[Web Comm] Website map ...

[Auke Jilderda]

Good gracious, I, for one, needed a dictionary for this e-mail. ;-)
Educational.

Anyway, I think it would be wise to keep in mind that CN is an
infrastructure for software development.  It is not designed to do
everything conceivable to man and never claims it can.  Instead of
trying to fit everything onto CN, I would suggest to use CN for what it
is designed to do and complement it with other solutions to address your
needs and likes in the most cost efficient way.

It sounds like there need to be a number of different entry points to
the community:
- marketing: Aims to attract new users and get them up to speed as soon
  as possible.  It should highlight the products, comparing and
  interrelating them. (E.g. mozilla.com does for mozilla.)
- community: Aims to bring users and developers in contact with each
  other, leveraging know how and expertise where possible.
- development: Facilitates development.  Should provide version control,
  tracking, lists, builds, and so on.  (E.g.
  http://www.mozilla.org/developer/.)  This is what CN is designed to do
  and can do for you.

All three need a front page aimed at the target users.  The Marketing
site will likely be a straightforward web site, the Community more a
wiki style solution, and the Developer site contains most day-to-day
activity.


Auke

On 12 October 2006 17:44, Jason Birch wrote:
> 
> I agree with you entirely on this Jody.  It's hard to shift mindset
> from the portal that we're forced into with the current CN
> infrastructure, and perhaps we need to look at how we're doing the
> migration.  We can't just transfer over the existing content, we need
> to focus on proselytization, or smothering them with love :)  It's
> good to hear your perspectives on this, it's helping clarify our
> requirements.
> 
> Perhaps we do need two sites, www.osgeo.org, and community.osgeo.org.
> Www would be for marketing, and community would be for existing users
> that want to interact, share blogs, etc?
> 
> One of the problems here is new content; I have tried to do some work
> on this, but time constraints have killed me on this.
> 
> Thought:  one user group that we've missed is proprietary software
> companies.  If we can get involvement from LizardTech (because they
> want to give back for the use of GDAL, etc) and Autodesk (because they
> want to make their development cycle more reactive and gain market
> share), we should be looking at what marketing message can be used to
> attract others.
> 
> Jason