[Members] Voting criteria

[Ulrich Staudinger]

Bart van Bragt schrieb:

> Ulrich Staudinger wrote:
>
>> I have to admit that i do not doubt the democratic approach - it's by 
>> far the best approach to bring different opinions together.
>
> Hmm, is it?
>
> Just take a look at what's currently happening with the European 
> 'constitution'... The people have to vote but they have absolutely no 
> clue what they are voting on. Besides that most democratic 
> organisations end up with a LOT of talk an no action. Linux, Psi, 
> Firefox, all very successful projects but they all have a very small 
> number of people that are in charge and who decides what does and what 
> doesn't get into the project.
>
> IMO having a democratic project doesn't attract more developers. Your 
> project just needs to be popular, accessible (documentation, readable 
> code) and there needs to be strong leadership. Having something under 
> the JSF flag doesn't guaranteee any of these points.
>
> You might not enjoy writing documentation (neither do I :D) but I know 
> that I really appreciate it if documentation is available. Imagine 
> that you are someone that's building an application that needs to be 
> able to communicate with other processes, or that you need to 
> integrate IM featuers in your software. Where would you start? What 
> documentation would you find? The current documentation for Jabber is 
> either outdated or not complete. Just pointing at the RFCs and the 
> JEPs is not the way to go IMO. IMO a lot can improve here which is 
> also why I would welcome more people to the JSF with a less technical 
> background. People that are good at marketing, copywriting, 
> documenting, etc. It's really cool what Peter is doing for jabber.org 
> but the site is far from optimal in it's current state. Making the 
> XMPP/Jabber technology more accessible is beneficial to us al, it 
> makes sure that there is a very low threshold for new users and new 
> programmers. Much lower than it is today.

Yes, the site is far from optimal. But how do you want to decide for 
example a website redesign ? We can for example vote in the board about 
this, but unfortunately the board list is not very lively - the board 
list lacks decisions. Most activity happens on at members at jabber.org and 
jdev.

>
> But I'm not sure if that is something for the JSF. Well, having a more 
> attractive jabber.org page would be nice. But besides that creating 
> documentation etc could very well be done outside of the JSF. Maybe we 
> should concentrate on the certification program anyway. That is 
> something where the JSF 'brand' could have extra value...

You are correct with the certification program - we should pursue 
automated certification - but with no good marketing the certification 
does not help a lot. A brand is only as good when it's known - Jabber is 
known by not too many internet users. We should achieve higher attraction.

That's why i say we need a good marketing team with some power.

A split off from the JSF is not what i want - the marketing team should 
be integrated into the official JSF - otherwise it'd be a new project on 
it's own, suffering under all those difficulties new and stand-alone 
projects simply have.

A proper integration into the JSF will help the JSF and a marketing team.

/me needs to get some coffee.

Ulrich