[VisCom] Update on brochures

[Jason Birch]

One of the downfalls of the balkanized open source geospatial community is that it has been seen as just a set of tools.  In order to "sell" OSGeo to potential users, they will need to see solutions.  The most effective case studies for this task would be cross-project rather than project-specific, and the community biographies I had in mind would be of users who are successfully using or contributing to (and getting value from) multiple projects as well.
 
As to site layout, I really doubt (but could be wrong) that all of the existing strong communities will want to modify their existing sites to conform to an arbitrary OSGeo layout.  I certainly don't want to duplicate content from the project sites or limit their autonomy, but I think that we need to sell the OSGeo solution up front and in a consistant manner before the users navigate to the (often dense and technically-oriented) project pages for more detailed information.  Of course, different users have different needs; developers would likely just be presented with a list of links to various projects and resources.
 
By focusing VisCom/WebCom efforts on up-front marketing efforts, projects that don't want to spend a lot of effort on these items can concentrate on doing what they do best:  building great software and supporting their communities.
 
Jason

________________________________

From: Frank Warmerdam on behalf of Frank Warmerdam
Sent: Tue 2006-06-06 11:57 AM
To: dev at visibilitycommittee.osgeo.org
Subject: Re: [VisCom] Update on brochures

Jason,

I'm all for preparing introductory information that introduces the relative
roles and positioning of the different projects, but I think project specific
case studies, and community bios (not exactly sure what this is) belong on
the project pages rather than some high osgeo level pages that some direct
visitors to the project might never see.

It may be that the various projects can be encouraged to follow some
best practices to improve navigation from the project run main page.

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