Shawn Walker wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 16, 2008 at 11:36 AM, John Plocher <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> Check out: http://www.glasspig.org/
>
> I don't know what scarier John; the fact that you control a domain
> called glasspig.org or that you took the time to make a mockup based
> on one :-)
A domain is <$10/year, so why not :-)
We really need to figure out how to better connect with the various
types of people who visit our community. In looking at other sites
(Wordpress, Firefox, RubyOnRails,...) it seems everyone else has
already figured out that there is more than one way for newcomers
to interact with a community - there is a progression of involvement
that people go thru at their own pace. Think about some of your own
experiences with new software - I'll bet they went like this:
1) You hear about something new and interesting from someone,
so you google it to see what it *really* is.
2) If you are still interested, you grab a copy to try it for
yourself. Your willingness to deal with complexity at this
point is vanishingly small - if it is hard, if it doesn't
"just work", if it takes more than one or two clicks or
requires reading more than a few words, you are likely to
give up.
3) Still here? Then you must have been successful in getting
it and are playing around with it. If you are like me,
you will want to poke and prod at it, customize it, and
somehow add your own content, skin, theme or extensions to
it. You want to find out more, so you check out some of the
user groups in your area, you join some user focused forums,
you may even start a user group in your own area.
4) You find that there is something missing - an add-on, module,
feature or cool theme that you need badly enough to go off and
create. You need the development environment, tools and docs,
you start to connect into the developer forums, .... This is
the beginning, you are starting to become a contributer in
the community. If this is hard, doesn't work, or is full of
bad karma, you will probably leave in frustration... If
it works, the result goes into the collections in #3 above.
5) A very few of the people who get this far will want to do
more. Using and tweaking and themes are too superficial; they
really want to contribute something to the core application.
They are/become the developers who build the things that
get downloaded way back in step #2...
Today, the OS.o constitution is geared towards the people living
in steps 4 and 5, with a strong bias towards #5. The community
is lopsidedly split between those involved in step #3 and those
in step #5, and the web site pretty much ignores anything but #5.
I did the mockup to see what could be done to make it easier for
people in any of these stages to interact successfully with Open
Solaris.
-John
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