[webteam] My ideas about the target group and goals for this website

[Sander Devrieze]

Hi,

I know I'm a bit late in joining this mailing list and posting
something, but I read the archives of this list, so I know what was
said. One of the things I read was that the new website would be
targeted at admins, end users, developers, and business. Also,  there
were things said about making the website multi-lingual etc. In my
opinion we don't need all of this. What's more, I believe if we want
to do *all* these things, I predict that this website project will
die, like all previous projects for a Jabber community website. This
does not mean I say we don't need a Jabber community website; we
really need one. However, we should find a tight target group instead
of trying to please all the target groups.

My idea is to create a Jabber community website that is *only*
targeted at contributors to different Jabber projects. This website
will also try to convince new contributors to Jabber software. These
can be contributors to existing software projects outside the Jabber
community that do not yet support Jabber, but also people that want to
start a new project. The strategy thus is to invest in human resources
(to say it in business words) so that we will have larger benefits in
the long term.

To illustrate why I believe we don't need to work on convincing end
users, admins, and the business world ourselves, think about what will
happen if we can convince more people and projects to contribute to
Jabber based technology. If we can convince more people and projects,
the different Jabber projects will get more "contributing power",
allowing them to target a specific audience and specialise in this
more than we can do as a central project. Or what if we could convince
distributions to automatically create a Jabber account for each new
user. In short: targeting the the end users (for clients) and admins
(for servers) should be the task for the different Jabber projects,
and even distributions.

So, my idea is to *only* target incumbent and potential new
contributors in the Jabber community. With contributors I mean
developers, translators, web designers, documentation writers, support
people,... The goal of this website would be to increase collaboration
between the different Jabber projects and to increase competition
between Jabber projects.

Some collaboration examples:
* A client developer should easily be able to see which other clients
support which XEP and which version of that XEP so that he can test
interroperability. Hence, this project will document which XEP is
supported by which client.
* A client developer should be able to see which Jabber server
implements which version of which protocol
* A client developer should be able to easily find the contact
information of other Jabber projects (also closed source!!) in case he
need to report a possible protocol implementation error.
* Everyone in the contributors community should be able to add Jabber
software to a blacklist if that software does not follow the
protocols, or uses different unstandard protocols.
* I started making video tutorials for Coccinella, it would be nice if
I could share my experience using this website and work together to
make multi-lingual video tutorials.
* A list of common Jabber jargon and how to translate it to different languages.

Some competition examples:
* As it is listed which XEPs and XEP versions all Jabber software
supports, the different projects will start to compete on this by
implementing protocols also supported by other software. This also
happens now, but this website should speed up this process. The end
result will be a wider and faster deployment of new protocols. Besides
that projects are forced to differenciate from competing project in
different ways: writing a new protocol and contributing this, better
documentation, better support, platform support, translations,...

The Jabber community will then have the following goals:
* Move competition based on competing with non-Jabber software, to
internal competition. If we reach this state, it will mean for example
that Jabber clients do not look at Windows Live Messenger anymore for
competition, instead it will look at other Jabber clients. This is
good because that means the Jabber community *leads* the instant
messaging market instead of following the proprietary networks. In the
end, the proprietary networks have one choice: die or adopt Jabber.
* Collaborate by sharing knowledge so that the different Jabber
projects gets stronger (and not only this website).

Some content we could put on this website:
* software lists including features and especially supported XEPs
* Jabber history and other material that can be used by other projects
(e.g. to write news items)
* documented processes (e.g. howto make video tutorials)
* documents for developers and other contributors (e.g. howto
implement a specific XEP, list of Jabber jargon to help translators)
* hosting of jdev mailing list (which merges with the jadmin list)
* amongst others

Some things we shouldn't care about:
* translations (contributors speak English)
* software reviews
* stuff for end users
* stuff for admin

-- 
Mvg, Sander Devrieze.