.org wrote: On Sun, Aug 12, 2012 at 5:50 PM, Kay Schenk kay.sch...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, Aug 12, 2012 at 10:49 AM, Rob Weir robw...@apache.org wrote: On Sun, Aug 12, 2012 at 12:38 PM, Max Merbald max.merb...@gmx.de wrote: Hi, I'd say it's not very fair because probably not everyone knows OOO is available for free. It's kind of weird that someone is trying to make money with something which is available for free. I wonder... is there anything that prevents one of us from offering the same thing on eBay, but at a near-zero price? For example, would it be within eBay policy to have an auction for instructions for downloading OpenOffice? Give all the same marketing plugs for features, etc., but set it as a Buy Now price of 1-cent or something. Some users want a CD, because of bandwidth limitations. But the cost of information, in this case, should be nearly zero. -Rob You might want to check out seller requirements first... http://pages.ebay.com/help/sell/questions/sell-requirements.html I would think if we're willing to do this -- and set this up somehow, the answer is no unless ASF precludes this, which it might. Drew mentioned another eBay policy that said you could not sell access to downloaded software. You could only sell the media. Looking at the ebay auctions, some of them seem reasonable. $3 or $5 for a CD and packaging, shipping, etc., is not outrageous. But I am concerned that several of the auctions seem to be selling old versions of OpenOffice including 3.2 and 3.1. These earlier versions lack important security fixes and those who distribute old versions, without a warning, are putting their customers at risk. As a project we take great pains to ensure the users who download from our website get authentic versions of our software, the latest versions, not tampered with. We give the downloader ways of verifying this, with MD5 hashes and PGP signatures. But there is no current way that we can offer similar assurances to users who purchase a CD. (Anyone who thinks users will verify checksums or signatures on a CD is deluded.) Our options: 1) Do nothing. Bandwidth and access is increasing and this problem will solve itself...sometime. This would the best course, although I don't that there is a problem. Quite the opposite, it is in fact a good thing. People are thinking like proprietary software vendors, please get out of this trap. Ebay sellers are cheap promotion, they get the brand out there. People who return to those sellers do it to save bandwidth. The people who buy off them the first time but who do have bandwidth, may not do it a second time because they figure out pretty quickly that the name is a web address, or at least they used to. Also many people like dealing with a person rather than a server. The vast majority of the EBay sellers do the brand a service. Getting someone to do it on behalf of the project is just a waste of energy that could be put to better use. We would be better to promote the EBay sellers, treat them as partners rather than competitors.EBay tends to be self policing, the unscrupulous ones get bad feedback and disappear fairly quickly. If they are selling older versions, my answer to that is So what? My wife still uses 3.0 and it suits her needs perfectly. When the user decides that perhaps downloading is the better way to go then they will automatically get the latest version. Having the latest and greatest is not the be all and end all. 2) Define voluntary requirements for distributors of OpenOffice. Those who agree to these requirements would be allowed use of a special logo and would be listed on our website. More bureaucracy that is unneeded 3) One or more community members, acting outside of Apache, could organize to sell CD's on eBay at cost, and have eBay auction listings that are upfront and honest, explaining that the software is open source and can be downloaded for free. We can give the URL right in the listing. We would make it clear that the charge is only for convenience of having a CD delivered. Putting a URL in the body of the listing that allows people to circumvent the auction process is against EBay TOU. Is it worth approaching eBay with our concerns? No, because there are none - ensuring that sellers credit (and link to) the ASF They are selling OOo, that's enough credit, these people are our retailers. We, the project, do not supply the software on media, just like Heinz gets supermarkets to sell their beans rather than only supply from a Heinz shop. - ensuring that sellers provide clear information on the version supplied EBay won't do anything like that, their policing is along strict guidelines. Their actions are strictly binary: Allow or Ban. The value to EBay of
Re: [PROPOSAL] Create ooo-l...@incubator.apache.org
I suggested this on the list a few weeks ago. I'd like to now move forward with it. +1 to the list and +1 to L10n that is recognised as the dimunition of localisation amongst translators I'll volunteer to be one of the list moderators. But I need 2-3 other committers to volunteer as well. Let me know if you can help. I can help moderate that or at least I can handle the english garbage. For the rest I'll need a bit of help fom google translate if no native speaker of the language in question is moderating. Cheers GL l10n = localization or localisation, depending on where you went to school. The purpose of the list would be coordination of the localization efforts, including translation, for AOO. Another purpose would be for coaching new translators on the project., helping them to get started and productive with our tools. In other words, rather than ooo-dev's drink from the fire hose approach, where power-user email filtering skills are necessary to preserve sanity, let's offer a more focused collaboration environment for translators -Rob
Re: [UX][Volunteers Needed] - Harvesting Social Data
KG01 - See comments inline. On Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 6:11 PM, RGB ES rgb.m...@gmail.com wrote: 2012/6/26 Kevin Grignon kevingrignon...@gmail.com: Hello All, As mentioned in an earlier post, collectively, our social assets present a huge opportunity to engage the AOO user community, capture insight, feedback and thoughts on the current health of our products, and our future product direction. Harvesting data from our social media assets, forums and mailing lists is an extremely challenging task. With s much content in disparate sources, it is likely that many threads will fade into the archives. However, we can attempt to harvest any insight that is considered relevant and actionable - so that the valueable data is not lost. Also, some AOO contributors cannot access some social media sites. Capturing social data in the AOO UX wiki also ensures the relevant and actionable social data is open, accessible and visible to all. To be clear, I understand that such effort is not going to capture everything, nor is it ever complete. Rather, this is a chance to capture any notable insight that could help drive informed design and development decisions in the future. Some data is better than none. Also, some international AOO contributors cannot access some social media sites. Capturing social data in the AOO UX wiki also ensures the relevant and actionable social data is open, accessible and visible to all. I have created a number of pages within the AOO UX wiki [1] for harvesting and capturing social data. [1] http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/AOO_Social_Data I invite everyone to harvest insight from our social media and post to the wiki. If you see something relevant, that could be actionable, please harvest this information and post to the wiki. Feel free to tweak the document table format to suite the content. Such raw data can help feed the development of informed UX work products moving forward. For example, such data can help us define our user roles, validate key usage scenarios and capture actionable product recommendations. Tracing our design and development work products to real data ensures that we will make informed decisions driven by end user insight. Do not hesitate to contact me for more information on this ongoing research activity. Regards, Kevin Added one example (and fixed a typo on the table headings) to see how it works. KG01 - Good stuff. Thanks for getting the ball rolling. I think description column should be left aligned, not centred, but other than aligning paragraph one by one I cannot find a way to do so on the column. Also the bold is not needed there, but I did not find how to change that. KG01 - Man alive, the mediawiki is really hard to work in. I'm aware of the formatting issues. Let's focus on content for now. I created a better table today in another page, and can copy the wiki code over. It's easier to read than the social data table. It's OK you've just formatted every row as a header. I'll sort it. Cheers GL I'm really a newbie on wikis, as you can see :) Regards Ricardo
Re: [UX][Volunteers Needed] - Harvesting Social Data
Added one example (and fixed a typo on the table headings) to see how it works. KG01 - Good stuff. Thanks for getting the ball rolling. I think description column should be left aligned, not centred, but other than aligning paragraph one by one I cannot find a way to do so on the column. Also the bold is not needed there, but I did not find how to change that. KG01 - Man alive, the mediawiki is really hard to work in. I'm aware of the formatting issues. Let's focus on content for now. I created a better table today in another page, and can copy the wiki code over. It's easier to read than the social data table. It's OK you've just formatted every row as a header. I'll sort it. Cheers GL Done. It's a good idea to have the formatting toolbar enabled if you're not sure of the markup. Go to your preferences tab, select Editing and check Show edit toolbar. It makes things a little easier. For bulk changes I just copy and paste the markup into Writer. Cheers GL I'm really a newbie on wikis, as you can see :) Regards Ricardo
Re: official logos ???
On 06/13/2012 03:45 PM, Ariel Constenla-Haile wrote: Hi Kay, On Tue, Jun 12, 2012 at 08:48:58AM -0700, Kay Schenk wrote: yeah-- I was definitely thinking of extending the /images/AOO_logos to house JUST the logos... ooo-site/content/images/AOO_logos/svg/OOo_Website_v2_copy.svg is not really an svg file, but an svg with a raster image embedded. Can you upload the original SVG file for this, well this is all that I found...so sorry. Not being a graphics guru, I really don't know how to differentiate these things, and well, gimp was happy with it, so...I'll see what I can do. I will contact the designer. and for the orb as seen in ooo-site/content/images/AOO_logos/orb.jpg ? (I had to take it from the facebook page, because I didn't find anywhare ;) ). This orb is not ooo-site/content/images/AOO_logos/svg/orb.svg oh boy! you are definitely correct on this one! :( I should have put this one instead... http://www.openoffice.org/trademark/symbol_color.png OK, I'll change this... The one you have is nice...the designer must have received permission to create it from the real trademarked orb so perhaps we can track this down. Regards Hi Kay, Probably the best images available of the orb are at: http://www.openoffice.org/ui/VisualDesign/OOo3_refresh.html This was Stella's work for the last brand refresh which is where the orb came into use. Cheers GL
Re: Another installation annoyance
Greetings Peter, Could you please start a new thread rather than hijacking one with a different topic. Because of the volume of mail on this list it's very easy to miss a message buried a long way down a different topic thread. Cheers GL Who had the brilliant idea of enabling the OO splash screen unconditionally so users have to look at the monstrosity every time the machine boots? Apparently one has to edit program/soffice.ini with a text editor to disable it. Yikes. Need to fix this. PB
Re: Next steps for Symphony and AOO
As we wait [0] for the Symphony [1] code to be loaded into Subversion I think it would be good to start a discussion on next steps of how we can make best use of this contribution. Hopefully you've had time to review the list of features on the wiki [2], install one of the binaries [3] , or maybe even download the source [4] and try to build it [5]. As will see by your examination, the Symphony code base has co-evolved with OpenOffice.org for several years now, and continued to co-evolve with Apache OpenOffice even recently. Symphony has many features and bug fixes that AOO lacks. And there are areas where Symphony is missing enhancements or bug fixes that are in OpenOffice. Our challenge is to find the best way to bring these two code bases together, to make the best product. I think there are two main approaches to this problem: I. Merge code, from Symphony, feature by feature, into AOO, in a prioritized order. This is the slow approach, since it would take (by the estimates I've seen) a couple of years to bring all of the Symphony enhancements and bug fixes over to AOO. II. Use Symphony as the the new base, and merge (over time) AOO (and OOo) enhancements and bug fixes into the new trunk. This approach quickly gives a new UI, something we could fairly call Apache OpenOffice 4.0. But this approach would also give us some short-term pain. For example, those involved in porting AOO 3.4 would need to merge their patches into the new trunk. We'd need to update license headers again. Help files and translation are done differently in Symphony, and so on. Looked at another way, option I is a slow, but easy path. Option II is a leap forward, but will be initially more work and disruption. Evolution versus Revolution. I always liked those two choices! My gut goes for revolution, however do I remember a comment from way back that OOo extensions don't work with Symphony? That might be a disruption too far perhaps. Cheers GL So let's discuss. Please ask questions about the pro's and con's of each approach. The code and binaries are all posted, and my IBM colleagues in Beijing are happy to answer your questions. Regards, -Rob [0] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-4799 [1] http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Symphony [2] http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Symphony_contribution [3] http://people.apache.org/~zhangjf/symphony/build/ [4] https://svn-master.apache.org/repos/test/danielsh/symphony-import/ [5] http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/How_to_build_Symphony%27s_source_ code
Re: Next steps for Symphony and AOO
As we wait [0] for the Symphony [1] code to be loaded into Subversion I think it would be good to start a discussion on next steps of how we can make best use of this contribution. Hopefully you've had time to review the list of features on the wiki [2], install one of the binaries [3] , or maybe even download the source [4] and try to build it [5]. As will see by your examination, the Symphony code base has co-evolved with OpenOffice.org for several years now, and continued to co-evolve with Apache OpenOffice even recently. Symphony has many features and bug fixes that AOO lacks. And there are areas where Symphony is missing enhancements or bug fixes that are in OpenOffice. Our challenge is to find the best way to bring these two code bases together, to make the best product. I think there are two main approaches to this problem: I. Merge code, from Symphony, feature by feature, into AOO, in a prioritized order. This is the slow approach, since it would take (by the estimates I've seen) a couple of years to bring all of the Symphony enhancements and bug fixes over to AOO. II. Use Symphony as the the new base, and merge (over time) AOO (and OOo) enhancements and bug fixes into the new trunk. This approach quickly gives a new UI, something we could fairly call Apache OpenOffice 4.0. But this approach would also give us some short-term pain. For example, those involved in porting AOO 3.4 would need to merge their patches into the new trunk. We'd need to update license headers again. Help files and translation are done differently in Symphony, and so on. Looked at another way, option I is a slow, but easy path. Option II is a leap forward, but will be initially more work and disruption. Evolution versus Revolution. I always liked those two choices! My gut goes for revolution, however do I remember a comment from way back that OOo extensions don't work with Symphony? That might be a disruption too far perhaps. Cheers GL So let's discuss. Please ask questions about the pro's and con's of each approach. The code and binaries are all posted, and my IBM colleagues in Beijing are happy to answer your questions. Regards, -Rob [0] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-4799 [1] http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Symphony [2] http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Symphony_contribution [3] http://people.apache.org/~zhangjf/symphony/build/ [4] https://svn-master.apache.org/repos/test/danielsh/symphony-import/ [5] http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/How_to_build_Symphony%27s_source_ code
Re: Propose to Integrate Old OO Wiki and New AOO Wiki
On 6/5/12 5:11 AM, Kevin Grignon wrote: KG01 - See comments inline. On Tue, Jun 5, 2012 at 10:35 AM, chengjh chen...@apache.org wrote: Hi, We see,the old OpenOffice.org wiki http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Main_Page has accumulated plenty of valuable information,including planning,function specification,technical documents and so on..Currently,the planning and project tracking parts have been moved to https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OOOUSERS/Wiki+Home,that means a new start of the project.Because the two wikis are two different wiki software systems,moreover, there are existing different writing styles between them and writers need accounts for them respectively, it is not convenient for writers to write wiki articles when switching between them... KG01 - Yes, attempting to manage and maintain content on two wikis is painful and inefficient. it would be indeed nice to have only one wiki. We have unresolved issues with the old wiki content (unclear licenses) but MediaWiki as underlying wiki software offers more features as far as I can see and the editing is smoother for me. Very useful extensions are used in several places all over the wiki. If possible I would prefer to move forward with MediaWiki Juergen +1 for going with Mediawiki simply because of it's feature set. Cheers G So, I propose to create a new wiki for developers to record technical documents,technical review,proposals/ideas,function specification and design,and so on by sub-project categories, for example,we can move the scope of teams section from the old OO wiki to the new wiki, or *extend the scope of https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OOOUSERS/Wiki+Hometo include these areas. KG01 - While I appreciate that there is a focus on development in the open source world, I would suggest that the effort is much broader. I personally prefer open source product development ;) Delivering sustainable, compelling and delightful products is the domain of an interdisciplinary team, not just technical folks. Any future wiki strategy should address the needs of all project stakeholders and contributors. *Thus, in the future,the new wiki will only keep a link to the old OO wiki which takes as the history data and continue to accumulate new project data to benefit the project and contributors..Please comment...thanks. KG01 - Archiving older content as is, and including references from the new wiki makes sense. A one-time migration of relevant data would be important, however, any older content could be left as is in the archives. To help differentiate old versus new, we might consider a different tool. As a better user experience is important, this seems like a good time to move to a newer wiki tool. -- Best Regards,Jianhong Cheng
Re: [UX] The Questions for users
Hi. Questions relating to research! We aren't in order to adjust. Sorry long text. Legend: - Questions --Response options. *** - How old are you ? - What S.O you use ? --Linux --Mac --Windows --other [what] - Use of Linux ? Wich graphic interface: --GNOME --KDE --Lxde --Others [what] - Where do you use Apache OpenOffice? --Home --Office --Company --Telecenter --Others [whatl] -Where to get support ? --Manuals --Mailling list --Search --Friends --Others [what] -Where do you want to get support ? --Manuals --Mailing list --Search --Friends --Others [whatl] -How often do you use Apahce OpenOffice ? --Sometimes --With frequency --Daily - How much time you spend on the computer ? --30 min to 1 hora --1h to 3h --3h to 5h --More of 8h - As you consider using the computer ? --Beginner --intermediate --Advanced (expert) -How important computer for you: --unimportant --insignificant --Very Important -How do you consider a nice software? --With enough buttons --Buttons significant --Buttons simple and agile --Results --Buttons and good visual meanings. *** Accepted reviews and more questions. Each survey has to generate information that guides and informs decisions. For each question we should ask ourselves, why do we need to know this? What is the reason for this query. What advance - enhancement - feature will be generated or affected by a majority response for one particular selection. So each survey therefore, has to have a specific reason for being. We have come to a point where there are a number of possibilities. We need user input to steer us down the right road. For this questionairre we have not decided what these parameters are, we have the cart before the horse. Our users do us a huge favour by participating in a survey, for them it is a substantial cost in time and effort for no percievable reward. While it is necessary obviously to think of the value of the survey to the project we need to think about our users and what encourages them to take part and how do we make the survey a pleasurable experience for them. This is a statistic that is a warning about not considering our respondents. The old OOo had a registration thing at first run. It directed the user to a user survey. It was long and complex and badly targeted. Several hundred million downloads resulted in a few tens of thousands respondents, an almost unmeasurable fraction of one percent response. Perhaps the first survey we should conduct is a survey about what sort of surveys our users would respond to. Cheers GL PS I have made a few comments on the wiki page with regard to the questions there. Albino
Re: [UX] The Questions for users
Hi. Questions relating to research! We aren't in order to adjust. Sorry long text. Legend: - Questions --Response options. *** - How old are you ? - What S.O you use ? --Linux --Mac --Windows --other [what] - Use of Linux ? Wich graphic interface: --GNOME --KDE --Lxde --Others [what] - Where do you use Apache OpenOffice? --Home --Office --Company --Telecenter --Others [whatl] -Where to get support ? --Manuals --Mailling list --Search --Friends --Others [what] -Where do you want to get support ? --Manuals --Mailing list --Search --Friends --Others [whatl] -How often do you use Apahce OpenOffice ? --Sometimes --With frequency --Daily - How much time you spend on the computer ? --30 min to 1 hora --1h to 3h --3h to 5h --More of 8h - As you consider using the computer ? --Beginner --intermediate --Advanced (expert) -How important computer for you: --unimportant --insignificant --Very Important -How do you consider a nice software? --With enough buttons --Buttons significant --Buttons simple and agile --Results --Buttons and good visual meanings. *** Accepted reviews and more questions. Each survey has to generate information that guides and informs decisions. For each question we should ask ourselves, why do we need to know this? What is the reason for this query. What advance - enhancement - feature will be generated or affected by a majority response for one particular selection. So each survey therefore, has to have a specific reason for being. We have come to a point where there are a number of possibilities. We need user input to steer us down the right road. For this questionairre we have not decided what these parameters are, we have the cart before the horse. Our users do us a huge favour by participating in a survey, for them it is a substantial cost in time and effort for no percievable reward. While it is necessary obviously to think of the value of the survey to the project we need to think about our users and what encourages them to take part and how do we make the survey a pleasurable experience for them. This is a statistic that is a warning about not considering our respondents. The old OOo had a registration thing at first run. It directed the user to a user survey. It was long and complex and badly targeted. Several hundred million downloads resulted in a few tens of thousands respondents, an almost unmeasurable fraction of one percent response. Perhaps the first survey we should conduct is a survey about what sort of surveys our users would respond to. Cheers GL PS I have made a few comments on the wiki page with regard to the questions there. Albino
Re: [UX] The Questions for users
Hi. Questions relating to research! [] Perhaps the first survey we should conduct is a survey about what sort of surveys our users would respond to. Cheers GL PS I have made a few comments on the wiki page with regard to the questions there. Discussion on Delivery Methodologies Unfortunately probably our best way of reaching OOo users, the OOo mail redirect, has been taken away (Although the value of that list could be debatable) so we have to come up with different methods. We have basically two demographics that we have simple access to: New Users and Experienced Users. New User contact: At Download, from a redirect from the download site At install: a link to a survey to do while AOO is installing Immediately Post install Experienced user contact: As for the New User Via the announce list from the Home Page (Add in another link I am willing to help with AOO User Research) At upgrade as part of the process This in addition to posting on all lists obviously It should go without saying that the user should be able to opt-out at any point Discuss either here or on the wiki http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Talk:AOO_UX_Research_Surveys Cheers GL
Re: [UX] The Questions for users
Additional comments inline. See KG02. On Tue, Jun 5, 2012 at 10:49 AM, Kevin Grignon kevingrignon...@gmail.comwrote: KG01 - see comments inline. On Tue, Jun 5, 2012 at 8:26 AM, Graham Lauder y...@apache.org wrote: Hi. Questions relating to research! [] Perhaps the first survey we should conduct is a survey about what sort of surveys our users would respond to. KG01 - Thanks for your feedback and interest in the user research effort. While I agree we could deploy different types of surveys to gather different types of data, I feel that a survey of surveys might induce premature survey fatigue. User research, especially surveys, consumes people's time and energy. Rather, I propose we work from the other direction. If the goal of the research activity is to gather data that will help us build insight and drive informed design and development decisions, then we should focus the surveys on the information we need to do that. I have captured some comments in the wiki discussion page. http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Talk:AOO_UX_Research_Surveys Cheers GL PS I have made a few comments on the wiki page with regard to the questions there. Discussion on Delivery Methodologies Unfortunately probably our best way of reaching OOo users, the OOo mail redirect, has been taken away (Although the value of that list could be debatable) so we have to come up with different methods. We have basically two demographics that we have simple access to: New Users and Experienced Users. New User contact: At Download, from a redirect from the download site At install: a link to a survey to do while AOO is installing Immediately Post install Experienced user contact: As for the New User Via the announce list from the Home Page (Add in another link I am willing to help with AOO User Research) At upgrade as part of the process This in addition to posting on all lists obviously It should go without saying that the user should be able to opt-out at any point Discuss either here or on the wiki http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Talk:AOO_UX_Research_Surveys KG02 - Graham, I can log into and edit the page, but cannot login to or edit the comments. Thoughts? Mediawiki sometimes plays silly buggers with login. If you are logged but your ID is not at the top of the page then look for the View Source tag click that and it seems to take you to the editable page Cheers G Cheers GL
Re: [UX] The Questions for users
KG01 - see comments inline. On Tue, Jun 5, 2012 at 8:26 AM, Graham Lauder y...@apache.org wrote: Hi. Questions relating to research! [] Perhaps the first survey we should conduct is a survey about what sort of surveys our users would respond to. KG01 - Thanks for your feedback and interest in the user research effort. While I agree we could deploy different types of surveys to gather different types of data, I feel that a survey of surveys might induce premature survey fatigue. Survey fatique has already set in, that is not a new thing, that is recognisable simply by those surveys conducted by SUN. We haven't caused that, it is a factor of the modern marketing malaise. The cost of incentives these days, that one needs to hand out to get a significant sampling in a timely manner is huge. User research, especially surveys, consumes people's time and energy. Indeed as I myself pointed out earlier in this thread Rather, I propose we work from the other direction. If the goal of the research activity is to gather data that will help us build insight and drive informed design and development decisions, then we should focus the surveys on the information we need to do that. I have captured some comments in the wiki discussion page. Indeed, however if the sample of respondents is ridiculously small, as has historically been the case, then the data is useless. You cannot use corporate methodologies in an open source environment. We have no ability to offer incentives, we therefore need to make the survey process as pleasant and enjoyable as possible or we need to find out from people what would encourage them to participate. That requires research, I doubt it will require as big a sample as a UX survey but that is only because there are a limited number of answers needed. Every good research organisation I have worked with does short surveys to find out what they're doing right or wrong. For the most part they do these at the end of another survey, but that is because the group of respondents they are questioning will probably never do the same survey again. For us the problem has been getting respondents to finish. Lose them once and they won't come back again and we will need to talk to our user community if not often, at least regularly I would prefer to do things right first time up so people will happily respond to any surveys we need to put out. Remember that there are not only UX surveys to be done but Marketing as well. We know already know two things that get people to complete surveys: Brevity and Fun. If we do a light hearted, quick survey that gives us the reasons that people will participate, I think that's a really good use of resources. The Surveys already put up are boring, generic and not likely to inspire people to complete them. OOo has a user base in the hundreds of millions a few hundred completions is not a sample. We need 10s of thousands of responses across scores of languages, to get a easonable sample. So first we need to figure out how to get that sample. Cheers G
Re: LinuxTag 2012 Berlin
Hi, Hi Juergen, Please excuse if this seems a little abrupt, but I want to the message to be precise. last week I gave a talk about OpenOffice on the LinuxTag conference in Berlin. The attendance was moderate and I got the bad first slot in the morning 10:00am after the LinuxTag party on Thursday ;-) It was an interesting interruption of my vacation. My main goal was to express that OpenOffice was never dead and the project have found a new home at Apache. I highlighted our achievements and of course our release as important milestone. Presenting our nice download numbers was also a pleasure for me ;-) We should stop apologising for being who we are. We should not use any speaking opportunity allowed us to talk about / put down / argue about LO. We do not need to mention the rumours of the project's demise, our actions give lie to that, mentioning it merely gives the rumour recognition that it does not deserve. We have had a release! Even to the most nontechy folk that is proof of life. Let's not mention it ever again. I also expressed my view that OpenOffice.org = Apache OpenOffice go-oo = LibreOffice based on the facts that we own all rights on the name and the domains, the source code. And we have reserved and migrated the whole infra structure... And on www.go-oo.org you can see the relation to LibreOffice. And that not the complete community have moved to LibreOffice. But I have pointed out that it is my personal view ;-) I also pointed out that we don't want to compete with LibreOffice (also my personal opinion) and that our main focus and goal is to provide a good, stable, high quality, free and intuitive office application. A further point was that I tried to express that our users will decide in the future which office they will prefer and that we will focus on our users and their real demand. Based on the discussion after my talk it is clear that many people don't understand the split anymore and would appreciate if both projects would work together. But that is a political question that can't be answered easily. I think with the Apache license we provide a possible basement but the license question is much more complicate for some people. The main reason that the post discussion revolved around the LO/AOO relationship is because it sounds like that was what your talk was about. If asked then the answer short and to the point: We have different licenses and we wish them well!That's it... no more. We should not be discussing the detail. If people need to know, both licenses are published and discussed on a million places on the web. People can research it there. We have different names now, neither project is the original, Sun is gone! LO is no more a SUSE project than AOO is an IBM project. Both projects have corporate members. That's all. We need to move the conversation away from this nonproductive discussion. People need to know: The AOO community is growing and highly active We have had our first release Yes our downloads are lower than historical but we did that with virtually zero publicity We are very close to graduation to being an Apache Top Level Project We now have Symphony code moved over We will probably have a couple more incremental releases before 4.0 We have sourceforge onside and other distribution channels are being looked at. 4.0 will be killer! Those are the messages we need to go out. We do not define this project by LO. We can be a little grateful to LO for keeping OOo and ODF out there in the public eye and maintaining our brand recognition, but that does not extend to allowing their brand to intrude into our conversation. No more please. We need to be on message Cheers GL
Re: LinuxTag 2012 Berlin
On 5/30/12 3:10 PM, Graham Lauder wrote: Hi, Hi Juergen, Please don't see this as a criticism directed at you, this is simply a constructive critique of the content and suggestions for future interactions. Thanks is due for doing the presentation in any case. Please excuse if this seems a little abrupt, but I want to the message to be precise. last week I gave a talk about OpenOffice on the LinuxTag conference in Berlin. The attendance was moderate and I got the bad first slot in the morning 10:00am after the LinuxTag party on Thursday ;-) It was an interesting interruption of my vacation. My main goal was to express that OpenOffice was never dead and the project have found a new home at Apache. I highlighted our achievements and of course our release as important milestone. Presenting our nice download numbers was also a pleasure for me ;-) We should stop apologising for being who we are. nobody apologized for that and I simply pointed out the facts as I see it. My apologies, after burbling about being precise I use a metaphorical statement. :/ The point that I tried to make (badly) is that every time we consume our time and energy discussing our relationship with LO we reinforce a view that we exist only as an adjunct to LO. The subtext in any such conversation is Sorry, but Anyway ignore We should not use any speaking opportunity allowed us to talk about / put down / argue about LO. I don't have argued against LibreOffice, I respect it and pointed out that the user will decide in the long term. But you were talking about it. That's wasted energy, let's confine ourselves to speaking about AOO We do not need to mention the rumours of the project's demise, our actions give lie to that, mentioning it merely gives the rumour recognition that it does not deserve. well the abstract of my talk was submitted several month ago and I made clear that I will clarify some misunderstandings. I haven't put too much pressure on this topic and simply highlighted more the success of AOO. I was definitly the first and the last time where I have expressed the difference between both from my point of view. Excellent We have had a release! Even to the most nontechy folk that is proof of life. agree and I have highlighted this a lot ;-) Let's not mention it ever again. I also expressed my view that OpenOffice.org = Apache OpenOffice go-oo = LibreOffice based on the facts that we own all rights on the name and the domains, the source code. And we have reserved and migrated the whole infra structure... And on www.go-oo.org you can see the relation to LibreOffice. And that not the complete community have moved to LibreOffice. But I have pointed out that it is my personal view ;-) I also pointed out that we don't want to compete with LibreOffice (also my personal opinion) and that our main focus and goal is to provide a good, stable, high quality, free and intuitive office application. A further point was that I tried to express that our users will decide in the future which office they will prefer and that we will focus on our users and their real demand. Based on the discussion after my talk it is clear that many people don't understand the split anymore and would appreciate if both projects would work together. But that is a political question that can't be answered easily. I think with the Apache license we provide a possible basement but the license question is much more complicate for some people. The main reason that the post discussion revolved around the LO/AOO relationship is because it sounds like that was what your talk was about. I don't think so but I think it is natural that this discussion comes up again and again. And I haven't said that I have discussed the details on this topic with anybody. If asked then the answer short and to the point: We have different licenses and we wish them well!That's it... no more. We should not be discussing the detail. If people need to know, both licenses are published and discussed on a million places on the web. People can research it there. We have different names now, neither project is the original, Sun is gone! LO is no more a SUSE project than AOO is an IBM project. Both projects have corporate members. That's all. well that is your personal opinion but not mine. For me it is clear that AOO = OpenOffice.org. The fact that the project moved to Apache doesn't change it. And we still download the product from the same website as before, install it in the same directory, the visible name change is currently a mix and we support both. If a project decides to rename it's name it is still the same project, isn't it? The original project was funded by SUN, we don't have that any more. The old project would never have IBM
Re: LinuxTag 2012 Berlin
On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 6:39 PM, Graham Lauder y...@apache.org wrote: On 5/30/12 3:10 PM, Graham Lauder wrote: Hi, Hi Juergen, Please don't see this as a criticism directed at you, this is simply a constructive critique of the content and suggestions for future interactions. Thanks is due for doing the presentation in any case. Please excuse if this seems a little abrupt, but I want to the message to be precise. last week I gave a talk about OpenOffice on the LinuxTag conference in Berlin. The attendance was moderate and I got the bad first slot in the morning 10:00am after the LinuxTag party on Thursday ;-) It was an interesting interruption of my vacation. My main goal was to express that OpenOffice was never dead and the project have found a new home at Apache. I highlighted our achievements and of course our release as important milestone. Presenting our nice download numbers was also a pleasure for me ;-) We should stop apologising for being who we are. nobody apologized for that and I simply pointed out the facts as I see it. My apologies, after burbling about being precise I use a metaphorical statement. :/ The point that I tried to make (badly) is that every time we consume our time and energy discussing our relationship with LO we reinforce a view that we exist only as an adjunct to LO. The subtext in any such conversation is Sorry, but Anyway ignore We should not use any speaking opportunity allowed us to talk about / put down / argue about LO. I don't have argued against LibreOffice, I respect it and pointed out that the user will decide in the long term. But you were talking about it. That's wasted energy, let's confine ourselves to speaking about AOO We do not need to mention the rumours of the project's demise, our actions give lie to that, mentioning it merely gives the rumour recognition that it does not deserve. well the abstract of my talk was submitted several month ago and I made clear that I will clarify some misunderstandings. I haven't put too much pressure on this topic and simply highlighted more the success of AOO. I was definitly the first and the last time where I have expressed the difference between both from my point of view. Excellent We have had a release! Even to the most nontechy folk that is proof of life. agree and I have highlighted this a lot ;-) Let's not mention it ever again. I also expressed my view that OpenOffice.org = Apache OpenOffice go-oo = LibreOffice based on the facts that we own all rights on the name and the domains, the source code. And we have reserved and migrated the whole infra structure... And on www.go-oo.org you can see the relation to LibreOffice. And that not the complete community have moved to LibreOffice. But I have pointed out that it is my personal view ;-) I also pointed out that we don't want to compete with LibreOffice (also my personal opinion) and that our main focus and goal is to provide a good, stable, high quality, free and intuitive office application. A further point was that I tried to express that our users will decide in the future which office they will prefer and that we will focus on our users and their real demand. Based on the discussion after my talk it is clear that many people don't understand the split anymore and would appreciate if both projects would work together. But that is a political question that can't be answered easily. I think with the Apache license we provide a possible basement but the license question is much more complicate for some people. The main reason that the post discussion revolved around the LO/AOO relationship is because it sounds like that was what your talk was about. I don't think so but I think it is natural that this discussion comes up again and again. And I haven't said that I have discussed the details on this topic with anybody. If asked then the answer short and to the point: We have different licenses and we wish them well!That's it... no more. We should not be discussing the detail. If people need to know, both licenses are published and discussed on a million places on the web. People can research it there. We have different names now, neither project is the original, Sun is gone! LO is no more a SUSE project than AOO is an IBM project. Both projects have corporate members. That's all. well that is your personal opinion but not mine. For me it is clear that AOO = OpenOffice.org. The fact that the project moved to Apache doesn't change
Re: [UX] Questions for users
+1 for your thoughts. 2012/5/21 Graham Lauder y...@apache.org Hi. 2012/5/21 Paulo de Souza Lima paulo.s.l...@varekai.org 2012/5/21 Albino Biasutti Neto biasut...@gmail.com Hi. 2012/5/20 Raul Pacheco da Silva raulpachecodasi...@gmail.com Yes, like others softwares and questions in free internet U2es,012/5/20 Paulo de Souza Lima paulo.s.l...@varekai.org This could be done in the wiki. Yes. Let's go ?! Who wants to also create questions feel free. Albino You? We. :) Albino First off we need to figure what we want to learn, just asking random questions is no way to endear us to our users. Totally agree. We need know the goal we ask this kind of questions. We used to have a survey that the user connected to when s/he selected I want to register during install. That survey, set up by SUN, was very comprehensive. It had a couple of problems: One was that it was just an information gathering exercise there seemed to be no real goal other than that. Second was that it took too long to fill in, around 45 minutes. Consequently very actually completed it. I did the numbers on it a few years back but unfortunately I can't find them. Suffice to say it was miniscule, insufficient to be a reasonable sample. So therefore, any survey should have: 1) A specific goal such as: to guide marketing as to untapped target markets or perhaps to answer a specific UX question. In other words the data gathered should be used to guide specific decisions 2) the survey participants should be told what the survey is about and how their participation will affect the product. 3) An approximate completion time but no more than 10 minutes and as close to 5 as feasible. We also need to identify the target audience and how we approach that audience. So question one: What issue needs discussing right now and why. My first response to this would be Aesthetics. A common complaint that we have had is that the interface looks something from Win 2000 period. At first glance they are right. Buttons look clunky, the 3D depression with dark gray background does look old. Symphony by comparison has a light background behind the buttons on mouse over and a quite thin emboss on click. It looks lighter and fresher. Good job symphony team. We could put up a set of UI designs or themes and survey our users feelings about them. What else could we usefully ask about? Personally I think one plug-in etc can help collecting user behavior to offer more user experience/behavior analysis maybe is one good choice. But it is out of this topic scope.. OK, here's a question: I'd like to know if users would like the option to be able to Skin their AOO interface The other question that arises from this from developers/artists point of view: If the faclity was available would people like to create skins for AOO. For instance, would it be possible to code up an application similar to a WYSIWYG webeditor like Kompozer, in which you could design a skin for your AOO interface and then that application would generate an extension that would allow the user to download the skin from the extensions repository and thus change the look and feel of their interface. (I'm not making a case that this would be a good use of projects resources at this point, just asking the question as to the possibility) I ask because I am mindful of the difference of the freshness in the look between OOo and Symphony and our users have made this point over a fairly substantial amount of time. cheers GL Cheers GL
[UX] Symphony UI elements for AOO
As one member of the team, I feel proud that people missed the mail merge feature ^o*...although the code can't be applied to our code base, the design does. We can refer to the best from the design, and improve the mail merge function here. Hi Helen Congratulations and well done, you and your team did an excellent job. There are some bits that it would be nice to work on. Synching of address labels for instance. In the old OOo and it seems in Symphony, the address labels were a completely separate document means extra work load for the user. It would be preferable to generate both letter and address label at the same time then at the Print dialog, be able to choose Print documents or Print labels. Besides mail merge MDI, there are a lot of user experience improvements across three editors in this contribution...for example, the sidebar is in, which users can access most context properties easily; the clip-art gallery, has many newly designed pictures; numbering bullet enhancements, context menu, look feel, ...some are bigger ones, but some are very small items, but were driven by strong user needs or user study, so IMHO still very valuable for users. It's too bad about the MDI, ironically the pre-SUN StarOffice had an MDI. Very good it was too. I do like the sidebar and the whole fresher uncluttered look These enhancements are spreading in many places (in code) across three editors. It would take quite some time to integrate. I would invite all to have a look at the list, and discuss what you like, what we want to use here, and how to go forward...Looking forward to your thoughts. :-) Will do Helen Cheers GL
Re: [UX] Questions for users
On Sun, May 20, 2012 at 1:33 PM, Albino Biasutti Neto biasut...@gmail.comwrote: Hi. 2012/5/20 Paulo de Souza Lima paulo.s.l...@varekai.org I think you mean How old are you? =) Sorry, thanks. Maybe we could contribute to improve those questions. My 2 cents: Are you using it at your work (ask where does he/she work) or at home, or both? Do you think you have enough support? Where do you use to get support? (manuals, friends, forum, mailing lists, etc) Good! Open to suggestions. :-) Albino Where will these questions be asked? During the download process? During the registration process? A poll on the web site? -Wolf PS Website polls 1 to 2 question open-ended questions (questions without a set choice of answers) have been known to produce very useful data-sets among users of public library services, and I would suggest that model as an interesting way to find out our own blind spots, regarding usage trends. Closed-end questions such as do you like seagulls can only get 3 responses, yes, no and no response at all. Scaled response and open response questions are always better in terms of data that is dealing with aesthetics and feelings. The art with these answers is in the interpretation. A Yes/no response to a question is not an answer it's a vote and a sign of lazy Poll design. We don't need to do that, we don't have department heads breathing down our necks and waving deadlines under our noses so as there is no pressure, our Survey design should be tops. What I would like to be able to do is to design a survey, collate the data, make a decision based on that data, publish it and then be able to point directly at a feature or design element that we can say was due to feedback from the survey. This gives our surveys gravitas with users and we are more likely to get quality responses to later surveys. Cheers GL
Re: [UX] Questions for users
Hi. 2012/5/21 Graham Lauder y...@apache.org First off we need to figure what we want to learn, just asking random questions is no way to endear us to our users. We used to have a survey that the user connected to when s/he selected I want to register during install. That survey, set up by SUN, was very comprehensive. It had a couple of problems: One was that it was just an information gathering exercise there seemed to be no real goal other than that. Second was that it took too long to fill in, around 45 minutes. Consequently very actually completed it. I did the numbers on it a few years back but unfortunately I can't find them. Suffice to say it was miniscule, insufficient to be a reasonable sample. So therefore, any survey should have: 1) A specific goal such as: to guide marketing as to untapped target markets or perhaps to answer a specific UX question. In other words the data gathered should be used to guide specific decisions 2) the survey participants should be told what the survey is about and how their participation will affect the product. 3) An approximate completion time but no more than 10 minutes and as close to 5 as feasible. I informed about the scope the research, but must be prepared. We also need to identify the target audience and how we approach that audience. So question one: What issue needs discussing right now and why. My first response to this would be Aesthetics. A common complaint that we have had is that the interface looks something from Win 2000 period. At first glance they are right. Buttons look clunky, the 3D depression with dark gray background does look old. Symphony by comparison has a light background behind the buttons on mouse over and a quite thin emboss on click. It looks lighter and fresher. Good job symphony team. We could put up a set of UI designs or themes and survey our users feelings about them. What else could we usefully ask about? I'm prepared questions and details. Sorry, I'm not understanding. Have you prepared some questions or are you preparing some questions and what sort of details are we talking about. Suggetion of site for creates questions: doodle.com survey.usability-methods.com ... Open to suggestions ! I have a lime survey setup on a webhost that we can use also which will give us plenty of flexibility We also need to identify our respondents and figure out a way to get the survey in front of them. Albino Cheers GL
Re: [UX] Questions for users
Hi. 2012/5/21 Paulo de Souza Lima paulo.s.l...@varekai.org 2012/5/21 Albino Biasutti Neto biasut...@gmail.com Hi. 2012/5/20 Raul Pacheco da Silva raulpachecodasi...@gmail.com Yes, like others softwares and questions in free internet U2es,012/5/20 Paulo de Souza Lima paulo.s.l...@varekai.org This could be done in the wiki. Yes. Let's go ?! Who wants to also create questions feel free. Albino You? We. :) Albino First off we need to figure what we want to learn, just asking random questions is no way to endear us to our users. We used to have a survey that the user connected to when s/he selected I want to register during install. That survey, set up by SUN, was very comprehensive. It had a couple of problems: One was that it was just an information gathering exercise there seemed to be no real goal other than that. Second was that it took too long to fill in, around 45 minutes. Consequently very actually completed it. I did the numbers on it a few years back but unfortunately I can't find them. Suffice to say it was miniscule, insufficient to be a reasonable sample. So therefore, any survey should have: 1) A specific goal such as: to guide marketing as to untapped target markets or perhaps to answer a specific UX question. In other words the data gathered should be used to guide specific decisions 2) the survey participants should be told what the survey is about and how their participation will affect the product. 3) An approximate completion time but no more than 10 minutes and as close to 5 as feasible. We also need to identify the target audience and how we approach that audience. So question one: What issue needs discussing right now and why. My first response to this would be Aesthetics. A common complaint that we have had is that the interface looks something from Win 2000 period. At first glance they are right. Buttons look clunky, the 3D depression with dark gray background does look old. Symphony by comparison has a light background behind the buttons on mouse over and a quite thin emboss on click. It looks lighter and fresher. Good job symphony team. We could put up a set of UI designs or themes and survey our users feelings about them. What else could we usefully ask about? Cheers GL
Re: [ANNOUNCE] IBM SGA/CCLA Submitted for Symphony Source Code Contribution
Graham, Thanks for your comments! I also feel sorry that some of the features in Symphony can not be contributed out directly, because they were implemented based on Java XPD. But there are still a lot of valuable UX features in the code contributed, e.g. the sidebar, NumberingBullet enhancement, DataPilot, and many small UX enhancements. One thing I want to set every one's expectation is that even for the features/enhancements in the current contributed Symphony code, there will still be a lot of work for us to do to integrate them into our AOO build in the future releases. It can not simply happen tomorrow, unfortunately. But my point is, as far as we set the clear targets, we will move forward. MDI, Mail merge... all those can bring big value to AOO users, we can do. What we need are only more time and more contributors. :) Let's work together to make them happen! - Simon Indeed, let's do that. The Symphony Mail merge does do one good thing for us: It shows a really good way to go, a target iteration if you will. There are a few small UX issues with it but we can make the AOO version better as a result. Cheers G 2012/5/19 Graham Lauder g.a.lau...@gmail.com The Male Merge interface is implemented in Java. So it is not part of the contribution. OK so neither MDI or Mail merge is available. Does that mean that none of the GUI elements are part of the contribution. The question then bears asking what is in the contribution that we didn't have before that would be obvious to this poor simple enduser. It seems to me that it is less. It doesn't work with OOo extensions, there is no draw component. We have been told that those GUI elements of Symphony are what won it awards. And these awards are one of the reasons we should be happy because those elements can go into AOO, but now we are told this is not the case. I'm a tad confused. In this code base, the mail merge function was updated with OO.o 3.x code. This maybe so, but it is still a very bad User Experience example. In my corporate training it is the single biggest barrier to change in Marketing and Event Management departments. In the advertising and publishing space it is the biggest single barrier amongst sales departments. The Symphony Mail Merge is intuitive, quick to learn and doesn't require addressing data sources before getting started. One of the difficulties that OOo suffers from is that it costs nothing. So the change back to MSO does not necessitate the abandoning of any investment. The high cost of MSO is actually a barrier to uptake of OOo because businesses are reluctant to abandon any previous investment in MSO to make the change. What this means is that AOO has to be as good and/or better at everything it does, than the opposition or at least in those particular functionalities that individual businesses or departments use. This is because if there is an issue, there is no incentive to open a bugzilla instance when the lowest cost solution is simply to go back to MSO. I thought that getting the Symphony code on board was going to help with this, but it appears not. If I have misinterpreted this please feel free to correct this Cheers GL On Fri, May 18, 2012 at 11:12 AM, Graham Lauder y...@apache.org wrote: Though MDI is not in the current Symphony contributed code, but if people really like it, I suggest we to think about how to make it in AOO, maybe 4.0 or later... - Simon My hands are up for another lover of Symphony's MDI... :) One of the other cool things in Symphony that I would love to see in AOO, is Symphony's Mail Merge interface. Is that part of the contribution? Cheer GL 2012/5/17 zhangjf zhan...@apache.org On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 11:35 PM, Alexander Thurgood alex.thurg...@gmail.com wrote: Le 16/05/12 09:26, Yue Helen a écrit : Hi Helen Yue, http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Contribution Here you can find a document to describe what's inside this code contribution, by highlighting some additional features beyond what's in Apache OpenOffice 3.4. The feature list includes enhancements on performance, usability, functionality, interoperability, as well as globalization, accessibility and more. I actually really like the MDI UI and the context-based dockable properties panes. Alex The MDI feature is not included in the contributed code, while the sidebar feature is in. The MDI feature in fact is from another product IBM Lotus Expeditor which Symphony is integrated on. zhangjf
Re: [ANNOUNCE] IBM SGA/CCLA Submitted for Symphony Source Code Contribution
Though MDI is not in the current Symphony contributed code, but if people really like it, I suggest we to think about how to make it in AOO, maybe 4.0 or later... - Simon My hands are up for another lover of Symphony's MDI... :) One of the other cool things in Symphony that I would love to see in AOO, is Symphony's Mail Merge interface. Is that part of the contribution? Cheer GL 2012/5/17 zhangjf zhan...@apache.org On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 11:35 PM, Alexander Thurgood alex.thurg...@gmail.com wrote: Le 16/05/12 09:26, Yue Helen a écrit : Hi Helen Yue, http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Contribution Here you can find a document to describe what's inside this code contribution, by highlighting some additional features beyond what's in Apache OpenOffice 3.4. The feature list includes enhancements on performance, usability, functionality, interoperability, as well as globalization, accessibility and more. I actually really like the MDI UI and the context-based dockable properties panes. Alex The MDI feature is not included in the contributed code, while the sidebar feature is in. The MDI feature in fact is from another product IBM Lotus Expeditor which Symphony is integrated on. zhangjf
Re: [ANNOUNCE] IBM SGA/CCLA Submitted for Symphony Source Code Contribution
On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 5:15 PM, Graham Lauder y...@apache.org wrote: A few minutes ago, I submitted the IBM Software Grant Agreement and Corporate Contributor License Agreement for IBM Lotus Symphony contribution. This action means infra can begin to prepare to receive the 'Contribution into svn when they're ready. We will be providing more descriptive content to the list tomorrow when our China team wakes up. :) This is just a short announcement to get the ball rolling. We announced our plan to do this on July 15, 2011. The successful delivery of Apache OpenOffice 3.4 has now made it possible to move forward. We hope the community will invest time and energy to study and understand this contribution and help determine how best to use it going forward for the benefit of the public good. This ends the Symphony fork here with Apache OpenOffice. Absolutely brilliant. Well done the IBM team for getting all the IP stuff sorted and getting it to this point. Now we will start to see the shape of AOO 4 Yes, indeed. Glad to see you're still reading our lists. :) Have you seen the new energy around user experience? Would you be interested to take a closer look at that? ...in the context of AOO 4, that is. Hi Don, I've been keeping a weather eye on things. Between house remodelling and job hunting I've necessarily had to keep my participation to a minimum. Yes I'll definitely be getting involved in the UX discussion. I haven't been totally idle however, I've setup a Lime Survey instance that we can use. I've been working on some questions when time allows and I'll give people access as required if/when we decide to use it. http://www.tenakoe.net/survey Cheers GL Cheers GL
Re: [PROPOSAL] AOO logo rebranding...
On 3/31/2012 9:42 AM, Graham Lauder wrote: On 3/31/12 6:02 PM, Kay Schenk wrote: We're getting very close to a 3.4 launch, and the time has come to move forward with a logo rebranidng for at least the user portal web site, http://www.openoffice.org, and possibly the project web site as well, http://incubator.apache.org/openofficeorg/. Quite a number of logo variations have been proposed for uses within OpenOffice, both internal to the program and other uses, page sidebars, Forum header, etc. The most recent discussion can be found at the following thread: http://markmail.org/thread/fvgwlvva5ziib7qg a conversation started by Rob on March 15. You will note that one of the outcomes of this discussion was the desire that a new logo NOT include the word incubating in the logo. What I think we need to focus on now, and get Lazy Consensus on, is a new logo for the upcoming release, 3.4. Internally, we've already started calling OpenOffice.org Apache OpenOffice, and we need to move forward to complete this re-branding to the public. I've put 3 web header logos in... http://incubator.apache.org/openofficeorg/ * AOO_orb1_logo_webSite.jpghttp://www.openoffice.org/images/AOO_logos/AO O _orb1_logo_webSite.jpg * AOO_orb2_logo_webSite.jpghttp://www.openoffice.org/images/AOO_logos/AO O _orb2_logo_webSite.jpg * AOOfeather_logo_webSite.pnghttp://www.openoffice.org/images/AOO_logos/ A OOfeather_logo_webSite.png Please respond to this e-mail by selecting your favorite from these 3. Given the Lazy Consenus process, discussion will be closed on Tuesday, April 2, 0900 PDT. Hopefully, we'll have a clear choice by then. A clear vote for AOO_orb1_logo_webSite.jpg from me The minimal required change to add Apache is done nice and it doesn't change too much. We should be careful with changing too much the overall branding for now. We should first make clear that our users understand the relation between Apache and OpenOffice.org. The brand and also the logo are well known and I think it is important to keep and to protect the brand by doing minor changes only. This is incorrect, please provide the results of research that support this assertion. I have corrected this sort of broad unsupported statement in the past. Please also provide a relative comparison. Well known in comparison to what? MS Office? Word Perfect? Lotus or maybe CocaCola. These are facts borne out by research: I talked to Professional Office Workers, the Gulls proved to be almost unknown in this target market. In my limited research the name OpenOffice.org or OpenOffice is the most recognised brand element even amongst present users. Amongst non users that recognise the brand, people recognise the name more than the Logo by a factor of about 10 (This could be greater but not possible to gauge an accurate factor because again of the limited sample) We have applied the most violent change to the most recognisable branding element already and that is completely out of our hands so minimal change is already not possible. While I understand that you were not in favor of it, I believe you are overstating this a bit. A quick look at google trends ( link http://www.google.com/trends/?q=openoffice.org,open+office,openofficectab =0geo=alldate=allsort=0 ) shows that Open Office or OpenOffice are used an order of magnitude more than openoffice.org. Thus, the removal of the '.org' is more of an alignment with our 'effective brand' than it is a violent change. We have kept the gulls, we've kept the colors, and we've kept the most recognizable part of the name (OpenOffice). The only major change is the addition of 'Apache', which in addition to being required, represents the major change in the project in terms of licensing and community control. I'm not trying to suggest that in total this is not substantial, I'm just questioning the 'violent' part of the comment. Hey Andrew, Fair enough, the violent comment is definitely a personal POV. However the value of google analytics in this case has always been arguable. It is a nice easy thing to pluck out of the ether and having studied the outputs when this has been brought up in the past I find very little that is useful given the nature of the product and the nature of our target market. For instance, for the user to do a search, they need to know about OOo first to be able to put it into the search engine. Another for instance, if you put in Microsoft Office with OpenOffice you will see that the result does not reflect the difference in market share. I've gone on record on numerous occasions defending the need to retain the .org especially, if only to lessen the impact of the Openoffice.coms and the like, the old name at least defined the web address and given that our contact with our users is almost exclusively via that URL
Re: [PROPOSAL] AOO logo rebranding...
On 3/31/12 6:02 PM, Kay Schenk wrote: We're getting very close to a 3.4 launch, and the time has come to move forward with a logo rebranidng for at least the user portal web site, http://www.openoffice.org, and possibly the project web site as well, http://incubator.apache.org/openofficeorg/. Quite a number of logo variations have been proposed for uses within OpenOffice, both internal to the program and other uses, page sidebars, Forum header, etc. The most recent discussion can be found at the following thread: http://markmail.org/thread/fvgwlvva5ziib7qg a conversation started by Rob on March 15. You will note that one of the outcomes of this discussion was the desire that a new logo NOT include the word incubating in the logo. What I think we need to focus on now, and get Lazy Consensus on, is a new logo for the upcoming release, 3.4. Internally, we've already started calling OpenOffice.org Apache OpenOffice, and we need to move forward to complete this re-branding to the public. I've put 3 web header logos in... http://incubator.apache.org/openofficeorg/ * AOO_orb1_logo_webSite.jpghttp://www.openoffice.org/images/AOO_logos/AOO _orb1_logo_webSite.jpg * AOO_orb2_logo_webSite.jpghttp://www.openoffice.org/images/AOO_logos/AOO _orb2_logo_webSite.jpg * AOOfeather_logo_webSite.pnghttp://www.openoffice.org/images/AOO_logos/A OOfeather_logo_webSite.png Please respond to this e-mail by selecting your favorite from these 3. Given the Lazy Consenus process, discussion will be closed on Tuesday, April 2, 0900 PDT. Hopefully, we'll have a clear choice by then. A clear vote for AOO_orb1_logo_webSite.jpg from me The minimal required change to add Apache is done nice and it doesn't change too much. We should be careful with changing too much the overall branding for now. We should first make clear that our users understand the relation between Apache and OpenOffice.org. The brand and also the logo are well known and I think it is important to keep and to protect the brand by doing minor changes only. This is incorrect, please provide the results of research that support this assertion. I have corrected this sort of broad unsupported statement in the past. Please also provide a relative comparison. Well known in comparison to what? MS Office? Word Perfect? Lotus or maybe CocaCola. These are facts borne out by research: I talked to Professional Office Workers, the Gulls proved to be almost unknown in this target market. In my limited research the name OpenOffice.org or OpenOffice is the most recognised brand element even amongst present users. Amongst non users that recognise the brand, people recognise the name more than the Logo by a factor of about 10 (This could be greater but not possible to gauge an accurate factor because again of the limited sample) We have applied the most violent change to the most recognisable branding element already and that is completely out of our hands so minimal change is already not possible. Orb 1 is best at the moment, as a long term solution however, it does not provide the impact or the story that will get the brand out into the market place. Anything used now should be seen as a stopgap and no more. GL Juergen
Re: Someone is selling OpenOffice on Ebay....
On Tue, Mar 6, 2012 at 12:57 AM, Graham Lauder g.a.lau...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Mar 6, 2012 at 12:31 AM, cklsynt ckls...@gmail.com wrote: I just thought I should bring this to your attention. http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/Office-Suite-Microsoft-Word-Powerpoint-Acce ss- Excel-Compatible-Free-Post-/140624633605?pt=AU_softwarehash=item20bd e19f 05 This one is not using the OOo logo, just showing a screen shot and nominative use (IMHO) of Open Office. Some odd claims, like saying Draw is comparable to Microsoft Visio. At the end of their description they say: eBay Staff: We are an authorized community distributor of this software. We are authorized to distribute this software by the Intellectual Property Owner. This software is licensed under the GNU General Public License and Lesser General Public License (GPL LGPL). No copyrights have been violated and our listing is in compliance with eBay rules and policies. Not sure what authorized community distributor means. http://www.openoffice.org/distribution/#community Interesting. How important is that distribution network? I suspect that a decade ago, when bandwidth was less available, being able to get OOo on a CD was very important. But what about today? -Rob Bandwidth is still problematic in a large portion of the world so I would think that there is still a call for it. It does require a little work however. Alex used to build the iso and installer for the DVD that came with installs for every platform as well as all the langpacks. Many Community distributors focussed on a single language with win32 only installs mixed with other FOSS. In India the government plays a large role in distributing CDs in specific local languages (5 million for the Tamil distribution if memory serves. Two Indian MarCons were present at that launch they may have more accurate numbers) The Community distributor programme was simply a way to get people to sign off on a few non-challenging rules, in return we would list them on the Marketing project site and they were able to use artwork provided by the Art project for the CDs and Covers. A lot of unsophisticated web users are still wary of downloading anything off the internet. They have been told by all the NetSafe types that all downloads are full of trojans, viruses, worms and various virulent indecypherable acronyms. Hence the valuable service that the EBay sellers and local bricks and Mortar Community Distributors perform. Good distribution is about maintaining as many channels as is possible. Online download is only one. Hard copy EBay is another. It was my opinion that we never went far enough. I wanted to have listed on the marketing site a reasonable recommended retail price. $5 on ebay is ridiculous when the Seller's time and effort is taken into account. I have talked to groups of High Street retailers who installed OOo on Computers for free and proved to them that they should in fact be charging around $60 per install when you take into account: Download, install, first level support and media. First response was: Yea that's a bit unfair though because only 1 in 20 will come back asking for support. To which I answer: Yes, but that one person will likely consume most of the support allowance for rest of the twenty. Sometimes the response has been: Yea but we'd rather do without those ones. To which I respond: The ones that keep coming back are the ones that pay your rent and wage bill and from my point of view I want that loud noisy pushy customer to loudly tell the world 'I got OpenOffice on my computer and the support I got was brilliant and it only cost me $60 and they tell me I get free upgrades for life!' best advertising going. We have two large difficulties in the market, one: We don't get to people's consciousness early enough, this is why the OOo4Kids project is so important and why we need distribution channels into schools. and two we don't have the community support networks that the opposition does (by this I mean the guy next door, the cousin the niece, the son, the guy down at the local computer shop) distribution channels enhance this community support network. As an extension for this I had a pipe dream, not sure how feasible it would be, but I think it would be brilliant if it were possible, like SUSE Studio, to be able to build a customised instance of AOO online. Upload templates to the install, select languages, extensions, font sets, customise look and feel defaults such as icon sets, upload ones own graphical elements such as splashscreens and then build it for whatever platform you choose. A bit like the distros do now but instead it would be for the users or distributors to be able to roll their own. A possibility, who knows but it would strengthen the community networks.
Re: Someone is selling OpenOffice on Ebay....
On Tue, Mar 6, 2012 at 12:31 AM, cklsynt ckls...@gmail.com wrote: I just thought I should bring this to your attention. http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/Office-Suite-Microsoft-Word-Powerpoint-Access- Excel-Compatible-Free-Post-/140624633605?pt=AU_softwarehash=item20bde19f 05 This one is not using the OOo logo, just showing a screen shot and nominative use (IMHO) of Open Office. Some odd claims, like saying Draw is comparable to Microsoft Visio. At the end of their description they say: eBay Staff: We are an authorized community distributor of this software. We are authorized to distribute this software by the Intellectual Property Owner. This software is licensed under the GNU General Public License and Lesser General Public License (GPL LGPL). No copyrights have been violated and our listing is in compliance with eBay rules and policies. Not sure what authorized community distributor means. http://www.openoffice.org/distribution/#community
Re: Reminder: Not all list posts are from list subscribers
Filtering, or just manual inspection? I use Gmail. Looks like the only allow filtering based on the final delivered-to header, which doesn't help us: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/gmail/thread?tid=63575fed3f2d2072h l=en Unfortunately you are right, it does only match the final delivered-to header. Blast, I use GMail too. I just assumed it would work. I guess it serves me right for not checking the results of the filter. Oh well... still a great tip for those who can use it. Ross I use gmail but use the popmail facility and download to my Kmail. That gives me all the headers. I then add a Moderated tag to my tag list and add a filter on Delivered-To: moderator in the headers and get it to tag the message as Moderated and change the colour of the subject text. Cheers GL
Re: Updates: IBM Lotus Symphony, Apache OpenOffice, IBM Docs and other fun stuff
On Wednesday 01 Feb 2012 01:58:58 Rob Weir wrote: ASF does not fill one critical measure of Corporations: Freely transferrable shares. Apache is an Incorporated Charity. The Profit Motive doesn't come into the equation. That may be a distinction in New Zealand, but it is not in the US. Apache is a corporation. It is of little consequence, the fact is that it applies to any Limited Liability, for profit, share holder held organisation. Corporation is a common term. Semantic gymnastics doesn't change it. http://www.apache.org/foundation/records/certificate.html A non-profit corporation is just a specialized form of a corporation. Not all for-profit corporations have publicly trading shares. And in some states a non-profit corporation can issue stock. So your generalities really fall apart. So wild generalities of corporations being sociopathic beasts are not going to get you very far. I would be pretty famous I suspect if I had come up with the concept. In fact it goes back to the 18th century and Adam Smiths Wealth of Nations, he didn't of course coin the word Sociopath or indeed corporations, but he did point to the dangers in organisations where ownership and liability are separated It is a fairly well known tenet, well researched and presented by behavioural psychologists, business analysts and philosophers. It's not a criticism, just a statement that has a considerable measure of accuracy. Certainly it is a generalisation and I know of a number of corporations that now rate Ethical Performance as high as Profit and Share holder return on their KPIs to avoid the Sociopathic trait. Perhaps IBM is becoming one of those, I don't know. You yourself have said that in the past that IBM was a less than ideal member of the OSS community. I dare say that you and your colleagues would have known how IBM was perceived in the community, but that was simply brushed off and ignored because that affected neither profit nor shareholder return. Ignoring the groups wishes is a Sociopathic trait. It is also a well known fact that sociopathic personalities do well in the corporate environment. Perhaps this is true in New Zealand. I can't really speak to that, since offhand I can't name a single New Zealand Corporation. I can do it for you if you wish, I'm still on the Board of Directors of one. Heck, Apache was incorporated by a New Zealander, we do know how they work. :) But in the US it is more complicated. Really, the bit we are considering isn't that complicated and besides which complexity is of little consequence to the discussion, it's to do with divorcing ownership from liability. In your exchanges with a number of people on the list, you have demonstrated a low level of empathy I feel your pain. LOL, typical sarcasm, I rest my case. I would have thought the 20th century would have thought us something about the dangers of such demagoguery? Tsk, a trait of the internet debate and American politics is the tendencty to lean toward hyperboly and grand over statement. But you get my point? Oh indeed I do, my point is that it isn't demagoguery it is simply a statement, I seriously doubt however that you will ever see any of my points [.] Ireland, the Lutheran Church, the Real Madrid Football club are not going to profit from the activities of this project, not that it would worry me if they did. What would concern me however is how much loyalty would any of the above\ I hope many project participants find ways of profiting from AOO. That would be a wonderful thing, especially as it draws more resources (contributions from more individuals) into the project. show to the project and so I would question their motives as well and in particular the loyalty prioritisation of the individuals from those communities with roles that could lead to a conflict of interest. Not a big ask and not demagoguery Profit is not a conflict of interest. That's a strawman, I never said it was and deliberately misinterpreting what I say is not going to get us anywhere. If a person or a group is working toward a profit of some description, while at the same time working toward a profit within another group then at some point there is probability of conflict of interest especially if there is a co-dependence. The loyalty question is to do with priorities: If in the case of a conflict of interest, which groups profit is a priority to the individual. Or to be more specific, if the AOO PMC were to take decisions on a course of action that were contrary to IBM policy would you or any other IBM employee then remove yourself from the project or would IBM simply back away. Oh, I know exactly what I want to achieve in the project, the point is the goal is ONLY about OOo, there is no divided loyalty. The last I checked, we don't require a loyalty
Re: Updates: IBM Lotus Symphony, Apache OpenOffice, IBM Docs and other fun stuff
On Friday 27 Jan 2012 04:53:29 Rob Weir wrote: On Wed, Jan 25, 2012 at 3:35 PM, Graham Lauder g.a.lau...@gmail.com wrote: On Thursday 26 Jan 2012 02:50:20 Rob Weir wrote: On Wed, Jan 25, 2012 at 7:08 AM, Graham Lauder g.a.lau...@gmail.com wrote: Second, new features and function, worthy of consideration by this community as a 'Apache OpenOffice 4.0' release will be the primary focus for the IBM volunteers working in the project at Apache, after the project successfully completes the Apache 3.4 release. See the AOO 4.0 Feature Planning wiki page here: *http://s.apache.org/hW* IBM volunteers? _I_ volunteer. I don't get paid to be here, I come here only on my own time. That's what volunteers do, if someone is picking up a salary to work on AOO code that's hardly volunteering, except maybe in doublespeak. Tsk! However, whatever they're called, it will be good to see them pushing along 4.0, we are at a point now, having been out of the market for such a lengthy time, that with the new release there needs to be a substantially different product. Let me challenge your views on this. Anyone who participates in this project does so because they get more out of it than they put into it. Further, they would be insane to participate in the project under any other conditions. What they put in is obvious: their time, their skills, their experience, their care, their overly long emails, etc. What they get out is less tangible, but it still exists. In some cases it is a salary, in other cases it is enjoyment, or experience, reputation, etc. Cash payments are they only form of reward. Even those who think they are participating for purely altruistic reasons are doing so to enhance their self-image, imagining themselves to do altruistic deeds. This is just basic balance of energy. An animal will not survive long if it chases down and kills prey where the returned calories are less then those expended in the hunt. Since no one has a gun to our heads, forcing them to work on this project, everyone here is a volunteer. Everyone is free to go or remain, or participate to whatever level they feel gives them a sufficient reward (of any form) for their investment in the project. Even those who are employed had and have a choice of jobs they could take. Maybe they took their current job because it gave them the opportunity to continue participation in the project? Any illusion about this basic fact, such as the the project has self-less martyrs and course mercenaries, is just sentimentality and does not really promote clear thinking. The form of your personal reward for working in the project has zero impact on your rights, abilities, prerogatives, status or (to me at least) the weight of your arguments in this project. Challenge away, I never said: people that volunteer, do it for altruistic reasons, not sure where you read that. I will clarify: I simply stated that IBM's motives were certainly not altruistic I just have no idea what they are, and given that a corporation is a sociopathic beast I would really like to know what they are, but in the absence of an OOo related mission statement, I have to try deduction. I remind you that the Apache Software Foundation is also a corporation. ASF does not fill one critical measure of Corporations: Freely transferrable shares. Apache is an Incorporated Charity. The Profit Motive doesn't come into the equation. So wild generalities of corporations being sociopathic beasts are not going to get you very far. It is a fairly well known tenet, well researched and presented by behavioural psychologists, business analysts and philosophers. It's not a criticism, just a statement that has a considerable measure of accuracy. Certainly it is a generalisation and I know of a number of corporations that now rate Ethical Performance as high as Profit and Share holder return on their KPIs to avoid the Sociopathic trait. Perhaps IBM is becoming one of those, I don't know. You yourself have said that in the past that IBM was a less than ideal member of the OSS community. I dare say that you and your colleagues would have known how IBM was perceived in the community, but that was simply brushed off and ignored because that affected neither profit nor shareholder return. Ignoring the groups wishes is a Sociopathic trait. It is also a well known fact that sociopathic personalities do well in the corporate environment. In your exchanges with a number of people on the list, you have demonstrated a low level of empathy I also stated that someone paid by a corporate member to participate in this community cannot be called a volunteer. Take your argument to the extreme and you could say that every one _lives_ voluntarily because they decided not to top themselves this morning. A ridiculous argument. Volunteer
Re: Updates: IBM Lotus Symphony, Apache OpenOffice, IBM Docs and other fun stuff
On Friday 20 Jan 2012 09:24:44 Donald Harbison wrote: Sorry this took so long to reply to, I've been busy. (Wearing IBM Hat) (Warning - long post ) Warning longer post! :) Here's an update on what was communicated this week at the annual Lotusphere event in Orlando, Florida. I hope this helps clarify misunderstandings, and resolves lingering concerns regarding IBM plans with respect to investments that directly support and benefit the overall Apache OpenOffice project. IBM, and it's staffers are going to have to get used to that. Corporate doublespeak is something that we are all familiar with and so it is necessary for those of us outside the sphere of cogniscense to try to translate between the lines of the words that are put out front. Transparency is an extremely unusual attribute in the corporate beast. A Corporation looks after it's shareholders first, it's own health second, but as a consequence of the former and then customers come third. Low cost, low profit centers come far down the list of priorities. The corporate beast is sociopathic, has no sense of loyalty, except that which is bought and paid for and is completely nonempathic. Every dealing therefore will be and should be scrutinised to deduce the motives behind. Assumption of Altruism however, would be extremely unlikely no matter what was said. Here's what it has looked like to me and many others, this is reinforced by IBMs past actions with regard to OOo. Others were more succinct: A Pox on IBM was one. IBM have some serious pr to do Symphony development is/was expensive, certainly for a cost free product. Oracle showed very quickly after the purchase of SUN that they saw OOo as a burden. They went through some motions and made announcements espousing their ongoing support for the project. (There's that corporate doublespeak again and you wonder why some are a little less than trusting) However IBM had a deal, signed with SUN back in '07 wrt OOo code (I would love to know how much changed hands with that deal) and to avoid any messy legal stuff sat down with Larry's people (a question that was always in my mind: Did Larry's people mistakenly figure they had an automatic buyer for the whole OOo thing in IBM before they bought SUN? Did IBM let them think that. It would certainly have explained the confused messages.) and negotiated Oracle's gift of the OOo code to Apache and hence, via AL2, to allow IBM unfettered access to the code without any copyleft baggage, without any or only little cost to IBM and also without the need for costly infrastructure which would be picked up by the ASF. And now, additionally, ASF will host the Symphony code as well. Slicing a few more dollars out of IBM infrastructure overheads while at the same time giving them an easy, low cost, exit strategy if it becomes necessary. Now it is true that there has been some money pushed toward the ASF and a spend on devs, which is all great, but I would seriously doubt that it would be a negative sum game for IBM in the medium or long term, it's just not the corporate way. So the above is always going to colour things a little, that's not partticularly a bad thing, I can get into a yard with one of my bulls and I can go right up to him and pat him on the nose and rub him behind the ear but I always keep a wary eye on him. That's not a bad thing, he's a Bull and Bulls do what Bulls will do. It's just what it is. And so to the announcement, which right up front, I think is brilliant!! There are (3) topics to look at. [..snip as irrelevant...] Notably, IBM announced it is ending its Symphony fork, the downstream fork of OpenOffice, if you prefer to think of it that way. With the July 15, 2011 announcement that IBM will contribute its Symphony source code to the Apache OpenOffice project, it makes no sense to continue a separate development effort. Instead, the entire Symphony development team will now be focused on working in the Apache OpenOffice community. Excellent stuff, it has been a long time coming Second, new features and function, worthy of consideration by this community as a 'Apache OpenOffice 4.0' release will be the primary focus for the IBM volunteers working in the project at Apache, after the project successfully completes the Apache 3.4 release. See the AOO 4.0 Feature Planning wiki page here: *http://s.apache.org/hW* IBM volunteers? _I_ volunteer. I don't get paid to be here, I come here only on my own time. That's what volunteers do, if someone is picking up a salary to work on AOO code that's hardly volunteering, except maybe in doublespeak. Tsk! However, whatever they're called, it will be good to see them pushing along 4.0, we are at a point now, having been out of the market for such a lengthy time, that with the new release there needs to be a substantially different product. - As part of the public
Re: Updates: IBM Lotus Symphony, Apache OpenOffice, IBM Docs and other fun stuff
On Thursday 26 Jan 2012 02:50:20 Rob Weir wrote: On Wed, Jan 25, 2012 at 7:08 AM, Graham Lauder g.a.lau...@gmail.com wrote: Second, new features and function, worthy of consideration by this community as a 'Apache OpenOffice 4.0' release will be the primary focus for the IBM volunteers working in the project at Apache, after the project successfully completes the Apache 3.4 release. See the AOO 4.0 Feature Planning wiki page here: *http://s.apache.org/hW* IBM volunteers? _I_ volunteer. I don't get paid to be here, I come here only on my own time. That's what volunteers do, if someone is picking up a salary to work on AOO code that's hardly volunteering, except maybe in doublespeak. Tsk! However, whatever they're called, it will be good to see them pushing along 4.0, we are at a point now, having been out of the market for such a lengthy time, that with the new release there needs to be a substantially different product. Let me challenge your views on this. Anyone who participates in this project does so because they get more out of it than they put into it. Further, they would be insane to participate in the project under any other conditions. What they put in is obvious: their time, their skills, their experience, their care, their overly long emails, etc. What they get out is less tangible, but it still exists. In some cases it is a salary, in other cases it is enjoyment, or experience, reputation, etc. Cash payments are they only form of reward. Even those who think they are participating for purely altruistic reasons are doing so to enhance their self-image, imagining themselves to do altruistic deeds. This is just basic balance of energy. An animal will not survive long if it chases down and kills prey where the returned calories are less then those expended in the hunt. Since no one has a gun to our heads, forcing them to work on this project, everyone here is a volunteer. Everyone is free to go or remain, or participate to whatever level they feel gives them a sufficient reward (of any form) for their investment in the project. Even those who are employed had and have a choice of jobs they could take. Maybe they took their current job because it gave them the opportunity to continue participation in the project? Any illusion about this basic fact, such as the the project has self-less martyrs and course mercenaries, is just sentimentality and does not really promote clear thinking. The form of your personal reward for working in the project has zero impact on your rights, abilities, prerogatives, status or (to me at least) the weight of your arguments in this project. Challenge away, I never said: people that volunteer, do it for altruistic reasons, not sure where you read that. I will clarify: I simply stated that IBM's motives were certainly not altruistic I just have no idea what they are, and given that a corporation is a sociopathic beast I would really like to know what they are, but in the absence of an OOo related mission statement, I have to try deduction. I also stated that someone paid by a corporate member to participate in this community cannot be called a volunteer. Take your argument to the extreme and you could say that every one _lives_ voluntarily because they decided not to top themselves this morning. A ridiculous argument. Volunteer = someone who has to sacrifice personal time outside of their daily mortgage paying work, to contribute. Everyone participates in an Open Source project for various reasons, some may be their own and some may be employers and all do it for some form of reward whether it be cash or something more esoteric. There are a lot of people who do this as part of their 9 to 5 who are not what I would call volunteers. How do I know this? Easy, this list dies over the weekend. Cheers GL
Re: Moving ahead with the AOO logo and rebranding
On Friday 13 Jan 2012 17:50:49 Michael Acevedo wrote: Hi again! I added more logo proposals since my last post in this mailing list. Let me know what you think... The logo font is Verdana and uses the seagull orb as the principal part of the branding... On Fri, Jan 6, 2012 at 12:21 AM, Michael Acevedo vea...@gmail.com wrote: Greetings, I've made the following logo proposals in the OpenOffice wiki found here: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=27834483 Hope you like them! Verdana is a proprietary typeface owned by MS. An open licensed Typeface would be preferred. Cheers GL
Brand Usage Guidelines: Hands Off management (Was: May I use OpenOffice.org and Apache Incubator logos on OpenOffice.org CD)
On Friday 13 Jan 2012 00:38:44 Rob Weir wrote: On Thu, Jan 12, 2012 at 5:55 AM, Graham Lauder g.a.lau...@gmail.com wrote: On Thursday 12 Jan 2012 12:26:59 Rob Weir wrote: Lets stick with CTR, one thing that history has shown us is that there are a lot of eyes out there, if someone is misusing the brand, it gets back to us pretty fast. Far too much time is being spent on this sort of nonproductive effort where we could simply be using the eyes of the wider community to keep us in touch. That is not current ASF policy. We currently require explicit permission to use the loog. If you want to change policy, I'd recommend starting a new thread on that, so your thoughts are not buried in this one. Good Point, done As for far too much time is being spent, I'd draw your attention to the fact that this is the first logo request we've received for a CD in 6 months, and perhaps only the 4th logo request we've received at all. All our current process requires is lazy consensus, e.g., a 72 hour opportunity for PPMC members to object. And then VP, Branding permission based on our recommendation. I'm talking about the time spent worrying about what people are doing with the trademark and logo, screeds of mail on the TOO thing, Shane tied up with an email tennis match and much brow beating and hair tearing. It is becoming tiresome and it is distracting from our purpose here. Create Software for the public good. We are getting into battles that only limit the ability for the community to connect and all for little or no profit, this project will live and die on what it produces, not on the use or misuse of the logo. We have to get out of this obselete Corporate mind think. Our name is the principle part of the brand, we protect that by producing good product that looks after our users needs. Our highest profile element out in the wild is our software on our Users computers, not thousands of billboards, or hours of TVCs shoving our Logo in people faces. Ours is word of mouth or string of text, definitely not people being drawn to us by seeing our ubiquitous Logo. People usually only get taken once, then they come here and complain and our response is: It's OK, it'll all be good from here. That's as good as it gets in terms of building a community. Community distributors will use it anyway once we get CD art decided on and published on the wiki. So this is neither difficult nor time consuming. And if anyone thinks it is, I'm happy to remove that objection by volunteering to manage the workflow for this myself for this project, something I'm essentially already doing. It may seem that way now, but that's because noone knows us, we have no policies in place, we don't even have any software to distribute. Gad it surprises me that anyone is asking at all right now. However if you want to know where it's heading, check out the Distro and cd-rom lists and ask Andy Shiels and Alex Fisher how non time consuming it was. Hands-off worked in the past, sure there were breaches, but in terms of the greater picture the numbers were very small. The easier we can make it for the brand to be out in the wild the better, if only from a brand recognition point of view. If we want to have absolute control over how and where the brand is used then it will not get the spread it needs without the expense of paid advertising. Not much point in having a a brand if we are the only ones looking at it or recognising it. That is an argument for giving permission broadly. It is not an argument for giving permission without review. Think of this as an opportunity for engagement with the person or group wanting to use the logo. By asking our permission we're introduced. We have the opportunity to explain our preferred ways to use our branding. We can answer their questions. We can perhaps point them to other forms of the logo,. Maybe we identify ways of cross promoting their activity. It opens up a two-way conversation. It is not a bad thing. Indeed that's not a bad thing, but I refer again to the CDROM list and then point to Eric Raymonds famous Essay for some clues. Cathedral Builders can force people into a cue, line up at a desk and get stamped, you may deal with everyone one on one, but it takes too long and the spread is too slow. In the Bazaar model you are standing in the crowd who are all demanding your attention at once, if you try to talk to everyone again you'll run out of time, even if you can make yourself heard. But if you make the logo easy to obtain and put up a big sign that displays a few simple rules that are easy to adhere to. For instance: Always display the web address so that people will eventually always get to the real project. Of course we never had that rule because, well, the name WAS the web address. sarcasm Good heavens, who would have thought of that, what a brilliant idea
Re: May I use OpenOffice.org and Apache Incubator logos on OpenOffice.org CD
On Thursday 12 Jan 2012 12:26:59 Rob Weir wrote: On Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 5:35 PM, Andrea Pescetti pesce...@apache.org wrote: Rob Weir wrote: On Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 9:58 AM, Kazunari Hirano wrote: May I use OpenOffice.org and Apache Incubator logos on OpenOffice.org CD?... As we've done in the past, we seek lazy consensus from the PPMC on these requests and then send our recommendation to the Branding VP (Shane) for the final decision. So let's wait 72-hours and see if there are any concerns. No objections at all, but I would generalize the question and turn it into a FAQ: surely we can't expect to have to approve logo requests for every CD distribution initiative, so we should probably reach the consensus (and consult Shane) on generically allowing the OpenOffice.org logo, and the logo that will eventually replace it, on CDs containing the unmodified software as released by Apache (a more proper wording can probably be found, but you get the concept). So, hypothetically, if someone wanted to produce CD's that contained literal copies of AOO and put the logo on them, would they then be allowed to sell them on eBay, and to show a photograph of the CD with the logo? That would be allowed if we gave blanket permission. Also, would someone be allowed to use the logo for CD's that they sell from a website where they claim that OpenOffice is in danger and that they are collecting donations in order to rescue OpenOffice? It might make sense to handle these requests case-by-case for now, until we have a better sense of what kinds of problems we will encounter. Lets stick with CTR, one thing that history has shown us is that there are a lot of eyes out there, if someone is misusing the brand, it gets back to us pretty fast. Far too much time is being spent on this sort of nonproductive effort where we could simply be using the eyes of the wider community to keep us in touch. Hands-off worked in the past, sure there were breaches, but in terms of the greater picture the numbers were very small. The easier we can make it for the brand to be out in the wild the better, if only from a brand recognition point of view. If we want to have absolute control over how and where the brand is used then it will not get the spread it needs without the expense of paid advertising. Not much point in having a a brand if we are the only ones looking at it or recognising it. The old policy, if I recall correctly, was to allow this kind of usage and a generic usage for community activities. indeed Cheers GL Regards, Andrea.
Re: Moving ahead with the AOO logo and rebranding
On Monday 09 Jan 2012 17:57:55 Pedro Giffuni wrote: Thanks Graham! --- Dom 8/1/12, Graham Lauder g.a.lau...@gmail.com ha scritto: ... I'm not sure any of these are killer objections to the use of a commercial font. But I think we'd want a strong design reason for not using a font with few or no restrictions. +1, the old font was a commercial one: Frutiger, which caused all sorts of issues when being used by the community Artists. There are plenty of similar fonts about. The best solution was Liberation Sans at 60% IIRC. But that was just to try and maintain the old logo look as close as possible. FWIW, Android fonts are under AL2, and there's also the plus that they should display very well on mobile devices which have become so important nowadays. FWIW, I am playing (just playing) with Android Sans at 60% but my uneducated eye doesn't notice much difference. The biggest problem with using many typefaces in shortened form is that if the contrast is low on the original typeface, you can end up with a negative contrast. This was one of the disadvantages of the Liberation and Deja Vu font families at anything under 80% a stem would end up thinner than the shoulder, most obviously in an O. Additionally, Frutiger had a high contrast so to maintain the look was difficult just by shortening typeface. Cheers GL I certainly agree the font is not as important as so many other factors that should be taken into account. I haven't yet got to the aesthetic and general marketing issues you mentioned so there is truly a lot to think and this is not really anywhere near my priorities lately so no promises from my side, but I surely had to say that you hit the nail in this posting. Pedro.
Re: Moving ahead with the AOO logo and rebranding
On Monday 09 Jan 2012 05:22:11 Rob Weir wrote: On Sun, Jan 8, 2012 at 9:09 AM, drew d...@baseanswers.com wrote: On Mon, 2012-01-09 at 03:55 +1300, Graham Lauder wrote: On Wednesday 04 Jan 2012 11:14:53 Rob Weir wrote: On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 4:52 PM, Pedro Giffuni p...@apache.org wrote: Hi Rob; JIC someone with a lot of spare time gives a try on this logo thing ... I have some questions. What would be the implications (if any) of using a legally licensed commercial font? Our ability to use such a logo would depend on the specific terms of the font license. But in general, a commercial font license might lead to restrictions on how we redistribute images using the font. For example, we might only be able to redistribute rasterized bitmaps of a logo, but not a scalable vector image that included a font glyph definition as well. A commercial font might also restrict who in the project is able to modify the logo or create derivative logos for the benefit of the project. I'm not sure any of these are killer objections to the use of a commercial font. But I think we'd want a strong design reason for not using a font with few or no restrictions. +1, the old font was a commercial one: Frutiger, which caused all sorts of issues when being used by the community Artists. There are plenty of similar fonts about. The best solution was Liberation Sans at 60% IIRC. But that was just to try and maintain the old logo look as close as possible. My personal opinion is; if we can't bundle the font with the software then we shouldn't use it.Of course, it should be added there is absolutely no reason why a font should be used at all in the main logo. Taglines and positioners perhaps and a free font should be used in things such as splashscreens, but the logo can be a graphic that looks like text. I've added a couple of proposals based on a graphic that was created in a vector editor, no fonts used, created as needed. On that last point I agree - and I suppose I started all this my mentioning which font I used - the final is not font based, it is paths... If we don't need to scale the logo, then that is fine. But text -- at least with high quality fonts -- is not scaled proportionately in the way you would a simple SVG shape. In order to preserve a pleasing, balanced appearance at small and large sizes, real fonts do much more complicated things, e.g. manual hinting. If we want to have the optimal appearance, at various scales, then we may need to take this into account. I did a little research and the number of fonts with hinting enabled is miniscule and all commercial. Also Post script doesn't do hinting so it's probably best to not concern ourselves with it. Cheers GL To much focus on Text/Font style in branding is a part of an old paradigm. This was put in a style guide so that signwriters could easily retain corporate branding out on the high street. We don't do High street, we are internet based. We just have to make our branding easily available to those who want to distribute it. That is is the power of the internet after all. Ariel pointed to some nice splash screens done previously in the Wiki, can those be (re)used as a starting point? I have no objections. But I think right now we're talking about the general theme of the Drew's logo proposal, i.e., the distinctive design elements of: - text - color Broader than this, we are talking pallet, aesthetics, emotive response. - type face necessary, only if a designed font face is used as part of the graphic - spacing - background - embellishment. - and so on If there is consensus on that, then there will be follow up design work to incorporate that logo into a variety of locations, including a splash screen. But I think there is a hesitation to invest in that additional work until we're sure the basic design is OK. Which of course is completely the wrong way round. Define the look and feel first, the logo should fit that. Answers first: What is our target Market What is our aesthetic, how do we want the market to percieve us. How do they percieve us now, do we want to change that perception, This is not about what the people on this list consider is aesthetically pleasing to them, but what the people who are going to download the software, think is best. I would like to see a selection of branding elements, in particular: Pallet, logo and name, several of each and then survey our customers via the announce list to find their preferences. Any brand suggestions should include all of the above including an explanation that defines the aesthetic and where it positions the product in terms of the market as well as target market. Voting on the list is a particularly bad
Re: Moving ahead with the AOO logo and rebranding
On Tuesday 10 Jan 2012 13:14:27 Dave Fisher wrote: On Jan 9, 2012, at 3:56 PM, Christian Lohmaier wrote: Hi *, On Mon, Jan 9, 2012 at 8:20 PM, Dave Fisher dave2w...@comcast.net wrote: Who are our projects BZ admins? Are there remaining issues. No idea if there are any, at least the contact given on the bugzilla page itself to report problems is a black hole, no response nor fixin ghte reported problem (xmlrpc). http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-ooo-dev/20.mbox/%3 CCAOPHaVRC6ZqZMX_XVNeivYFQR6sq_ucdtqjWcE3xPtF-zVd5%2Bw%40mail.gmail.com%3 E It has been suggested that infra issues via jira are necessary to get in touch with the AOOo-bugzilla admins, but issues.apache.org/ooo/ still reads: This is Apache OOo Bugzilla: the Apache OOo podling bug system. In case of problems with the functioning of Apache OOo Bugzilla, please contact bugzilla-ad...@apache.org. Please Note: this e-mail address is only for reporting problems with Apache OOo Bugzilla. Mail about any other subject will be silently ignored. But that's a detail, and I already took the non-response as an implicit WONTFIX - but as you brought up the topic... Any problems that are not getting resolved for the community need to be brought to here. Please remember that we are volunteers here. This project insisted on having its own, separate Bugzilla instance. ASF Infrastructure set this up, we are responsible for seeing that we have sustainable support. There is a reason why it is said if it didn't happen on the list it didn't happen. Thanks for bringing this up. Let's see if someone takes the lead here. Regards, Dave ciao Christian This belongs in another thread please. If we are bound to using a single list for all decisions then some discipline would be appreciated.
Re: Moving ahead with the AOO logo and rebranding
On Tuesday 10 Jan 2012 07:17:52 Andrew Rist wrote: On 1/8/2012 5:59 PM, Graham Lauder wrote: snip What did you have in mind for the survey itself? Were you thinking of SurveyMonkey? Survey monkey is good, though personally I prefer Zoomerang, but I'm with Claudio, Lime Survey is great and we have an instance in place already that we possibly could use before Oracle pulls the plug entirely. Possible Andrew? All this infra is getting decommissioned as stuff moves to ASF. What's the link to the Lime Survey? Is that actually online? Even if it's still around, we should look for a more forward looking solution that we can reuse on future projects. (thus probably not a good idea to use, even if it's still around) Andrew Fair enough, link is http://surveys.services.openoffice.org/ but I'm getting timed out, so it's possibly decommed already. Cheers G I was considering a JIRA request to infra to install an instance on an AFS Server and that would be a definite for later. Right now I'm looking for a path of least resistance to some useful data.
Re: Moving ahead with the AOO logo and rebranding
On Tuesday 10 Jan 2012 09:54:44 Pedro Giffuni wrote: --- Lun 9/1/12, Rob Weir robw...@apache.org ha scritto: ... I made a reasonable observation on the advantage of having our own instance of Lime. This solves the data security/privacy problem. FWIW, personal issues apart, I don't think there is sufficient justification for having our own Limesurvey instance. Lets just use the public one for these things that have no privacy issues. Unfortunately to get any meaningful data it would cost, it's only free up to 25 responses, there are a lot of these about that run on different software and most of them you get a fixed number of free responses. We need to able to cope with responses in the thousands. Any thing less than that could cause issues. Limeservice requires payment for responses, without knowing how many responses, you have no way of knowing how much the survey is going to cost. If running on third party infrastructure is the go, then we would be best to set it up on another host. Obviously hosting and domain would have a cost component. Zoomerang is probably the lowest cost in terms of manhours and cash outlay Cheers GL
Re: Moving ahead with the AOO logo and rebranding
On Wednesday 04 Jan 2012 11:13:20 Ross Gardler wrote: Sent from my mobile device, please forgive errors and brevity. On Jan 3, 2012 8:59 PM, Pavel Janík pa...@janik.cz wrote: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OOOUSERS/AOOLogo+proposal Personally I think this is fine work, and since we've received no counter-proposals in the last month, we should go ahead and update the There is a TM in the image. Does Apache own the trademark OpenOffice or Apache OpenOffice? Yes, in both cases. Ross Sorry to be a pedant, are you saying that we own OpenOffice as well as OpenOffice.org Cheers GL
Re: Moving ahead with the AOO logo and rebranding
On Wednesday 04 Jan 2012 13:18:51 Rob Weir wrote: On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 8:02 PM, Graham Lauder g.a.lau...@gmail.com wrote: On Wednesday 04 Jan 2012 11:13:20 Ross Gardler wrote: Sent from my mobile device, please forgive errors and brevity. On Jan 3, 2012 8:59 PM, Pavel Janík pa...@janik.cz wrote: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OOOUSERS/AOOLogo+proposa l Personally I think this is fine work, and since we've received no counter-proposals in the last month, we should go ahead and update the There is a TM in the image. Does Apache own the trademark OpenOffice or Apache OpenOffice? Yes, in both cases. Ross Sorry to be a pedant, are you saying that we own OpenOffice as well as OpenOffice.org The question Ross responded to was on Apache OpenOffice, not OpenOffice. Hope that helps. -Rob Sorry, the question specified two trade marks, neither of which was OpenOffice.org. Now we know we have the OpenOffice.org gifted from Oracle, but OpenOffice is a different brand all together. I just wanted to clarify, do we now own OpenOffice (which we never have in the past) or when Ross said Yes to both. did he just accidentally lose sight of the lack of .org in Pavels question Cheers GL Cheers GL
Re: Announce list is live
On Thursday 29 Dec 2011 15:29:46 Rob Weir wrote: On Wed, Dec 28, 2011 at 10:15 PM, Graham Lauder g.a.lau...@gmail.com wrote: On Thursday 29 Dec 2011 09:52:13 Rob Weir wrote: On Wed, Dec 28, 2011 at 3:34 PM, drew d...@baseanswers.com wrote: On Wed, 2011-12-28 at 15:15 -0500, Rob Weir wrote: On Wed, Dec 28, 2011 at 2:44 PM, drew d...@baseanswers.com wrote: On Wed, 2011-12-28 at 14:26 -0500, Rob Weir wrote: On Tue, Dec 27, 2011 at 4:52 PM, Kay Schenk kay.sch...@gmail.com wrote: snip Hi Andrew -- I just forward the message I received from Rob in total to annou...@openoffice.org. Got a return from SYMPA that the editors would look at it. If you or anyone else knows some magic to push this through, that would be great. The announce@oo.o has about 84000 users! FYI, we currently have only 134 subscribers to the announce list. And the sky is blue - my suggestion use the website cut over for a legitimate announce list class event - send to both the new and the old announce list (assume and ask for it to be moderated onto the old one) - put a copy to the blog, even if others a planning more extensive blog posts - an extra simple post won't hurt. It might make sense to webs site migration, along with all the other migration accomplishments as part of a general engagement with those users. Here's what we've done, here's what we are doing now, here's what to expect in 2012, here's where to find more info, etc. Remember, aside from a few hundred people (a relatively small number) most of the 84,000 subscribers to the announce list will be hearing about AOO for the first time. The initial note will be our re-introduction. right - which might be the spot where Grahams concerns start to kick in.. just sayin'. I'm not sure from reading his posts if he is actually urging that we not play this up for the moment, but delay till a release and by then to have formulated and executed a more extensive re-branding...then again I'm likely not fully interrupting his thoughts correctly, such is the norm for written communications. So - in my head the answer for the moment is: keep it very simple - a couple of paragraphs with the explicit aim of getting the reader to come visit the new site (not so much a full overview of events) - those interested can find the new communication channels on the new web pages. maybe something a kin to - @ Drew: Your announcement style is on the money, exactly what is needed. Reasoning: We don't have a huge advertising budget and the truth of the matter is, no matter how many deny it, is that advertising dollars translate into copy. If you don't have a real story, just padding or vapour, buy a chunk of ad space and suddenly BS becomes Font Page news. (This doesn't apply to trade press as much, but our demographic goes way beyond trade) It is necessary therefore to actually have a story with some depth and real interest to a particular Journo. For instance: Market penetration stories would interest WSJ readers, value stories go after consumer magazine audience and so on. But the story needs substance to get noticed by these people who are in fact speaking to our larger demographic, who have never read Steven Vaughan-Nichols or Dana Blankenhorne or Rob Weirs or Simon Phipps blogs and are never likely to. ** For all but 500 or so of the 84,000 this would be entirely without context. They would say, Apache what? What the heck is a Podling? Which would be brilliant, that means you've started a conversation, if you could get them asking that question, then you have achieved a significant step. Are you volunteering to write something up, Graham? -Rob Sorry I have taken so long to reply, I got laid low by a stomach bug, xmas overindulgence perhaps or the seething mobs of transmission vectors that come with the crowds of last minute shoppers. I could pad out Drew's announcement, but he's done a great job already. I believe Andrew Rist will have to post it on announce@ooo. Right now I'm working on a survey methodology that we can do online because to do a more broadbased survey I would need to find sufficient people to do the hard yards either on the phone or F2F. In the normal corporate world this would be contracted out, not an option for us given our financial resources. Given time and the right sort of encouragement using community members may be a possibility in the future but that's going to take a little time. If I can add something onto the announce email rigged so that recipients to send a reply to the marketing list I think that would be our best bet. The first step would be a pre-notification mail, simply asking people to participate in the survey. A reply mail to the marketing list would be agreement
Re: Announce list is live
On Thursday 29 Dec 2011 09:52:13 Rob Weir wrote: On Wed, Dec 28, 2011 at 3:34 PM, drew d...@baseanswers.com wrote: On Wed, 2011-12-28 at 15:15 -0500, Rob Weir wrote: On Wed, Dec 28, 2011 at 2:44 PM, drew d...@baseanswers.com wrote: On Wed, 2011-12-28 at 14:26 -0500, Rob Weir wrote: On Tue, Dec 27, 2011 at 4:52 PM, Kay Schenk kay.sch...@gmail.com wrote: snip Hi Andrew -- I just forward the message I received from Rob in total to annou...@openoffice.org. Got a return from SYMPA that the editors would look at it. If you or anyone else knows some magic to push this through, that would be great. The announce@oo.o has about 84000 users! FYI, we currently have only 134 subscribers to the announce list. And the sky is blue - my suggestion use the website cut over for a legitimate announce list class event - send to both the new and the old announce list (assume and ask for it to be moderated onto the old one) - put a copy to the blog, even if others a planning more extensive blog posts - an extra simple post won't hurt. It might make sense to webs site migration, along with all the other migration accomplishments as part of a general engagement with those users. Here's what we've done, here's what we are doing now, here's what to expect in 2012, here's where to find more info, etc. Remember, aside from a few hundred people (a relatively small number) most of the 84,000 subscribers to the announce list will be hearing about AOO for the first time. The initial note will be our re-introduction. right - which might be the spot where Grahams concerns start to kick in.. just sayin'. I'm not sure from reading his posts if he is actually urging that we not play this up for the moment, but delay till a release and by then to have formulated and executed a more extensive re-branding...then again I'm likely not fully interrupting his thoughts correctly, such is the norm for written communications. So - in my head the answer for the moment is: keep it very simple - a couple of paragraphs with the explicit aim of getting the reader to come visit the new site (not so much a full overview of events) - those interested can find the new communication channels on the new web pages. maybe something a kin to - @ Drew: Your announcement style is on the money, exactly what is needed. Reasoning: We don't have a huge advertising budget and the truth of the matter is, no matter how many deny it, is that advertising dollars translate into copy. If you don't have a real story, just padding or vapour, buy a chunk of ad space and suddenly BS becomes Font Page news. (This doesn't apply to trade press as much, but our demographic goes way beyond trade) It is necessary therefore to actually have a story with some depth and real interest to a particular Journo. For instance: Market penetration stories would interest WSJ readers, value stories go after consumer magazine audience and so on. But the story needs substance to get noticed by these people who are in fact speaking to our larger demographic, who have never read Steven Vaughan-Nichols or Dana Blankenhorne or Rob Weirs or Simon Phipps blogs and are never likely to. ** For all but 500 or so of the 84,000 this would be entirely without context. They would say, Apache what? What the heck is a Podling? Which would be brilliant, that means you've started a conversation, if you could get them asking that question, then you have achieved a significant step. Remember, the announce list is not a project community list so much it is an end user list. So we'll want to have a good model for what they know and what they don't know already. My guess -- and your guess is as good as mine -- is that they vaguely recalled reading something about LibreOffice, maybe something also about Apache. Maybe they recently received a note from TOO. They are soft on the details and a little bit confused. Doesn't matter, it's an announce list, a low volume broadcast medium, if only ten on the list know exactly what it means then that's perfectly OK. Remember the subscribers to the announce list have made a deliberate effort to open a channel of communication to the project so that they will be kept up to speed with significant happenings inside OOo. However they don't want the noise of a project ML, they don't need or want a duplex communication channel. If I had my way, subscription to announce@ would be an automatic option during install. Your draft, on the other hand, would be perfect for sending to ooo-users, and other project lists where the subscribers are already insiders of one form or another. Disagree, insiders already know what's going on, if they're not on a list they are on the forum, news has been filtering through the old legacy lists. The rule should be If an event is
Re: IP Clearance Milestone
On Friday 23 Dec 2011 22:52:28 Andre Fischer wrote: Hi all, I am pleased to announce a major milestone on our way toward a first release of Apache OpenOffice. (This is, of course, no official announcement -- I just happen to have fixed the last IP clearance issue.) [...snip] Absolutely brilliant Andre, best Xmas present of them all. Ha! look out 2012, here we come. Cheers GL
Re: IP Clearance Milestone
On Saturday 24 Dec 2011 04:47:32 Dave Fisher wrote: On Dec 23, 2011, at 4:35 AM, Jürgen Schmidt wrote: On 12/23/11 10:52 AM, Andre Fischer wrote: [snip] i would volunteer to drive our first release forward, means i would i like to collect the items we have to do to be cconform with the Apache release management process (André's number [4]), would like to track these items and would like to work with all of you on (this) our primary goal for the next. Are you volunteering to fill the role of Release Manager? That's fine with me. Dave, you and I must be reading this with the same glasses, equally fine with me. Go Juergen. Best Wishes for the Holidays! Indeed GL:
Re: Off topic
On Friday 16 Dec 2011 12:03:53 Rob Weir wrote: On Thu, Dec 15, 2011 at 5:44 PM, Graham Lauder g.a.lau...@gmail.com wrote: snip The evidence actually reveals the complete opposite. A vast vibrant community with all the tension and foibles that brings with it, that produced, marketed and distributed a well featured and reliable Office suite to a community of probably tens of millions of users. Could we have done some things better, of course, nothing is ever perfect but it was never as bad as you and others have been painting it. OOo was a failure because it only worked as a recipient of corporate charity. It was entirely a money hole for Sun and Oracle. It is amazing what kind of crazy organization you can have if sustainability of the ecosystem is not an issue because you have access to some magic external source of funds. I see, so if Sun and Oracle (and I include them even tho they fairly quickly decided the OOo community didn't fit with their corporate model, they did continue to support it in the interim.) sees fit to generously fund an open source project then it's a failure, but if IBM pays you to be involved in this Apache version and picks up a number of ex Sun devs to work on it, then that is.another crazy organisation perhaps? What sort of failure is that then? let's at least be consistent. At the end of the day any opensource project functions because of the generosity of anyone, individual or corporate, that contributes via cash or code or time, the overall proportion of any individual contribution should not and does not define success or failure, that much to me is obvious. Therefore to continually trumpet the old OOo as a failure in the face, says to me that there is either some sort of other agenda or a lack of understanding of the Open Source model. ESR made the point that one of the strengths of the OpenSource model is the ability for an owner to pass it on, for any or all reasons, to give the ability for a new driver to inject a new level of enthusiasm. Is taking that step signalling that the project is a failure, of course not, quite the opposite, it demonstrates a desire on the part of the previous owner to see the project grow and prosper, even if they had to be cajoled into it by interested parties wishing to have it continue.. Well, that corporate subsidy is gone. The question is how we can create a sustainable model for this project. What worked before, based on corporate charity, is not really relevant anymore. The question is, what works now? I have no problem with that, in fact I'm glad we're not beholden to a single corporate entity. I'm also happy to admit that I'm glad it's at Apache. We have a different model now, but that doesn't mean the other was a failure and any talk that it was, is simply not backed by the evidence and counterproductive in terms of community building. Cheers GL -Rob
Re: Off topic
On Wednesday 14 Dec 2011 06:25:50 Ross Gardler wrote: On 13 December 2011 16:16, Louis Suárez-Potts lui...@gmail.com wrote: This and others are actually viable business models, and we showed as much with OOo's long tenure. The issue that we had to deal with was that the owning companies pretty much clipped our wings and prevented us from becoming what we could. Historically that may or may not be true. From where I stand as a complete newcomer I see the results of the OOo long tenure as far from a glowing success. We have a significant fork, burned out relationships and a really unhealthy dose of mistrust as a result. All this seems to be attributable to what you call the issue that we had to deal with. The Apache process removes that issue. It focuses on creating a level playing field. If that's what you see then I would respectfully suggest that you're not looking in the right place. You say Apache is about building Communities, I would suggest that OOo was very good at building communities OOo had a community of thousands with over a hundred Native language communities. People all round the globe working on multiple parts of the OOo universe, from hackers to QA to translators to artists to marketing folk. Then if you count the community of users, OOo is Second in the marketplace only to the most dominant proprietary Software company in the world and their billion dollar marketing budgets. By these measures no other OSS project has built a community the size of OOo, save perhaps Mozilla. This unsuccessful community served up downloads of just shy of 300,000 an hour average for around 6 months between the launch of 3.0 and 3.1. and onward to 3.2 and that only counts those served off the download site, not the ones for instance sold by community distributors or simply copied and passed on by our community of users or distributed by magazines. Sure we had ownership and control issues with the corporate partner, but the community continued. The significant fork, just proved the strength of that community and it should also be remembered that LO wasn't the first, IBM forked it way back in the 1.1.x days. As far as the unhealthy distrust goes, you would perhaps like us to be malleable and totally accepting of everything without question given that we in the community were thrust into the Apache deal without any sort of consultation. OK that is perhaps a symptom of what Louis was talking about and like the other issues we just deal with it. IBM forked OOo back in the days when it had a dual license that included a permissive license: SISSL. They used that as a basis of Symphony and never contributed back to the community or became part of the community. So from where I stood as a complete newcomer to Apache, it seemed back room deals had been done, not to benefit the OOo community, but, given IBM staffers high profile in the new podling, simply to benefit IBM, who under the Apache license would have unfettered access to the code they had desired since the permissive SISSL license was dropped with OOo 2.0. I can therefore vouch for the health of my distrust. :) The question therefore that needs be answered for the OOo community, (or maybe just me, it wouldn't be the first time i've occupied a lonely outpost on my own) Does the the move to Apache benefit the community and especially the end users. In the first instance I was cautiously optimistic, with some small reservations. Some reservations became larger However as you say, the corporate partner issue has been removed, although right now the playing field still doesn't feel that level. There has been a consistent dissing of the old project since we got here as though it was a huge failure, nothing that we did was ever right, it was totally dysfunctional. Naturally this doesn't serve inspire confidence in those of us who have been with OOo for a long time. The evidence actually reveals the complete opposite. A vast vibrant community with all the tension and foibles that brings with it, that produced, marketed and distributed a well featured and reliable Office suite to a community of probably tens of millions of users. Could we have done some things better, of course, nothing is ever perfect but it was never as bad as you and others have been painting it. Cheers GL
Re: Aoo logo draft
On Friday 02 Dec 2011 21:31:45 drew wrote: Howdy Eric, On Fri, 2011-12-02 at 08:52 +0100, eric b wrote: Apologies, I forgot : Thank you very much for your proposal snip Your welcome and thanks also. Instead of changing everything, I'd suggest to define a complete graphic chart ? I mean new colors, new applications logos, and so on : invite Designers, and people who have ideas to participate. hmm, my take on the conversation was that there was a user for a graphic specific to the project and not necessarily to the product, so that is what was in my head when prompted. So with specifics to the graphic I whipped up, one thing I'm not satisfied with is the color change to the text 'Open' I'll work on that later today. In general, I believe you are absolutely correct this project would benefit from some 'real' designer(s) getting involved. (maybe this will help spur some one..) For specific elements of the application changing, including the logo used there, this proposal does not mean I think they should be changed, at least not at the moment - that level of change would, IMO, best be held off on till some of the above human resources speak up. Anyway, it's getting rather late now - will try to work on that color issue after I get some sleep. Best wishes, //drew Eric is right however, first we need to define a colour pallet, font face, bugs and general style. Define also dimensions and proportions and white space for the various use cases. (print, web, promotional gear etc) This should all be laid out in a style guide. Any fonts used should be available under appropriate licenses as well. Cheers GL
Re: [DISCUSS] Marketing Team
On 10/15/11, Dave Fisher dave2w...@comcast.net wrote: While discussing this month's PPMC Board Report we discussed making volunteers from the PPMC responsible for certain roles. We quickly proceeded with a Press Liaison due to the immediate need. Before settling on a larger set of roles let's have a discussion and come to a consensus. Apologies for not contributing to this sooner, I'm travelling in Australia and will be for a few more days. Thanks, Rob and Dave for raising this, I must admit I was not in a good place with regard to the project and Marketing last week and was, frankly, ready to throw in the towel. Types of roles or teams: (1) External or Marketing Team. Involving the relationship of the AOOo project community with the many communities in the OOo universe. - Press Liaison. (Don Harbison is currently filling this role.) Thanks Don for jumping in on this, single point of contact is best in this role - TDF Liaison. Dedicated to the special relationship between AOOo and LO. (Would we have other special relationships?) I'm not sure that this is a necessary role, we have LO people advocating both ways already and I think they're doing a good job. I read the press release and while it was factually correct, it was too long and emotionally bereft and so the tone left to much to interpretation. The consequence was far too much valuable time was used up explaining the meaning. This simply takes a little more care and in that way there is no need for liaison from an individual and thus hopefully lots of LO people will join AOOo lists and widen the connections. - Brand Manager. Dedicated to the OOo brand. A whole Marketing team task pretty much, a dedicated individual could get swamped. I think that is a little confusion sometimes with the seemingly hierarchical nature of legacy OOo projects. Yes each project had a “lead” and a “co-lead”, the terms however were somewhat misleading. A more accurate description would be an administrator. It is true that closer to the core code there was a more “managed” process simply because of the corporate heirarchy active in Hamburg and even that had flattened out over the life of the project. The “Lead” simply had access to the admin tools, he certainly did not dictate policy or direction, that was generally the result of discussion and consensus. Branding is simply part of the wider marketing strategy and branding right now is what should be our primary marketing focus and a group task. Decisions have to be made. So I'm with Ross on this, we have some excellent people to make up the team, those people will each take the lead on whatever task they feel that they can contribute best. Really that's not a lot different to the way the old OOo marketing project used to function in any case and what made it so successful. - Legal Affairs. Assure that copyright, license, and terms of use are all proper. That the NOTICE and LICENSE files are correct. Seek copyright assignments from authors where helpful. (Is this another team?) Regards, Dave Cheers GL
Re: Incubator PMC/Board report for October 2011 (ooo-dev@incubator.apache.org)
Graham Lauder wrote on Mon, Oct 03, 2011 at 07:02:17 +1300: On Sunday, October 02, 2011 05:16:15 AM Dennis E. Hamilton wrote: These announcements to a list are interesting, because it is not clear who will take the initiative to see that this happens. Last month, I waited too long before declaring what I would be doing and then doing it. This month, I won't be tardy. I am declaring that I shall not be preparing the quarterly podling report for October. - Dennis I'll have time this month to deal with this. It is a marketing task in any case. Reporting to the board isn't about marketing, it is about the board's oversight over the foundation it is the board of. I don't think you wuold include community friction issues in marketing materials, but a PMC chair must report them to the board if they exist. I will respectively disagree. Marketing is about communication. Marketing is not simply external facing, especially in an opensource project. Any good marketing team should and will identify challenges and weaknesses. Highlighting and communicating those to the appropriate stakeholders it's just part of the job as is gathering that information. Community friction issues are one of those challenges that is often present in an opensource project, so it is definitely something that should be communicated. The board is the stakeholder that this needs to be communicated to. Marketing is not simply about pr, spin and glossy pamphlets. Cheers GL
Re: [email] RE: [Discuss] ASF hosted openoffice.org email service [Was: Re: [Discussion] d...@openoffice.org]
On Sunday, August 21, 2011 09:21:51 PM Terry Ellison wrote: On 20/08/11 21:00, Rob Weir wrote: On Sat, Aug 20, 2011 at 3:47 PM, Dennis E. Hamilton 1. One has to do with n...@openoffice.org where this is a personal forwarding set up for some user (or entity) and it forwards to another e-mail address. If these are preserved, forwarding them to some other email address to then be forwarded to the original entity does not make a lot of sense. The issue here is that the entity is known by that email address and has connections that access that entity by that email address. It is a good idea to preserve that service so that the entities that have use of the individual ones can somehow manage their forwarding. I would not want to figure out how to retire it until later, and with considerable warning. Having an individual's e-mail address disappear is not a pleasant experience. ... How does this help us develop and publish open source software? ... There seems little point in developing any FLOSS package which doesn't meet the needs of its user population, as we will end up with an unused product. I repeat that OpenOffice.org targets the general PC-owning population as its user-base. This is very different to Apache Server, Traffic Server, Subversion and the other Apache projects that typically have a niche IT proficient and often IT professional user population. Clearly, the success of any FLOSS package depends on the support of a committed core of able developers. However, the success of OOo also depends on a wide community of contributors, documentation and tutorial developers, community supporter and even just power-users who can evangelise the product. We have historically encouraged this community to use their oo.o mailboxes to foster a sense of identity. I know that I used to use my ter...@openoffice.org address a lot: answering end-user emails and as my email address for a range of forums, wikis and similar services. I was and am proud to be associated with this project. However, because I realise that the address might go away, I had to trawl through my emails to work out which services I had subscribed to using TerryE@oo.o and rehook them to another mailbox: a real pain -- but less painful than suddenly finding out that I had become disconnected from them. So my answer is that alienating our extended community of supporters would not be something that we should do lightly. OOo depends on their support. //Terry Likewise, I use it all the time, I would be strongly opposed to losing the @oo.o redirects for all of the reasons Terry outlines. Also long term users, (I dare say I'm not the only one) would have considerable issues tracing every single connection that uses that email. Administratively and in terms of resource consumption, I don't see a big issue leaving it as is. Cheers GL Graham Lauder, OpenOffice.org MarCon (Marketing Contact) NZ http://marketing.openoffice.org/contacts.html
Re: Incubator PMC/Board report for August 2011 (ooo-dev@incubator.apache.org)
On Wed, 10 Aug 2011 21:50:46 Christian Grobmeier wrote: Graham, as time is short (due today) I have added it to the wiki and signed it Cheers Thanks for that, Christian, Work consumed my time the last couple of days. On Tue, Aug 9, 2011 at 1:47 PM, Graham Lauder yori...@openoffice.org wrote: Apologies for taking so long with this, it got a bit wordy and needed a bit of slash and burn. Draft inline: --- OpenOffice.org * OpenOffice.org entered incubation 2011-06-13. OpenOffice.org is an open-source, office-document productivity suite providing six productivity applications based around the OpenDocument Format (ODF). OpenOffice.org is released on multiple platforms. Its localizations support 110 languages worldwide. * Issues Some challenges exist: Under SUN/Oracle, semi-autonomous single focus projects were the basis of structure of OOo, many would like a similar system to be used under Apache. By contrast a single overarching authority is proposed with oversight of the entire project by the (P)PMC. Discussions are ongoing. Discussions with regard to licensing, especially with regards to documentation, are continuing. * Community development progress As of 2011-08-06, 71 committers, 52 on the PPMC up from 56 and 49 at last report Steps are continuing to bring onboard the last of the initial Committers who have not yet provided an ICLA. 208 people are subscribed to the ooo-dev list. 124 people have posted to the list of those 59 have more than 10 posts. 9 posters have more than 50 posts each. User related queries or posts were virtually nil. The shape and methodology of the Community Outreach is still in discussion An OOo blog has been initiated and is getting a high number of hits daily * Project development progress The grant from Oracle America, Inc for OpenOffice trademarks, logos, domain names has been received. Work with Infra: OOo Mediawiki has been successfully moved onto Apache infrastructure. Some concerns relating to IP of materials on the wiki are still in the proces of resolution. www.openoffice.org is now in an Apache sandbox and work is being done to recreate it in the Apache CMS -- Edit as required Cheers GL Graham Lauder, OpenOffice.org MarCon (Marketing Contact) NZ http://marketing.openoffice.org/contacts.html
Re: Incubator PMC/Board report for August 2011 (ooo-dev@incubator.apache.org)
Apologies for taking so long with this, it got a bit wordy and needed a bit of slash and burn. Draft inline: --- OpenOffice.org * OpenOffice.org entered incubation 2011-06-13. OpenOffice.org is an open-source, office-document productivity suite providing six productivity applications based around the OpenDocument Format (ODF). OpenOffice.org is released on multiple platforms. Its localizations support 110 languages worldwide. * Issues Some challenges exist: Under SUN/Oracle, semi-autonomous single focus projects were the basis of structure of OOo, many would like a similar system to be used under Apache. By contrast a single overarching authority is proposed with oversight of the entire project by the (P)PMC. Discussions are ongoing. Discussions with regard to licensing, especially with regards to documentation, are continuing. * Community development progress As of 2011-08-06, 71 committers, 52 on the PPMC up from 56 and 49 at last report Steps are continuing to bring onboard the last of the initial Committers who have not yet provided an ICLA. 208 people are subscribed to the ooo-dev list. 124 people have posted to the list of those 59 have more than 10 posts. 9 posters have more than 50 posts each. User related queries or posts were virtually nil. The shape and methodology of the Community Outreach is still in discussion An OOo blog has been initiated and is getting a high number of hits daily * Project development progress The grant from Oracle America, Inc for OpenOffice trademarks, logos, domain names has been received. Work with Infra: OOo Mediawiki has been successfully moved onto Apache infrastructure. Some concerns relating to IP of materials on the wiki are still in the proces of resolution. www.openoffice.org is now in an Apache sandbox and work is being done to recreate it in the Apache CMS -- Edit as required Cheers GL Graham Lauder, OpenOffice.org MarCon (Marketing Contact) NZ http://marketing.openoffice.org/contacts.html
Re: Community outreach to openoffice.org visitors?
On Thu, 04 Aug 2011 09:58:44 Andrew Rist wrote: On 8/3/2011 2:27 PM, Rob Weir wrote: On Wed, Aug 3, 2011 at 3:43 PM, Marcus (OOo)marcus.m...@wtnet.de wrote: Do you mean this? http://www.openoffic.org http://www.openoffic.org/news Or which landing pages do you have in mind? An idea: is there any easy way to get it into the header, so it is on every page? Something like News: Apache OpenOffice.org! with a link, perhaps to a new blog post. We could first write a blog post, specifically reaching out to OOo community members and telling them how they can get involved. Then, once that is posted, get that link out broadly, via the OOo website, wiki, mailing lists, forums, Facebook page, Twitter, etc. +1 I will take care of updating OOo site when we are ready Andrew It might make sense to wait until we first do the source migration and have Bugzilla, the wikis and forums migrated. But right around then would be a good time to put out the word. -Rob We should probably be looking at a press release as well as part of that. We can use the announce@ list simultaneously, the majority of subscribers of which, are our target Audience. If people are subscribed to that list anything sent via that medium can't be considered spam. Releases should go just to the tech press to remind them that the project is alive and kicking, wider than that is probably not necessary at this stage. Next press release after that should be to announce the Non Apache release if there is going to be one (I've made my feelings on this release known but we'll see what the consensus is) In the past press releases were hacked about with on the private PR list or on occasion the also private MarCon list, for obvious reasons. Is there a policy for creating such marketing materials here at Apache. Cheers GL Marcus Am 08/03/2011 09:29 PM, schrieb Shane Curcuru: (Taking the opportunity to Refactor a new thread on OpenOffice.org) Are there any short term plans to update the main landing pages of the existing OpenOffice.org website(s) to provide user awareness of the transition of the product and project to Apache? I don't know 1) how long it will take to actually get this transitioned, and 2) how hard it is to update the Oracle-hosted sites, but I think it would be really useful to have a few blurbs about the future plans of Apache OpenOffice get put on the existing OpenOffice.org site sooner rather than later. The blog feed on the homepage is nice, but not enough. Or is this too much for the moment? - Shane
Re: Community outreach to openoffice.org visitors?
On Fri, 05 Aug 2011 06:18:33 Kay Schenk wrote: On Thu, Aug 4, 2011 at 5:06 AM, Graham Lauder yori...@openoffice.orgwrote: On Thu, 04 Aug 2011 09:58:44 Andrew Rist wrote: On 8/3/2011 2:27 PM, Rob Weir wrote: On Wed, Aug 3, 2011 at 3:43 PM, Marcus (OOo)marcus.m...@wtnet.de wrote: Do you mean this? http://www.openoffic.org http://www.openoffic.org/news Or which landing pages do you have in mind? An idea: is there any easy way to get it into the header, so it is on every page? Something like News: Apache OpenOffice.org! with a link, perhaps to a new blog post. We could first write a blog post, specifically reaching out to OOo community members and telling them how they can get involved. Then, once that is posted, get that link out broadly, via the OOo website, wiki, mailing lists, forums, Facebook page, Twitter, etc. +1 I will take care of updating OOo site when we are ready Andrew It might make sense to wait until we first do the source migration and have Bugzilla, the wikis and forums migrated. But right around then would be a good time to put out the word. -Rob We should probably be looking at a press release as well as part of that. We can use the announce@ list simultaneously, the majority of subscribers of which, are our target Audience. If people are subscribed to that list anything sent via that medium can't be considered spam. Graham-- Are you talking about annouceme...@openoffice.org? We had a small discussion about this list a few weeks ago and Marcus pointed out that that list is moderated . So...yes, we should definitely use this and hope whoever IS the moderator jsut pushes the announcement through. I don't think we got an answer on this. I'll make some contacts and see what I can determine. Hi Kay Florian was one manager of the list IIRC and of course so was Louis. Louis is on the PPMC now, so unless there has been a change in terms of their abilities on the OOo lists then we should be good. Cheers GL Releases should go just to the tech press to remind them that the project is alive and kicking, wider than that is probably not necessary at this stage. Next press release after that should be to announce the Non Apache release if there is going to be one (I've made my feelings on this release known but we'll see what the consensus is) In the past press releases were hacked about with on the private PR list or on occasion the also private MarCon list, for obvious reasons. Is there a policy for creating such marketing materials here at Apache. Cheers GL Marcus Am 08/03/2011 09:29 PM, schrieb Shane Curcuru: (Taking the opportunity to Refactor a new thread on OpenOffice.org) Are there any short term plans to update the main landing pages of the existing OpenOffice.org website(s) to provide user awareness of the transition of the product and project to Apache? I don't know 1) how long it will take to actually get this transitioned, and 2) how hard it is to update the Oracle-hosted sites, but I think it would be really useful to have a few blurbs about the future plans of Apache OpenOffice get put on the existing OpenOffice.org site sooner rather than later. The blog feed on the homepage is nice, but not enough. Or is this too much for the moment? - Shane
Re: Community outreach to openoffice.org visitors?
On Fri, 05 Aug 2011 01:39:23 Shane Curcuru wrote: On 8/4/2011 8:06 AM, Graham Lauder wrote: On Thu, 04 Aug 2011 09:58:44 Andrew Rist wrote: On 8/3/2011 2:27 PM, Rob Weir wrote: On Wed, Aug 3, 2011 at 3:43 PM, Marcus (OOo)marcus.m...@wtnet.de wrote: ...snip... In the past press releases were hacked about with on the private PR list or on occasion the also private MarCon list, for obvious reasons. Is there a policy for creating such marketing materials here at Apache. Cheers GL Apache has a Press team led by the wonderful Sally here: http://www.apache.org/press/ Who tweets regularly: http://twitter.com/TheASF Any Apache press releases should be coordinated with them on pr...@apache.org - once the PPMC here has some specific questions about publicity here, you should ping press@ to get a conversation started there. Note that the Apache Incubator has specific policies about press releases for incubating projects: http://incubator.apache.org/guides/branding.html In terms of *what* to say, it's up to the project to decide, and typically just get any final signoff from press@. The ASF has a corporate press release account and will issue official releases for major news from any of our projects. Oh, and the official ASF boilerplate is available: http://www.apache.org/press/boilerplate/ - Shane Excellent, thanks for that Shane. I'll go over these before I work on a draft and subscribe to the press list. Cheers GL
Re: Suggestion for OOo branding...
On Sat, 2011-07-23 at 20:32 -0400, Rob Weir wrote: In any case, I think there is some benefit to stepping back and asking the basic question: how do we decide such questions about the user interface? A) Do we simply weight in with our personal opinions, saying I like X, I don't like Y, I like blue or I think X is pretty? There are always going to be subjective decisions that have to be made when it comes to marketing, look feel and UX components, at some point in the process. We don't have the resources to do otherwise and certainly not within a reasonable time frame. The objective bit comes with download numbers. or B) Do we have a way of raising the discussion about mere opinion and bring data to bear on the question? Certainly if we were discussing a performance improvement, a proponent of a significant change would be called on to show the numbers, to justify the change with hard data. We would not necessarily make wise decision relying on opinion, absent data. Consensus is great, but informed consensus is golden. Is there some way we can bring some structure to user interface decisions via usability testing? Usability testing would be great but it costs... money that we don't have, the next best thing is going to the community with options. However, isn't the Apache way, He who does the work makes the decision. and the (P)PMC then ratifies or not However, we have a number of things that should be worked out and nailed down first in terms of branding. The Name? Colour Pallet, the colour Pallet should show consistency across logo, Website, branding bugs, promotional materials and including of course icons Style Manual Just for starters, if anyone can add to the list please do. Cheers GL -- Graham Lauder, OpenOffice.org MarCon (Marketing Contact) NZ http://marketing.openoffice.org/contacts.html OpenOffice.org Migration and training Consultant.
Re: Suggestion for OOo branding...
On Sat, 2011-07-23 at 20:32 -0400, Rob Weir wrote: In any case, I think there is some benefit to stepping back and asking the basic question: how do we decide such questions about the user interface? A) Do we simply weight in with our personal opinions, saying I like X, I don't like Y, I like blue or I think X is pretty? There are always going to be subjective decisions that have to be made when it comes to marketing, look feel and UX components, at some point in the process. We don't have the resources to do otherwise and certainly not within a reasonable time frame. The objective bit comes with download numbers. or B) Do we have a way of raising the discussion about mere opinion and bring data to bear on the question? Certainly if we were discussing a performance improvement, a proponent of a significant change would be called on to show the numbers, to justify the change with hard data. We would not necessarily make wise decision relying on opinion, absent data. Consensus is great, but informed consensus is golden. Is there some way we can bring some structure to user interface decisions via usability testing? Usability testing would be great but it costs... money that we don't have, the next best thing is going to the community with options. However, isn't the Apache way, He who does the work makes the decision. and the (P)PMC then ratifies or not However, we have a number of things that should be worked out and nailed down first in terms of branding. The Name? Colour Pallet, the colour Pallet should show consistency across logo, Website, branding bugs, promotional materials and including of course icons Style Manual Just for starters, if anyone can add to the list please do. Cheers GL -- Graham Lauder, OpenOffice.org MarCon (Marketing Contact) NZ http://marketing.openoffice.org/contacts.html OpenOffice.org Migration and training Consultant.
RE: RE: [DISCUSS] Initial Committer: Apache OpenOffice.org Initial Committer Status
On Fri, 2011-07-22 at 22:45 -0700, Dennis E. Hamilton wrote: Let me ask the question in reverse: how long do you think that we should leave the door open, no questions asked? Why? Til July 31, because it's long enough in a completely arbitrary way. Those dedicated to OOo and who have no problem signing the ICLA would have done it by now in other than exceptional circumstances. And as you say it doesn't prevent them being invited to be comitters or on the PPMC at a later date. Remember, Initial Committers are grandfathered in as committers and members of the PPMC without being here and demonstrating commitment through their contributions. It is not even a matter of them being voted in based on existing reputation. (I'm one of those myself.) At some point, one wants to be complete with intake of initial committers and working toward a full-fledged meritocracy instead. I suspect it is possible that the PPMC will also shrink if those who are already on it do not eventually demonstrate a commitment that would have qualified them in the ordinary way. At what point does holding out that special status to those who have not shown up become a point too far. In this case, we are talking about folks who have not submitted an iCLA and not responded to requests to submit them and, as far as I know, have not appeared on ooo-dev. Even if we withdraw the Initial Committer invitations at some point, there is no barrier to becoming a contributor and demonstrating commitment to the project. It's not fatal. I propose to ask each of these absent Initial Committers whether they intend to submit an iCLA and how much time they want to do that. It is a simple request. There are any number of possible responses. I assume we will deal with the responses on an individual basis. If they do not intend to submit an iCLA, it would be useful to know, so we don't have to be expecting them, watching for the iCLA to arrive, etc. My goal is having them show up. And if they are not going to show up, I would like to know that. Then we can tell when we have a full roster of Initial Committers that are ready and willing as they signaled they were. - Dennis The Apache way is about lazy consensus, Yes? Then lets work on a lazy consent, simply add the tag that outlines as above in brief: We thank you for your early support. We now have a working compliment of PPMC members from the initial committers. If you don't feel the need to be on the PPMC or be a committer at this time, simply don't present your ICLA before 31 July and you'll hear no more from us and we will take that as read. Of course this does not prevent you from becoming a committer or being invited onto the PPMC at a later date. Or something of that nature Cheers GL -Original Message- From: Wolf Halton [mailto:wolf.hal...@gmail.com] Sent: Friday, July 22, 2011 20:32 To: dennis.hamil...@acm.org; ooo-dev@incubator.apache.org Subject: Re: RE: [DISCUSS] Initial Committer: Apache OpenOffice.org Initial Committer Status What is the technical or social stressor causing this issue to be framed in this time-sensitive language? Wolf On Jul 22, 2011 4:40 PM, Dennis E. Hamilton dennis.hamil...@acm.org wrote: I did not include a time limit, because we had not agreed on one. Instead, I made the request to indicate whether they intended to submit an iCLA and how much time they would need (for whatever review reasons or other determinations involved). These Initial Committers were already sent a bulk e-mail on June 23. Why would we not expect the Initial Committers who signed up by June 10 to report whether they intend to actually become committers? It is about their commitment, it seems to me. And they always have the opportunity to become committers by showing up and contributing, the same as for anyone who is not an Initial Committer. My thought was to wait 15-30 days after we approach all of them individually and then send a follow-up to ones who have not responded at all indicating that the invitation to become committers and PPMC members is being withdrawn. (Assuming we decide to do that and set such a date.) I would make the changes that Stephen Bergmann recommended. More feedback and discussion, please. - Dennis -Original Message- From: Juan C. Sanz [mailto:juancsa...@hotmail.com] Sent: Friday, July 22, 2011 12:28 To: ooo-dev@incubator.apache.org Subject: Re: [DISCUSS] Initial Committer: Apache OpenOffice.org Initial Committer Status El 22/07/2011 5:10, Dennis E. Hamilton escribió: There are 20 Initial Committers on the OpenOffice.org incubator proposal who have not yet submitted iCLAs or informed us of their intention not to do so. Today I used the following format for a message to one of those Initial Committers. Before 19 more of these are sent out I wanted to check how understandable this is.
RE: Suggestion for OOo branding...
On Fri, 2011-07-22 at 13:40 -0700, Dennis E. Hamilton wrote: Having thought about it some more, I think it is undesirable to use ODF as an identifier in the icons that are established by specific products. We are confusing application association and format. Furthermore, if there is to be an agreement on such icons as generic to the format, it should be arrived at as a wider agreement than one made within OpenOffice.org or LibreOffice projects. This thread is about OOo branding, and collapsing that onto a matter of ODF branding is troublesome for me. Anything about ODF should be product-agnostic. - Dennis -Original Message- From: Andrea Pescetti [mailto:pesce...@openoffice.org] Sent: Friday, July 22, 2011 06:39 To: ooo-dev@incubator.apache.org Subject: Re: Suggestion for OOo branding... Gianluca Turconi wrote: this issue of the colored icons has been considered a major one for several time in the Italian OOo community, both for usability and brand reasons. Indeed. To add to the links already seen in other messages, the OpenOffice.org community (actually, the names in the iTeam were all from Oracle, even though everyone could join) Heh, I tried to join one of the anybody-can-join I-Teams and got the short shift from an Oracle staffer was (is?) working at a redesign described in http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/ODF_icons_i-team http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/ODF_Icon_Redesign However, that was still a bit unsatisfactory for the community at large, since it didn't address the color problem (see mockups and guidelines at the links above). To be considering such a small part of the branding strategy at this point is premature in any case. The default iconset should be a decision that is made as a part of an overall branding strategy with UX and Art teams as well. There are more significant decisions to be made first. However on the ODF branding, I'm with Dennis, application and format should be separate. I suspect that the original reasoning behind the ODF thing was a corporate strategy to wave OOo as the primary application for producing compliant ODF documents. The trend, especially in Europe, was towards mandating ODF in Govt and so they wanted to ride the coattails of that move. If OASIS comes up with a branding/icon strategy for ODF compliant documents then we should look at offering a set that fits that strategy but until then, we should stick with what makes for the best User Experience for our User Base. The LibreOffice guys used the OOo 3 icons for theirs, that followed the StarOffice stylised S in various colours with the gulls substituted for the butterfly. Interestingly OOo 2 used a similar style but with the S reversed but with the same colours, obviously to differentiate it from SO. Cheers GL For a little history on the icon discussion: http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Unified_ODF_Icons_-_Minutes Regards, Andrea. -- Graham Lauder, OpenOffice.org MarCon (Marketing Contact) NZ http://marketing.openoffice.org/contacts.html OpenOffice.org Migration and training Consultant.
RE: [DISCUSS] Project + PPMC Growing Pains
days later and one week later I received confirmation that it was registered. It is clearly an accident of timing that it came to my attention immediately. That I acted on it was my own sense and excitement over the opportunity.) -Original Message- From: Kay Schenk [mailto:kay.sch...@gmail.com] http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-ooo-dev/201107.mbox/%3c4e23377b.1040...@gmail.com%3e Sent: Sunday, July 17, 2011 12:27 To: ooo-dev@incubator.apache.org Subject: Re: [DISCUSS] Project + PPMC Growing Pains On 07/13/2011 06:37 AM, Ross Gardler wrote: http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-ooo-dev/201107.mbox/%3ccakqbxgb83dos1nqtxh79l2qch3nw0vpxoahn1d9oghcn2vw...@mail.gmail.com%3e Responding as a mentor - not as an OO.o committer... [ ... ] �2. A person is considered eligible to become a committer when there is an established pattern of contribution on the project:http://community.apache.org/newcommitter.html. �2.1 To what degree should contributions elsewhere -- a prior reputation -- be taken into consideration? �2.2 For how long should we do this, if at all? Contributions elsewhere do not count. It is contributions here that matter. There was plenty of time during proposal time for past contributors to step up. They did not. Now this is an ASF project everyone needs to earn merit in the ASF project not in what went before. One comment on this. I believe MANY past OpenOffice.org contributors/committers were not even aware of the proposal time. So, this remark is a bit troubling to me. Really, it is only since well about June 20th that more details of the move to Apache had emerged. I don't know how this information was supposedly made known, but, well...a LOT of folks were NOT informed. [ ... ] -- Graham Lauder, OpenOffice.org MarCon (Marketing Contact) NZ http://marketing.openoffice.org/contacts.html OpenOffice.org Migration and training Consultant.
Re: OpenOffice.org (was Re: Ooo blog)
On Mon, 2011-07-11 at 20:21 +0300, Daniel Shahaf wrote: Javier Sola wrote on Mon, Jul 11, 2011 at 18:43:17 +0700: If Apache forced this without discussion it would be a bad start for the project. You're misportraying the facts; it's a preexisting Apache policy that predates OOo being proposed as a podling. Now, we're generally reasonable people here, and the podling can always request an exception (talk to trademarks@). But, with my Member hat on, this collective Let's join Apache, but not be called Apache, and not work with existing Apache entities spirit leaves a rather bad taste. I'm not saying we the community, should not be called Apache whatever. Nobody is down on Apache, but I just don't want to dilute the strong brand of the #product#. OOo has a very strong market share in the Office Suite Software Consumer market. http://www.webmasterpro.de/portal/news/2010/02/05/international-openoffice-market-shares.html It is important that we maintain that share and grow it. There is a large community: 35,000 individuals subscribed to OOo maillists when I last checked, Louis may have more up-to-date numbers Around 800 have signed the JCA/SCA Scores possibly Hundreds of Millions of Users worldwide and growing All this under the OpenOffice.org Brand. There has been a lot of noise around LibreOffice with those Linux Distributions who used Go-OOo now distributing with LO, but those numbers, compared to OOo across all platforms are miniscule and I believe that will remain the same unless of course this stalling of development, forced on us by Oracle, continues or the brand is modified violently so that we have re-establish our brand right from the beginning. In our consumer market tacking Apache on the end would do just this. This not a slight on Apache or lack of appreciation for their efforts thus far, just a statement of the circumstances. Cheers GL -- Graham Lauder, OpenOffice.org MarCon (Marketing Contact) NZ http://marketing.openoffice.org/contacts.html OpenOffice.org Migration and training Consultant.
Re: OpenOffice.org (was Re: Ooo blog)
On Sat, 2011-07-09 at 11:12 +0100, David McKay wrote: snip On 09/07/11 07:58, eric b wrote: The .org is and was always essential to the community. Why? Out of the folk on the OOo forum who expressed an opinion to me, no one liked it. It was a perpetual reminder that the product couldn't be called what they really wanted it to be called: OpenOffice. I greatly prefer Apache OpenOffice to Apache OpenOffice.org. Dave. As Peter Junge has stated, this discussion has a repetitive deja vu feel about it. There are number of most excellent things about the name openoffice.org, none of which relate to people who are involved in the community and this includes the people at OOoForum, they don't need to. It does however have beneficial effects for the New User or New Client which of course the Marketing project thinks of constantly. It tells this New Client, who may not be at all familiar with, or even heard the name, a number of things. It tells them that it is open, and so it starts to introduce the concept of open source or reinforces the idea for someone who is looking for Open Source Solutions. It tells them that it is an office type application and it tells them that it is a web based project with the .org on the end and at the same time gives them the web address. For the web savvy user, the .org tells them that there is a noncommercial organisation in place, a community in other words. It is a webaddress, which is important in a product whose entire distribution of product and collateral is webbased. Not openoffice.com, not open-office.com, which people would more likely put into an address bar, but OpenOffice.org, clear, precise, no confusion, put OpenOffice.org in your address bar or google and the new user will get to where they need to go. The name is not about what the community feels comfortable with. It is however about branding Branding needs continuity Branding is client focussed. The brand is 14 characters strung together in a very recognisable format, Upper case Os in OpenOffice with dot and lower case o on org. OpenOffice.org. In text on a page of typeface it is recognisable without bugs like the gulls. The diminutive in the format OOo is as recognisable. Google it sometime. The OOo community has always been well known for the strength of it's marketing. Diluting the brand by dropping the .org or tacking Apache (which has even lower brand recognition in our target market) on the end is, from a marketing POV, close to suicidal. Where marketing requires brand development with zero budget, it makes the marketers job very difficult because changing the name throws away 10 years of marketing collateral. It needs to be left as is. If the Apache rules say that Apache has to be appended, then the rule needs changing. I'd be happy to dump the gulls and add the feather as a bug. I'd be happy to add by apache as a tagline. But OpenOffice.org is the name of the software, the website and the community, it should remain unsullied and unaltered. Unless of course someone can come up with several hundred thousand for a marketing budget to launch a new global brand. Cheers GL -- Graham Lauder, OpenOffice.org MarCon (Marketing Contact) NZ http://marketing.openoffice.org/contacts.html OpenOffice.org Migration and training Consultant.
Re: OpenOffice.org (was Re: Ooo blog)
, Upper case Os in OpenOffice with dot and lower case o on org. OpenOffice.org. In text on a page of typeface it is recognisable without bugs like the gulls. The diminutive in the format OOo is as recognisable. Google it sometime. The OOo community has always been well known for the strength of it's marketing. Diluting the brand by dropping the .org or tacking Apache (which has even lower brand recognition in our target market) on the end is, from a marketing POV, close to suicidal. Where marketing requires brand development with zero budget, it makes the marketers job very difficult because changing the name throws away 10 years of marketing collateral. It might help to define some metrics that reflect what success looks like. Hopefully we'd agree that what the community thinks about the historic branding is important, but might not be the overriding concern. The impact on the users is the critical thing. No denying, but it should be remembered that many of our users, probably the majority are not sophisticated computer people, apache and the community are a mystery to them, change can be a scary thing especially with something(software) they have little understanding of, and a brand that they have slowly become comfortable with. It is a huge thing for someone who has been using the market leading office software right through their working life, to change to a strange Open Source product that they downloaded from that most dangerous of places: the Internet. They are very easy to alienate. I suppose the question is this: If after 10 years most users still refer to the product as Open Office or OpenOffice rather than the product's trademarked name, then what is most likely to occur: 1) That with zero marketing budget we convince users to refer to the product as OpenOffice.org, something we never accomplished in 10 years? And it doesn't matter, the brand and the colloquialism are separate things, the brand however must be connected to the colloquialism. Coca Cola came first, Coke came from the need to have a simple catchy byline. 2) We convince them to call it Apache OpenOffice? They wouldn't, put Apache on the end our present community would still call it Open Office 3) We have zero impact on what the users call it, and the debate is really about what the community calls the product? It doesn't matter what the User or the Community calls it, they can call it Bird Droppings for all I care so long as they connect whatever their own particular colloquialism to the brand. For that to happen we need to retain the strength of that brand I don't think it is worth having a big debate if this is really, in the end, just #3. This debate IS significant and should not be dismissed. I know this is a developer community and some of us Non-Dev types feel somewhat uncomfortable about the place and feel we should keep our heads down and be quiet, but some things are important outside the code that need to be addressed and debated and branding is a big one. Cheers GL -- Graham Lauder, OpenOffice.org MarCon (Marketing Contact) NZ http://marketing.openoffice.org/contacts.html OpenOffice.org Migration and training Consultant.
Re: Website Content plus Look and Feel Improvements
On Wed, 2011-07-06 at 08:34 -0700, Kay Schenk wrote: On Wed, Jul 6, 2011 at 12:39 AM, Graham Lauder yori...@openoffice.orgwrote: We had some earlier discussions on this. Personally, I was proposing that we take the opportunity to simplify. For example, right now we're doing all the work on ooo-dev. At some point it will be clear, perhaps soon, that we need an ooo-user list. From my POV, what would be really helpful right now to the existing user base, is to somehow migrate over the Announcement list and its corresponding subscribers. And, have someone designated to be the announcement guru. My feat at the moment is losing supporters/users who don't have any interest in direct contribution but who use OpenOffice.org. We have to be careful about rushing before we have an established community that is needed to run a users list. At present we have had a reasonably large migration to LibreOffice but I consider them to still be part of our greater community. In terms of brand recognition our brand still has high profile because LO is still seen as a fork of OOo. Possibly not the best scenario for the LO people but until they break fresh marketing ground that's simply the reality. What this gives us is breathing space that we would not have but for LO's existence, not a lot it is true but enough. OOo will not disappear from the LO users ken for a number of months, possibly even a year. In the interim before a release, an active announce list and marketing blog should be priorities as well as maintaining a profile on User forums such as OOoForum.org And maybe a few others. But I'd resist the urge to recreate the byzantine complexity of OOo until we're sure that we need it. I'm hoping we never do. Small projects do have the advantage that people can contribute as suits their availability and feel their contribution is meaningful. That's just a function of Human group dynamics, we can get to know about 8 people well, 25 we can work with, once the numbers get up however then people are simply in the company of strangers and thus they feel unrecognised and unappreciated. The home page as it is now was designed originally with one overriding goal: increase downloads. Do you think this should still be the overriding goal of the homepage? There was reasoning behind this, more downloads = more users, More Users = Greater market share, More market share = more contributors. However the homepage grew from that original precept to become Make it as easy as possible for someone landing on the homepage to have their OOo needs fulfilled! Downloads was one of those needs. There was a history to the More Downloads thing, in 06 I think it was, Sun decided to spend some money on promoting OOo. Rather than giving it to the marketing project and letting us use it as best we could, they spent it with a promotions company to use on internet marketing (and gave the Marketing team a part of it, with the proviso that it be spent on promo materials, but that's another story.) The promo company spent around 35K USD, IMS, on google keywords and the like on a Pay on click through basis. Clicking on a text ad or keyword sent people to download.openoffice.org. The money disappeared fast, so there were lots of clickthroughs. Oh boy...interesting little known facts. It was frustrating, we could have run a community driven campaign that raised brand recognition (always our single biggest problem) and we would have steered them to the Why.ooo page, build confidence in the brand and then led them to the download button, but someone in the corporate space somehow figured that dumping people straight onto the download page would turn into downloads, if only it was that easy. However, the rate of download changed not even so much as decimal of a percent. The promo company picked up their check and the value to the project was zero. To me and number of other people in the marketing project, the reason was obvious. The redesign of the homepage was a response to that failure, so that if ever they were that generous again we could say: Just link to openoffice.org homepage because we have proved that it increases downloads. Why wouldn't you design a homepage for users that makes it easier for them to get what they need -- monetary contributions notwithstanding? OpenOffice.org is first and foremost a client product. The confusion with the original design was the confusion over the definition of User. Our problem is that our User-Base is diverse in terms of Internet sophistication. The homepage in it's effort to cater for this huge diversity ended becoming too complex and confusing, a problem I foresee if we try to simplify everything too much. A maillist for devs is not the best place to have marketing discussions or users complaining that their download doesn't work, or artists considering
Re: DITA for Doc?
On Thu, 2011-07-07 at 07:52 -0400, Rob Weir wrote: On Thu, Jul 7, 2011 at 7:26 AM, Mathias Bauer mathias_ba...@gmx.net wrote: Moin, I know how the help files where written at Sun/Oracle: the writers took Writer for the text and used a set of basic macros to put some markup into the files. Then they used an xslt to convert the document into the xhp format. I can't speak for the help writers, but most probably that isn't necessary as we shouldn't ask those who created help content in the past but those who will do it in the future. IMHO using a well-established, maintained tool instead of a home brewn set of macros that probably has lost its maintainer would be a huge improvement. There's another aspect that we should see: extension developers might also want to add help content to their extensions. As until now there is no tool available for the public, extension developers had a problem. DITA would be an improvement for them. That is an interesting idea. The modularity of DITA should allow a downstream consumer of AOOo to customize the doc and generate their own materials relatively easily, using a standard tool set. For example, someone could create a Mac-only customized version of AOOo, add some additional help topics, but then generate doc that omitted all references to any Windows or Linux specific topics. More importantly, Community Members could contribute patches to the help documentation which could then be easily adopted. The help has been one component that has needed some more love for sometime. It was hard to drum up interest, if DITA were a way to lower some barriers, then great. -- Graham Lauder, OpenOffice.org MarCon (Marketing Contact) NZ http://marketing.openoffice.org/contacts.html OpenOffice.org Migration and training Consultant.
Re: Website Content plus Look and Feel Improvements
On Tue, 2011-07-05 at 13:33 -0400, Rob Weir wrote: On Tue, Jul 5, 2011 at 5:04 AM, Graham Lauder g.a.lau...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, 2011-07-03 at 10:23 -0700, Dave Fisher wrote: On Jul 2, 2011, at 9:29 PM, Graham Lauder wrote: Much of what is on there is legacy material that could be seriously pruned. For instance all the old Marketing material that is V2.0 and earlier could be deleted. What would you do to the main openoffice.org site if you were starting from scratch? Big question, moving to Apache has one big advantage from my POV. (I should point out that my POV is marketing centric and is End User focussed rather than developer focussed.) With the content going onto CMS it makes it a lot easier for marketing content to be updated and changed as required. The Collabnet setup was difficult. The OOo web presence is huge, not just the website itself but all the NLC projects, the services part, maillists, forums, downloads and so on. Each fragment is looked after by it's own team. There are overlaps (ie: Distribution and CDROM) and global projects (Renaissance, art, UX) each piece has it's user base and it's client base and so the website as an entirety, obviously has to reflect that. Yes, there were a lot of teams. Everyone seemed to have an official project title, often several ;-) Heh not everyone, but true there were a lot. Each had a Lead and a co-lead, then specific roles within each project. You have to remember that each section was treated as a project on it's own and this for good reason. OOo is a beast as people are discovering, there are very few people who could make informed comment about the entire project, maybe Mathias and Thorsten and Louis and a few others, but to be up to speed on all the code and the marketing and the documentation and the Linguacomponent and the NLC and the Renaissance project etc etc is well you can see what I mean. You break problems down into manageable chunks, then create the infrastructure that pulls all that together into a whole. In a Bazaar this size, it seems chaotic to the Cathedral builders. the problem is that this bazaar was trying to build a cathedral and so the stalls in the bazaar became minicathedrals to a degree, but that was possibly a symptom of the corporate ownership. It is true that many people wore several hats but I never considered that a huge problem, that's human nature, we all wear different hats. The problem was the coordination of all of the disparate pieces. We had some earlier discussions on this. Personally, I was proposing that we take the opportunity to simplify. For example, right now we're doing all the work on ooo-dev. At some point it will be clear, perhaps soon, that we need an ooo-user list. And maybe a few others. But I'd resist the urge to recreate the byzantine complexity of OOo until we're sure that we need it. I'm hoping we never do. Small projects do have the advantage that people can contribute as suits their availability and feel their contribution is meaningful. That's just a function of Human group dynamics, we can get to know about 8 people well, 25 we can work with, once the numbers get up however then people are simply in the company of strangers and thus they feel unrecognised and unappreciated. The home page as it is now was designed originally with one overriding goal: increase downloads. Do you think this should still be the overriding goal of the homepage? There was reasoning behind this, more downloads = more users, More Users = Greater market share, More market share = more contributors. However the homepage grew from that original precept to become Make it as easy as possible for someone landing on the homepage to have their OOo needs fulfilled! Downloads was one of those needs. There was a history to the More Downloads thing, in 06 I think it was, Sun decided to spend some money on promoting OOo. Rather than giving it to the marketing project and letting us use it as best we could, they spent it with a promotions company to use on internet marketing (and gave the Marketing team a part of it, with the proviso that it be spent on promo materials, but that's another story.) The promo company spent around 35K USD, IMS, on google keywords and the like on a Pay on click through basis. Clicking on a text ad or keyword sent people to download.openoffice.org. The money disappeared fast, so there were lots of clickthroughs. However, the rate of download changed not even so much as decimal of a percent. The promo company picked up their check and the value to the project was zero. To me and number of other people in the marketing project, the reason was obvious. The redesign of the homepage was a response to that failure, so that if ever they were that generous again we could say: Just link to openoffice.org homepage because we have proved that it increases downloads. Therefore we
Re: Website Content plus Look and Feel Improvements
On Sun, 2011-07-03 at 10:23 -0700, Dave Fisher wrote: On Jul 2, 2011, at 9:29 PM, Graham Lauder wrote: Much of what is on there is legacy material that could be seriously pruned. For instance all the old Marketing material that is V2.0 and earlier could be deleted. What would you do to the main openoffice.org site if you were starting from scratch? Big question, moving to Apache has one big advantage from my POV. (I should point out that my POV is marketing centric and is End User focussed rather than developer focussed.) With the content going onto CMS it makes it a lot easier for marketing content to be updated and changed as required. The Collabnet setup was difficult. The OOo web presence is huge, not just the website itself but all the NLC projects, the services part, maillists, forums, downloads and so on. Each fragment is looked after by it's own team. There are overlaps (ie: Distribution and CDROM) and global projects (Renaissance, art, UX) each piece has it's user base and it's client base and so the website as an entirety, obviously has to reflect that. The home page as it is now was designed originally with one overriding goal: increase downloads. Therefore we had to analyse our catchment, identify our user groups and their specific needs and patterns of usage of the Website. We then needed to specifically identify the Home page users and their needs. It should be noted that while there is a crossover, Homepage users are a different set to Website users. Regular community members tend to bypass the homepage because they know where they can fulfil their needs already, they either go straight to the wiki or the forums or docs or whichever part is specific to their part of the community. IMS We identified 5 groups that visit the Homepage. Casual arrivals People seeking a download, either for the first time or to upgrade Users seeking assistance People wishing to contribute to the community Developers Each of these groups have entirely different needs. The original home page tried to cater for all these different groups and ended up doing it badly. My intention for the homepage was to have each of these groups headed to wherever they needed to be on the website within 15 seconds. We did that by reducing the number of decisions and introducing the Action Statements. (There were over 120 links on the original homepage we reduced them to about 15, not including those in the news column.) Did it achieve More Downloads? as far as I know, yes. Louis would be better informed on this. A lot of debate went on with regard to the concept of the Action Statements, over many months, but once the web team were onside the results were, to my eyes, spectacular. (Just for amusements sake http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/mwiki/images/a/a3/Home_page_draft_11-27.jpg was my first rather amateurish mockup which the website team, Maarten, Kay, Ivan and others turned into http://www.openoffice.org .) So the homepage is simply a portal, a signpost that is geared to cater to the Unsophisticated End User. These people require simplicity, continuity and a feeling of security and it is only this group that the warmth and comfort of http://www.openoffice.org would be significant or necessary. So, keep the home page as is or find someway to get the CMS to display it, action statements intact at least. Then to my mind the only subs to the OOo domain that I would think that would be compulsory would be: support.openoffice.org Why.openoffice.org and download.openoffice.org and the NLC subdomains The rest of the website could happily exist under OpenOffice.apache.org. Cheers for now GL Regards, Dave Argument could be made for the marketing material to start from scratch. Personally I'd like to see a whole new branding and get shot of the old stuff, make the first Apache release: V4.0 (Historically, significant global change has meant a whole number change in the version: V2 new codebase, V3 Apple compatibility. I think this is significant enough: pre V4 = LGPL license, V4 and later = ALV2) From a marketing POV it gives us a handle to hang a campaign on. Cheers GL -- Graham Lauder, OpenOffice.org MarCon (Marketing Contact) NZ http://marketing.openoffice.org/contacts.html OpenOffice.org Migration and training Consultant.
Re: Another introduction
On Sun, 2011-07-03 at 09:21 -0400, Rob Weir wrote: On Sat, Jul 2, 2011 at 10:44 PM, Graham Lauder yori...@openoffice.org wrote: Greetings all, My name is Graham Lauder AKA Yorick or Yo. I've been involved with OOo for a number of years mainly in the marketing project but also in the website project. I am somewhat responsible (some would say to blame) for the look of the present front page, (although I was just responsible for the conceptual elements, Maarten, Kay, Ivan and others did the real work and improved vastly on my original idea). Welcome aboard, Graham! Glad to be here. I'd compare the situation with OOo under Sun/Oracle, where there the copyright was assigned to Sun, where there were reserved seats on the Committee Council for Sun staff, where the project leads on the dev side were almost all Sun employees. You will not see things like this in Apache. Apache projects are run by a meritocracy, not by a corporate-dominated hierarchy. We're not going to have leads who control the destiny of a component by power that has been assigned to them by a central authority. Power is not centralized. Yes, time + merit does give a form of power. But time comes in many ways. By employment, but also by retirement or by avocation. I know we have some retired engineers contributing to the project as well. Should we deny them the ability to do so because they have a luxury of time that we don't all have? I don't think so. There is competition for an open source developer's time and attention as fierce as any other competition in the marketplace. I think we should be grateful for any contribution of time we receive, big or small. Fair comment So the question is: Will decisions be made at IBM that will translate into fait accompli in OOo simply because the IBM members of the community have been given the time to contribute to Apache, above and beyond those of us who can afford only a number of hours outside of work time? To correct a error in your question: IBM (or any other company) does not make decisions in this project. Employees of IBM (or any other company) do not make decisions in this project. However, individuals of IBM (and other companies) will make contributions to this project, and these contributions will be reviewed and accepted or rejected, like any other contributions. There was no error in the question, decisions made at IBM, whether policy on OSS, Developer time allowance, code release to the core, work on elements that are only useful in Symphony these are corporate decisions that can affect the project. In any case not being privy to the internal politics at IBM, this is mostly educated conjecture on my part so not really worth debating. You have quite a list of concerns, Graham. I hope you will agree that debating them will achieve nothing, and that the best way to allay these concerns is to move forward and demonstrate good acts and even better results. Agreed, I've made my concerns known. Corporations are, by their very nature, sociopathic. Not a new revelation, but one that needs to be restated on occasion. Thankfully, Corporations are also made up of good people and are repositories of resources and networks that are not always available to a disparate group of volunteers. That's the plus side. I'll drink to the future of ApacheOOo. Cheers GL -- Graham Lauder, OpenOffice.org MarCon (Marketing Contact) NZ http://marketing.openoffice.org/contacts.html OpenOffice.org Migration and training Consultant.
