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

[Jim Simmons]

Luke,

I've been working on Floss Manuals for awhile and while what they have
is essentially a Wiki it offers a more structured approach.  Since
everyone is writing a manual on a specific topic and topics need to be
approved by an admin the content is less likely to gallop off in all
directions.  The nature of the Wiki is that it supports writing
manuals, so while you can "remix" chapters from various books to make
a new manual you can't just jump around from manual to manual.

There is already some good content in Floss Manuals on OLPC and Sugar,
so we really should link to that content.  It would probably make a
better first impression than the Wiki as it now stands.  Further, we
might take some of the better content on the Wiki (Sugar Almanac, for
instance) and think about converting it into Floss Manuals.

I have begun a beginner's manual on Activity development and I feel
pretty good about it so far.  I think its likely I will finish it
(hopefully with help) and I think that somebody could actually read
what I have and learn to write an Activity.

In my professional life my department has Media Wiki and is looking
for something better than that and at the same time better than our
current website.  I'm going to suggest a Floss Manuals approach there
too.

James Simmons


> Date: Sat, 26 Dec 2009 22:33:41 -0800
> From: Luke Faraone <luke at faraone.cc>
> Subject: [Marketing] [DESIGN] Ideas and questions on SL.o
> To: IAEP SugarLabs <iaep at lists.sugarlabs.org>,  Marketing
>        <marketing at lists.sugarlabs.org>
> Cc: Walter Bender <walter.bender at gmail.com>,    Stefan Unterhauser
>        <dogi at laptop.org>,      Bernie Innocenti <bernie at codewiz.org>,  Sebastian
>        Dziallas <sdz at sugarlabs.org>
> Message-ID:
>        <2eaf0c620912262233r69a668e0qdffa8eca1712ebef at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> 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.