[IAEP] [Marketing] [DESIGN] Ideas and questions on SL.o

[Gerald Ardito]

Luke,

As a teacher/technology facilitator managing a deployment of about 140
XOs and Dell netbooks with SOAS, I completely agree with your
assessment about the site's usefulness.

I think your strawman is a good start. I am willing to help with the
teaching resources piece.

Best,
Gerald

On 12/27/09, Luke Faraone <luke at faraone.cc> wrote:
> Recently, I attended a presentation along with Walter, Bernie, and Dogi in
> which students from Babson College discussed the deployability challenges
> faced by Sugar and SugarLabs in the United States.
>
> One of the things mentioned was the distributed nature of our project. We
> have a extensive wiki, a variety of high-traffic mailing lists, and doezens
> of blogs. For a teacher or administrator looking into the viability of
> Sugar, it can be quite a daunting task to process and synthesize all these
> disparate sources into a cohesive message.
>
> They specifically mentioned the front page of our community,
> www.SugarLabs.org, as an example of our failure to communicate. While the
> design is visually appealing and graphically stunning, it suffers from being
> *too* simplistic in my opinion. In terms of conveying actionable
> information, it performs poorly. Most people come to an organization's front
> page with specific goals in mind, and it should be our goal to make it as
> easy as possible for people to accomplish those goals.
>
> As Bernie commented during the meeting, "one of the first things as
> developers we jump for is the link to the wiki". But this link dumps the
> user to a large, disorganized mass of content in which one can easily get
> lost. Wiki-gardening is definately a full-time job, probably for more than
> one person, but as it is, what we have isn't working.
>
> Therefore, my proposal is simple: redesign www.SugarLabs.org. As a strawman,
> lets say we were to offer, on the main page, jumping off points to the rest
> of our community.
>
> This would include things like:
>
>    - Download Sugar (Sends them off to the [[Try Sugar]] wikipage)
>    - Explore teaching resources (needs authoring)
>    - Solve a problem ([[Sugar help]])
>    - Get involved
>
> Of course, we'd need to have these all link to supporting pages, either on
> the wiki or elsewhere, but deciding *how* to organize something is a large
> part of actually producing *usable* content.
>
> We can also find a place to put the current SL.o explanation text, but I
> don't think it should be the sole, central focus of the page.
>
> Comments, criticism, and alternative proposals welcome.
>
> Thanks,
> Luke Faraone
> http://luke.faraone.cc
>