[Marketing] Re: Marketing Digest, Vol 16, Issue 10

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Fri, Jan 16, 2009 at 03:43:32PM +0900, daniele.ocu ocu wrote:
> Dear Marketing committee,
> 
> We have started working on the website redesign.

Daniele,

I'm concerned that this is being done without interaction with WebCom --
or if this interaction is happening, I'm not aware of it.

Currently, I've expressed some concerns about the current state of the
OSGeo website, but I do not feel that there is sufficient agreement in
what the website should *be* that we can discuss Content Design, Layout
Design, etc.

I have some strong ideas about what the OSGeo website should be -- or at
least, questions about what it should be that would need answering
before any redesign was attempted.

Additionally, I think that any website redesign effort can only be
undertaken if a sufficiently motivated set of developers in the website
technology are involved. I'm not convinced that that is currently the
case; I don't know how much experience you have with the current website
technology, but I didn't have the impression that you were comfortable
implementing possible changes in this regard.

At the moment, I would like to say that although Marketing can feel free
to create an advisory suggestion to WebCom about suggestions for the
website, I  do ont feel that WebCom has suficient resources to implement
any possible suggestions, and I would consider the feedback from
Marketing -- except insofar as it relates directly towards marketing
tasks like management of branding -- to be advisory only.

Please take this into account in any decisions/investment placed in this
direction.

SOmetime in the near future, I will do my best to outline my hopes for
the OSGeo website to the members of the community; I expect the end
result will be a discussion (either on mailing lists or in a more
interactive forum) about what the OSGeo website should be. When I do
this, I will involve Marketing in that discussion as much as possible.

I appreciate the effort you want to go through, but I just feel at the
moment that it might be a wasted effort due to lack of general agreement
on the tasks needed for the website; if this is the result of some
larger discussion I'm missing, I apologize, and I look forward to
resolving my confusion. I don't want to stop the Marketing committee
from participating in website advisory positions, but I also don't want
to see anyone put forth effort  which may be wasted.

Best Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
MetaCarta