--- In IBDI@y..., Mark O'Donohue <mark.odonohue@l...> wrote:
>

> At some point (perhaps fairly close now for the logo) we should put
> up a poll, probably on firebird and get some feedback about it.
> If there is still some debate or no clear winner I would expect it
> to go to a firebird members only poll (I wonder if that'll increase
> our membership suddenly :-).
>
> I think the web pages still have a bit of evolving to do before we
> are at any sort of decision stage yet.

A poll for the website design sounds rather complicated. If a
Firebird core team will take responsability for the site as I
suggested, I would just hope they understand the role of this website
and let them decide the design. Of course that doesn't work if you'd
continue to work as until now, simply saying "if Pavel is happy I am
happy too...". That wouldn't be the kind of team I was talking about.
Of course that team could delegate normal site maintenance to one of
its members (e.g. Pavel), but important questions, including e.g.
site design, should in my opinion be decided collectively.

I would then probably be happy with what this team has decided, or
address my rants to the team if not :)

>
> [snip]
>
> > but still contains many obvious flaws and, generally, does
> > not follow what in my opinion is advised for Firebird in its
> > current situation: Being simple!
>
> Actually Marcus one thing I have been thinking about is that first
> impressions are one thing,
>
> But after people have seen our website once, to keep people
> returning a static site hold no new interest for them. I suspect
> some sort of active changing informative content like "news"
> or "announcements" would seem to work best for encouraging repeat
> traffic. What do you think?

I think that for the official website of an OSS project it's not an
objective to get "repeat traffic". The site is known because it's the
site of the product. So there's no risk to actually loose users if
they don't visit the site regularly. This is much different for a
news/discussion website, like e.g. IBDI, where the only motivation to
visit it is, that there's new information from time to time.

If you visit the site of some OSS project, it's usually because you
need some particular information, doc., a download or whatever. It's
unusual that these visitors check back just to see if there's some
news.

Yes, the site shall contain news and announcements, but only Firebird
related information. There won't be very much news, that's not the
role of this site.

Indeed it's true that if the new site should replace the current
Firebird site, that news/discussion aspect would be lost. But I'd
rather recommend for IBDI to retake that part of activity. It would
drive more traffic to their site and it could cover both InterBase
and Firebird, which isn't possible for the Firebird official site.


> >
> > Another important question is, who shall be the webmaster. Since
> > this is going to be the official site,
>
> The webmaster is currently Pavel, although others (including self)
> have done some bits and pieces. He is backed by a small bunch of
> people in an admin group for firebird. Who knows after discussion
> here we may have more people (preferably members :-) doing the
> webmastering thing.

I have nothing against Pavel. If I say his current site isn't
apropriate for the official site, that's not because he wouldn't have
done a good job, but simply because with the upcoming release of the
Firebird product circumstances have changed and the current site
doesn't correspond to the Firebird "official" website needed to
present the product and the community.

Since I understand Pavel is part of your core team, that's perfectly
ok. Concerning the site content there are however quite a
few "political" aspects for which you should decide in the team. It's
already quite late here, I'll write another message with my opinion
on which these things are tomorrow (or after).

>
> > I agree with Reed that it's important to give redactional
> > competence to Firebird core members. I would however prefer if
> > this wasn't just one member, but rather a little team. There are
> > other tasks which actually could well be handled by such
> > an "administrative" unit. One is, that the official site should
> > give some contact information, at least an email address.
> > So there's the question who shall receive this email.
>
> Previously this used to be 'alice' but this is no longer the
> case, we do have an email address to contact the admin group within
> Firebird, but alice was too open. After speaking with Pavel, he's
> been working on a moderated method for getting general email
> traffic into the admin group, or firebirdall group. I think it's
> comming in with the modified webring page.

Sounds good.

I couldn't find such an email address on the current website, so I
guess you don't get much email through that channel? I think the
official website should suggest an address like
contact@... or whatever.

> > For this as well, I would prefer a little team of "trusted
> > members", rather than one single person. This team would
> > not "own" Firebird, but only have some (rather limited)
> > administrative tasks.
>
> I think this basically describes the current admin team we have for
> firebird. It includes a number of the most active members, and Ann
> is the only representative there from ibphoenix.

Sounds perfect!

Markus