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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Thanks Luke, These suggestions are a
good start. Keeping up a content structure that works takes on-going
committment by a someone or some two. Wondering if there is some
innovative way to fund such an effort, small scale but at least it might assure
committment and consistency. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Sandra Thaxter</FONT></DIV>
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style="PADDING-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: #000000 2px solid; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px">
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial">----- Original Message ----- </DIV>
<DIV
style="BACKGROUND: #e4e4e4; FONT: 10pt arial; font-color: black"><B>From:</B>
<A title=luke@faraone.cc href="mailto:luke@faraone.cc">Luke Faraone</A> </DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>To:</B> <A title=iaep@lists.sugarlabs.org
href="mailto:iaep@lists.sugarlabs.org">IAEP SugarLabs</A> ; <A
title=marketing@lists.sugarlabs.org
href="mailto:marketing@lists.sugarlabs.org">Marketing</A> </DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>Cc:</B> <A title=dogi@laptop.org
href="mailto:dogi@laptop.org">Stefan Unterhauser</A> ; <A
title=bernie@codewiz.org href="mailto:bernie@codewiz.org">Bernie Innocenti</A>
; <A title=sdz@sugarlabs.org href="mailto:sdz@sugarlabs.org">Sebastian
Dziallas</A> </DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>Sent:</B> Sunday, December 27, 2009 1:33
AM</DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>Subject:</B> [IAEP] [DESIGN] Ideas and
questions on SL.o</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>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.<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>They specifically mentioned the front page of
our community, <A href="http://www.SugarLabs.org"
target=_blank>www.SugarLabs.org</A>, 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.<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>Therefore, my
proposal is simple: redesign <A href="http://www.SugarLabs.org"
target=_blank>www.SugarLabs.org</A>. As a strawman, lets say we were to offer,
on the main page, jumping off points to the rest of our community.
<BR><BR>This would include things like: <BR>
<UL>
<LI>Download Sugar (Sends them off to the [[Try Sugar]] wikipage)
<LI>Explore teaching resources (needs authoring)<BR>
<LI>Solve a problem ([[Sugar help]])
<LI>Get involved </LI></UL>Of course, we'd need to have these all link to
supporting pages, either on the wiki or elsewhere, but deciding <I>how</I> to
organize something is a large part of actually producing <I>usable</I>
content. <BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>Comments, criticism, and alternative proposals
welcome.<BR><BR>Thanks,<BR>Luke Faraone<BR><A href="http://luke.faraone.cc"
target=_blank>http://luke.faraone.cc</A><BR>
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