[webteam] radical simplicity

[Peter Saint-Andre]

On 05/22/2008 6:39 AM, Bart van Bragt wrote:
> On May 22, 2008, at 5:26, Peter Saint-Andre wrote:
>> I like your attitude! :) Yes, we are fighting for open communication and
>> freedom of conversation. That's what Jabber has always been about, since
>> 1999.
>>
>> The question is, what kind of services do we need to offer at the
>> jabber.org domain to achieve those goals?
> 
> 
> I have to agree with Robert. IMO jabber.org (or Jabber in general)
> doesn't only attract geeks, xmpp.org does. A large part of the people
> that use Jabber do so because they don't like using one of the
> proprietary protocols. They want something open, something not
> controlled by one large corporate entity. Those users are not our aunt
> Tilly but they are not (all) geeks either.
> 
> In the Jabber community we have a boatload of nerdy geeks which is
> great. These geeks can write protocols, implement them, think up new
> (technically challenging) features, etc. What we need in addition to
> that are people that can and want to advocate Jabber to non-geek people.
> We need designers, copywriters, journalists, activists, webmasters, etc,
> etc. To do this and to push Jabber (Jabber as a philosophy, not a
> technology), we need to have a community that can coordinate the
> advocation efforts. This community should be on jabber.org and this
> community will not spring into existence if we have an XML/XSLT site :)

I don't disagree with you, but at the same time I don't see a good way
to get such people involved. It's pretty clear what developers can do to
contribute (join one of the projects and write some code), what system
admins can do (run a server), etc. It's not as clear to me what people
like designers, writers, and activists can do to get involved. There's a
need for documentation (that's how I got started, after all!) but I
think most of that is focused on particular projects. There's a need for
attractive websites and user-friendly software interfaces, but again
that's mostly focused on particular projects. What can they do at the
level of the Jabber community in general? I think we need to get clear
on this before we can figure out what the right tools are.

> IMO the current site is pretty good (as a basis) and it just needs a bit
> more Drupal love. Moving my own site for a large part to Drupal is still
> pretty high on my priority list but some other 'stuff' got in the way :\
> Because of that I'm still hardly proficient in Drupal but I can see what
> I can do on the technical side of things.

I'm not either. Perhaps we can all learn together...

> IIRC there is no issue tracker, or is there? I'm getting 'Access denied'
> on http://www.jabber.org/project

Correct, there is no issue tracker.

Peter

-- 
Peter Saint-Andre
https://stpeter.im/

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