[webteam] radical simplicity

[Robert Martinez]

Peter Saint-Andre wrote:
> Jabber is infrastructure. You don't see a community form around
> infrastructure -- at least not a community of end users. There's no
> community around electric power, municipal water, interstate highways,
> IPv4, SMTP, HTTP, or any other piece of infrastructure. And that's fine!
> But we need to realize that non-technical people will never get excited
> about Jabber / XMPP. They might get excited about certain applications
> that are built using XMPP (say, Twitter or even a particular Jabber
> client perhaps), but never about the underlying technology itself.
>
>   
<snip>
> I don't think we'll see a lot of people use the jabber.org website.
> Mostly they will use it to find a link to something else. We don't need
> a dynamically-generated website with database-driven content and so on
> just so that people can be linked off to somewhere else.
>
>   
I think you're only partially right, too. Jabber isn't _just_ an 
infrastructure.

Maybe it would be _just that_ , if there was no MSN and ICQ.
Right now jabber is THE ONE side of a battlefield. It plays a major role 
in the battle between god end evil ;) - but where should we send our 
soldiers to?
Ok - the true fans have their favorite clients and support them in the 
first place. But what about all the people that are concerned about the 
battle itself?
On top of that, any client community has a certain affinity to our goals 
and ideas.
If we manage to activate their interest and integrate only a small part 
of their enthusiasm, we can collect more than enough manpower to build 
the website we had in mind:

A community driven hub to promote the use of xmpp related projects.
(If I'm not entirely mistaken this is what we want! With all the great 
features we "could" integrate into that)

I'm kind of an example for the non-technical contributors. I cannot code 
and have never send any XML streams manually.
Despite that I found myself building the structure for the website that 
seems to be interesting for tech-nerd only.
(I'm unhappy with the current state of things, too. If I had a choice I 
would choose to do "design-only" )

I think that the attitude - "jabber.org can't have 'fanboys/productive 
community' because there is no PRODUCT"  is not necessarily true.

And if we want to get more people, we have to build something to 
participate to.

"radical simplicity" does not really invite non-technical people to 
participate in a large scale.
Drupal does.

What we need now is just a _bit_ more technical nerds that want to help 
building a nice and stable drupal-driven community page.

> How long do we live with a broken website? I don't know the answer, but
> I do know that I find the current site to be embarrassing. It looks
> great thanks to mray's work, but the db errors and inability to display
> simple software pages is sad.
>
>   
I think I'm not only to blame for the look. I also worked on many 
backend stuff in the CMS (and therefore in the db).
And I'm also a embarrassed. Actually I was so right from the first 
second when you put the page online so early :P !

Finally  I have to say: If we don't get some Drupal manpower into 
jabber.org soon it really might be the better idea to fall back to a 
"xml-whatever -hand-coded-thing" you had in mind. (At least until a 
stable drupal page isn't ready).

Robert